In this workshop, participants are invited to reflect on how their own lives have been “storied” and consider how they might leverage those experiences to create more opportunities for their students and communities to engage in authentic identity work.

The facilitator will share a collection of original multimodal artifacts through a collaborative digital story that documents their explorations of self over the last few years. While this anchors the conversation, the purpose of the workshop is for participants to gain practical experience naming salient aspects of their identities and exploring dynamic ways to represent their lived experiences through multiple modalities.

This work is grounded in the conviction that thoughtful, critical engagements with arts-based multimodal practices offers powerful platforms from which learners can make sense of personal experiences in order to build alliances with others and strengthen shared commitments to equity and social justice. Through a series of deliberate and thoughtful activities designed to encourage self-reflection, participants will compose a set of mixed-media artifacts, taking photographs and videos of their creations and adding music and reflective narration to create a digital story. In order for educators to help students imagine their possible selves, they must first consider their positionalities so as to foster empathy, trust, and connections with young people in meaningful and authentic ways. This workshop aims to push participants to think about how they can better invite and nourish the voices of the young people they work with in both in- and out-of-school spaces, by encouraging them to first do this work themselves.

* Co-developed with Jen Ammenti, Ed.M.