What is it like to be you?
When asked, my students explain that reading is valuable because it exposes us to new information or ideas, and by extension of that, reading allows us to see situations from different perspectives as described and explained through a variety of voices. So I was grateful to invite Rosie King’s voice into our classrooms recently as we read the transcript of a TED Talk she presented as a teenager in 2014. The title of King’s talk was, “How Autism Freed Me to Be Myself.”
King said, “I don’t try and fit myself into a tiny little box. That’s one of the best things about being autistic. You don’t have the urge to do that. You find what you want to do, you find a way to do it, and you get on with it.”
Through her voice, by sharing her story and describing her lived experiences, King supplants common misconceptions that autism is a limiting condition that needs to be corrected or muted. Rather, King explains that being autistic is the root of her most significant gifts. King’s truth denounces the stereotypes; often stereotypes emerge from the heart of the other, as we project the shame, pity, or fears we might feel if living with a certain difference.
But that could all change if we simply asked the question, “What is it like to be you?,” and listened earnestly, such as when King said, “One of the things I can do because I’m autistic — it’s an ability rather than a disability — is I’ve got a very, very vivid imagination.”
Documenting and distributing lived experiences will help us confront problematic paradigms and ignorance. As educational outreach and advocacy, digital storytelling has significant potential for making new knowledge visible and actionable. A digital story can be any multimodal narrative artifact that serves a specific aim and communicates a message (Brailas, 2021); hence, digital stories have increasing usefulness in social marketing or public health promotion by facilitating knowledge and enhancing cultural competence (Gubrium et al., 2016).
Lasting change requires cultural transformation (Maton, 2000). Because story-oriented thinking is a way of organizing, understanding, and remembering events and situations, people are more likely to remember stories rather than isolated facts; storytelling can be a useful tool in engaging audiences and moving hearts and minds (Bublitz et al., 2016). Furthermore, stories developed in the first-person point of view offer access to the character’s thoughts and feelings, which facilitates audience empathy, depth, and engagement (Bublitz et al., 2016).
For organizations or enterprises with a social mission, communicating stories effectively means not only informing an audience, but also motivating behavior change and transforming lives. Therefore, digital storytelling holds significant potential as an educational intervention for both the storyteller and the audience. The impact will be transformative when these stories are strategically shared and distributed across multiple ecological systems.
References
Brailas, A. (2021). Digital storytelling and the narrative turn in psychology: Creating spaces for collective empowerment. Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice, 12(4), 1 – 19. Retrieved October 2, 2023, from http://gjcpp.org/
Bublitz, M. G., Escalas, J. E., Peracchio, L. A., Furchheim, P., Grau, S. L., Hamby, A., Kay, M. J., Mulder, M. R., & Scott, A. (2016). Transformative stories: A framework for crafting stories for social impact organizations. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 35(2), 237–248.
Gubrium, A.C., Fiddian-Green, A., Lowe, S., DiFulvio, G., & Del Toro-Mejias, L. (2016). Measuring down: Evaluating digital storytelling as a process for narrative health promotion. Qualitative Health Research, 26(13), 1787–1801.
Maton, K. I. (2000). Making a difference: The social ecology of social transformation. American Journal of Community Psychology, 28(1), 25-57.
