a new culture of learning: digital storytelling and faith formation

12 Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 1 • Spring 2014 • March

Theme Articles

A New Culture of Learning: DigitalStorytelling and Faith Formation

By Mary E. Hess

Abstract: How has the “new culture of learning” begun to transform us, and in what ways might thefaith formation practices of religious communities be impacted by the shift? Recent research funded bythe MacArthur Foundation lays an empirical basis for recognizing shifts in learning brought about bywidespread access to digital technologies. The implications of that research, in turn, pose widespread chal-lenges to the work of faith formation in contemporary communities of faith. Communicative theologiesmay be best poised to engage these challenges through the practices of digital storytelling.

Key Terms: digital storytelling, faith formation, media, communicative theology, religious education,theological education

In 2006, the MacArthur Foundation (a majorphilanthropic foundation in the US) launched afive-year, $50 million digital media and learninginitiative to “help determine how digital technolo-gies are changing the way young people learn,play, socialize, and participate in civic life.”1 Whilethat particular initiative has ended, the Foundation’swork has continued in multiple efforts, which haveincluded research into diverse topics within digi-tal culture including civic engagement, credibility,media and learning, libraries, media literacy, partic-ipatory learning, social media, and virtual worlds,among others. Several major books and hundreds ofscholarly articles have emerged from this research,spawning an entirely new focus of research—thatof digital media and learning.2

In 2011 Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brownpublished a book entitled A New Culture of Learn-ing, which offered a brief, engaging and thoughtful

Mary E. Hess is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at Luther Seminary, where she has taught since 2000. She is a past presidentof the Religious Education Association, and her most recent book is Teaching Reflectively in Theological Contexts: Promises and Contradictions.

overview of the field, and which contained a fo-cused set of implications from this new area ofstudy for higher education. In the rest of this arti-cle I draw primarily on their work to suggest waysin which our practices of religious education musttransform if we intend to nurture religious iden-tity that supports public engagement in just andconstructive ways.

Recent empirical research suggests that thereare several dynamics emerging—or at least newlyvisible—at the heart of digital learning cultures: amove from “teaching-based” to “learning-based” ap-proaches; a shift from the public and private to thepersonal and collective; and a focus on tacit know-ing that grows from inquiry-led approaches. Thesedynamics at one and the same time offer both newpromise for religious practice, as well as extensivecontradictions and obstacles to such practice. I takeeach in turn, defining and exploring them.

C© 2014 Wiley Periodicals and Dialog, Inc.

A New Culture of Learning: Digital Storytelling and Faith Formation • Mary E. Hess 13

Learning—based, in Contrast toTeaching—based

There are several ways to describe what it meansto move to a “learning-based”—or my preferredterm, “learning-centered”—form of education. Thedistinction was described as far back as 1995 byRobert Barr and John Tagg, who published an es-say entitled “From teaching to learning: A newparadigm for undergraduate education.”3 The ta-ble they included with the essay has been reprintedmultiple times, and notes a shift from what theylabeled the “instructional paradigm” to the “learn-ing paradigm.” Among the elements of this shiftthat they identified are:

From: To:providing or delivering

instructionproducing learning

assessing quality of enteringstudents

assessing quality of exitingstudents

atomistic; parts prior to whole holistic; whole prior to partscovering materials specified learning results

[outcomes]faculty as lecturers faculty as designers of

environmentsknowledge “out there” knowledge “in each person’s

mind and shaped byexperience”

Their table is organized into sections by“mission and purpose,” “criteria for success,”“teaching/learning structures,” “learning theory,”“productivity/funding,” and the “nature of roles,”and contains far more than the brief excerpt I haveoffered here. The point to note, however, is thatnearly 20 years later the paradigm shift they de-scribed still has not taken hold across the landscapeof higher education. It may well be, however, thatthis shift is beginning to take hold in new digitallearning cultures. Much of what has been observedin the empirical research funded by MacArthur isprecisely such a transformation.

Young people observed in the midst of multi-player online gaming, newly emerging social net-works, and other digital spaces enter those envi-ronments with a keen curiosity about what theycan learn, for instance, rather than feeling that

they must first be prepared prior to entrance. Evenreaders of this essay, who might have begun theirschooling prior to the advent of digital tools, areprobably users of personal computers, and as such,ever less likely to take classes on specific computersoftware before using that software. Indeed mostpeople draw on their previous experience, that oftheir friends and colleagues, tutorials created by“amateurs” and posted on the web, and so on whenthey begin to use new software, or install the latest“updates” to their specific operating systems.

At the same time the quality of hardwareavailable for everyday use has vastly improved,particularly in the areas of digital photographyand videography. The distinctions that were onceso clear between “amateur” and “professional” or“expert” and “novice,” for example, are becomingmuch more blurred. Multimedia recording equip-ment is often labeled as “prosumer”—a contrac-tion of “professional” and “consumer”—that de-notes precisely this kind of blurring of the lines.

Shift from Public and Private, toPersonal and Collective

There has been significant concern in the last fiveyears in particular over the risks perceived by theadvent of digital technology as embodied in so-cial networking. Much of that concern with regardto younger people has focused on the relativelyopen ways in which they regularly share infor-mation about themselves in these networks. Manyhave “viewed with alarm” pictures of young peoplewith alcohol in their hands, or status updates thatuse problematic language or make offensive state-ments. The alarm has focused on people “sharingtoo much” in these environments, and the ways inwhich “the private” has increasingly been shared in“public.” What these critics miss, however, is thatthe underlying issue is not so much that youngpeople are sharing things better left private, butrather that the negative edges of their behaviorare becoming more visible. That is, the concernin these cases should not so much be that peo-ple are “making public” their views, but rather the


problematic nature of the views and lack of re-spect they are making visible. Many scholars havepointed out, for instance, that the incidence of bul-lying has not so much increased, as it has becomemore visible.4

Digital spaces increasingly are spaces that mit-igate against compartmentalization. That is, quitethe opposite from the early concern that peoplewould create multiple personas to inhabit digitalspaces and lose touch with their “real” selves, digi-tal spaces increasingly are becoming spaces in whichyou have to display personal integrity across multi-ple communities or you lose credibility. Trust maywell become one of the most important currenciesof this new environment, and trust is most oftenbuilt through transparency and consistency.5

The second element of the concern over the“private and public” marks another element of thischallenge with “trust” and has to do with too muchsharing of information—such as personal identitymarkers, consumer tastes, and so on—that mightthen be available for consumer commodification.The concern would not exist, for instance, if peo-ple were not already legitimately worried about thehistory of ways in which personal information isbeing collected and used by both commercial en-terprises and in some cases even governments todevelop desires for consumption, provide a pretextor preparation for violence (as in the case of preda-tors, trafficking, and so on), or support suppressionof speech and other forms of political engagement.

There is a difficult paradox here: the dynam-ics and practices by which trust is developed, bywhich authenticity is inscribed in digital spaces,often require the sharing of personal informationthat previously would have been kept private. Con-sequently researchers are starting to speak of a shiftfrom a “public/private dichotomy” to one of “per-sonal/collective.” Here the decisions about whichinformation to share and in which ways tend to beevaluated in terms of how such information con-tributes to collective agency, rather than to someabstract notion of “public-ness.” The examples thatare most vivid in Thomas and Seely Brown’s bookcome from social networking media such as Face-book, or from massively multi-player online gameslike World of Warcraft.

The constant sharing of the ordinary events ofone’s days, the “likes and dislikes” associated withFacebook updates, contribute to a massive databasethat has at one and the same time the paradoxof becoming vastly more attuned to commercialcommodification even as it supplants the previousmechanisms of commercialization. In the past, ad-vertising could only be targeted towards more gen-eral demographic groups—perhaps people betweenthe ages of 18 and 45, or people who watchedNASCAR. Now it is possible for advertising toidentify target groups in ever more specific ways, al-lowing for ever more diverse permutations of “audi-ence.” But at the same time as advertising becomesmore targeted, it also becomes less persuasive thanword of mouth. Surveys suggest that only 22% ofpeople “believe” in advertising, whereas more than90% trust recommendations from people in theirsocial networks.6

Thomas and Seely Brown draw from this datayet another implication: that when societies em-brace the personal/collective dynamic they oftenshift from a “learning in order to belong” mode, toa “participate and belong in order to learn” mode,which closely tracks the shift noted in my earliersection from teaching-based to learning-based.

Shift from Explicit to TacticForms of Knowing

Participating and belonging in order to learn bringsto the fore the final element of the research towhich I intend to point: a visible shift in learningfrom explicit to tacit or implicit forms of know-ing. When you have a stable body of informa-tion that persists over time in the form of specificcontent many people argue that you can “trans-fer” that information, or “deliver” it. These aremetaphors for teaching and learning that Thomasand Seely Brown identify as being attached to“explicit” forms of knowing. Setting aside for amoment whether “information” is ever the pri-mary goal of teaching/learning—I am ambitiousenough to seek knowledge, or even wisdom—thedistinction being drawn here is between “explicit”


and “tacit” forms of knowing, with “tacit” formsemphasizing the unstable, rapidly changing, andfluid forms of knowledge that accrue from learn-ing through participation (think of Polyani’s ar-ticulation here). Thus, the forms of learning thatare heavily privileged in many digital environmentsstress drawing on tacit knowledges and emphasizelearning through doing, through feeling.

Thus far, three dynamics have been identi-fied for a “new culture of learning:” (1) a shiftfrom teaching-based to learning-based practices; (2)a shift from a “public/private” split to a “per-sonal/collective” distinction; and (3) an empha-sis on tacit forms of knowing rather than ex-plicit knowledges. At this point in their argumentThomas and Seely Brown are ready to offer theirdefinition:

The new culture of learning is about thekind of tension that develops when studentswith an interest or passion that they wantto explore are faced with a set of constraintsthat allow them to act only within givenboundaries . . . 7

In many ways this new culture of learning maynot be all that new. I believe, instead, it makesvisible, or retrieves, forms of knowing and learningthat have been prevalent in other periods of historyand, pertinent to the point of this paper, are partic-ularly evident in religious communities. This is notthe place to plunge into historical discussion, but Iwould like to lift up three paradoxical tensions thatcommunities of faiths ought to be engaging in themidst of digital environments all around us, ten-sions that can spark our creativity and energy—ordraw us into apathy or even despair.

For instance:

(1) The curiosity and passion of digital culturelearners is often piqued by a desire to gainaccess to esoteric forms of knowing (e.g. themore obscure the elements of a video game,the more fascinating for players). So on theone hand, mystery is deeply engaging to thisgeneration of learners, and religious communi-ties tend a variety of mysteries. On the otherhand, traditional religious education and the-

ological scholarship often has been embeddedin quite abstract language, in some cases de-manding years of study before accessing the ba-sic questions at the heart of religious inquiry.The promise here is one of drawing learnersinto holistic and integrated forms of religiousknowing that appreciate the tension of mys-tery, whereas the contradiction is one of mak-ing the learning of religion so difficult as tobe inaccessible to those who might find itcompelling.

(2) A second paradoxical tension resides in the ne-cessity identified within this new culture oflearning for appreciating tacit forms of know-ing. Religious studies scholars and theologiansoften are adept at methodologies that lift up forexplicit engagement forms of knowing that re-side in implicit, or tacit, learning. Yet at thesame time much of the way in which reli-gious practice is engaged and taught in vari-ous contexts has emphasized explicitly cognitiveand doctrinal aspects of religious practice. Suchclassroom focus is “teaching-based” rather than“learning-based,” focusing on teaching “about”the world, rather than through “engagementwith” the world.

Here the promise is one of making religiousunderstanding accessible to generations of peo-ple who are increasingly being formed in digitalcultures, while the obstacle is the possibility thatat the very moment in which religious under-standing is so needed in broader public spaces,religious scholars and educators may be sharingit in ways that isolate it outside of the learningframes most people use.

(3) A third paradoxical tension lives in the ele-ments of digital culture that at the same timeas they are deeply relational disrupt our “takenfor granted” understanding of embodied pres-ence. How might religious educators draw onthe relational elements of digital learning whilesimultaneously emphasizing embodied presencein ways that invite practices of contemplation,ritual practice, collective action for social jus-tice, and so on?


These paradoxical tensions emerge in part fromincreasingly accessible participatory tools that of-fer significant enjoyment and agency to those whouse them. I have written elsewhere about three dy-namics that I believe are shifting most dramaticallyin digital environments: authority, authenticity, andagency. Authority and authenticity have been ex-plored at great length and significant depth in otherresearch but the shifts in “agency”—particularly asunderstood as the ability to produce something, to“get something done”—are less well understood.8

Clay Shirky and Yochai Benkler are perhaps two ofthe most articulate proponents of the research thatidentifies this increasing agency in contexts well be-yond that of education. Shirky writes of the “cogni-tive surpluses” people are drawing on to explore andcreate in digital environments, and Benkler writesof the “wealth of social networks” as a way to de-scribe the power of human cooperation. And as I’vealready noted, Thomas and Seely Brown are clearabout the participatory focus of learning in digitalenvironments.

Engaging these paradoxical tensions in ways thatsupport human agency as both created by and em-bedded within divine agency may well be the mostchallenging element of religious identity formationin the midst of our increasingly “digitally perme-ated” environments. All around us environmentsare drawing people into active participation, andat the more utopian end of the spectrum, tout-ing their wide open opportunities for transformingour world. Yet, like most spaces outside of explicitreligious cultures, there is no room for transcen-dent agency. The kind of deep humility that reli-gious practice offers in relationship with transcen-dence is not often represented or invited in thesedigital spaces. Further, too much of the “partici-pation” exists at the lower end of the “ladder ofengagement.”9

What to Do?

How might we begin to engage these dynamics,these spaces, in ways that invite broad participationand active agency in religious community? How dowe engage the resistance to religious institutions

that seems to be growing ever more rapidly? I amconvinced that the answers to these questions residein creating intentional invitations to creative “play”and “making” in religious communities with a de-liberate theological overlay that contextualizes andembeds such forms of knowing in a deep recogni-tion of God’s agency.

Why “play” and “making”? Thomas andSeelyBrown explore at some length the related ele-ments of homo sapiens, homo faber, and homo ludens.Their argument is that we have focused too tightlyon the “sapiential” elements of our humanity invarious schooling environments, and not attendedto what it is to “make” and to “play.” Meanwhile,theorists of gaming are pointing to the intensely en-joyable elements of online multi-player games, notto mention other kinds of “maker spaces.”10 If anew culture of learning really is about “the kind oftension that develops when students with an inter-est or passion that they want to explore are facedwith a set of constraints that allow them to actonly within given boundaries . . . ” then we havemuch to learn from the deliberate structuring ofenvironments that occurs within game play.11 Herethe work of Hayse and Detweiler is instructive inreligious formation, and in the wider philosophicalfield, that of Huizinga.

I will leave to you, the reader, the explorationof these points in greater detail as you follow upcitations. Here I want to note that there are severalelements of fostering that creative tension that havebeen well-explicated by the theorizing of RobertKegan in his work on adult learning, specificallyhis work on transformation of meaning frames.Kegan’s framework for discussing a shift from thirdto fourth order meaning-making proposes one wayto consider living into the constructive tension ofthese paradoxes, inviting the promise of transfor-mative learning while avoiding the contradictionsthat can lead to premature ultimates.

Third—and Fourth—OrderMeaning—Making

In Kegan’s theorizing “third order” meaning-makingis structured around cross-categorical thinking—the


ability to relate one durable category to another.As a result, thinking is more abstract, individualsare aware of their feelings and the internal pro-cesses associated with them, and they can makecommitments to communities of people and ideas.Kegan and his colleagues noted that in this orderof consciousness, “other people are experienced . . .as sources of internal validation, orientation, or au-thority.” How the individual is perceived by othersis of critical importance since acceptance by oth-ers is crucial in this order. Support is found inmutually rewarding relationships and shared expe-riences, while challenge takes the form of resist-ing codependence and encouraging individuals tomake their own decisions and establish independentlives.12

While “fourth order” meaning-making requirescross-categorical constructing—the ability to gener-alize across abstractions, which also could be labeledsystems thinking—is evident in the fourth orderof consciousness. In this order, self-authorship isthe focus. Individuals “have the capacity to takeresponsibility for and ownership of their internalauthority” (and establish their own sets of valuesand ideologies). Relationships become a part ofone’s world rather than the reason for one’s ex-istence. Support at this stage is evident in acknowl-edgment of the individual’s independence and self-regulation. Individuals are encouraged to developfurther when significant others refuse to acceptrelationships that are not intimate and mutuallyrewarding.13

Supporting movement from one form to anotherproceeds along a spiral path that Kegan identifiesas being one of “confirmation, contradiction andcontinuity,” with “confirmation” having to do withseeking deep understanding of the internal logic ofa particular way of making sense in a specific sociallocation. He believes that you cannot support trans-formation in constructive and generative ways with-out first entering into a form of deep empathy witha person. The next step—contradiction—arises ei-ther organically in the course of a person’s journey,or might be introduced through the intervention ofa teacher/coach, who draws attention to the contra-dictions that exist in a particular meaning frame.Kegan points out, however, that simply encoun-

tering contradiction is not enough for true trans-formation. The rupture of meaning that emergesis so unsettling that people find themselves fleeinginto either relativism or fundamentalism, both ofwhich essentially are refusals to transform meaning-making, to move from cross-categorical thinking tocross-categorical construction.

The final element necessary for a transforma-tion to a new order of meaning-making is a pro-cess Kegan terms “continuity,” by which he meansa form of holding space that allows for the newstructures of meaning-making to consolidate. Suchcontinuity often can be described as a larger com-munity into which someone is invited, in whichtheir previous form of making meaning is acknowl-edged and valued, while at the same time the newform is cherished.

In my work with religious educators and digitalspaces one example that comes to mind of this shiftfrom one frame to the next is the frequently heardcomplaint that digital spaces are disembodying andas such cannot be utilized for faith formation. Ofcourse, another assumption embedded in that ar-gument is that faith formation is by definition em-bodied. If both of those assumptions are true, bythemselves, then the logical conclusion is correct:constructive faith formation cannot take place indigital spaces. But what if there are counter exam-ples? What if there are ways in which digital spacescan be experienced as deeply relational and em-bodied, while at the same time there are examplesof religious environments that are not relationaland embodied? Such examples would contradictthe underlying assumptions and invite movementinto a space that might truly be constructiveof cross-categorical meaning, not simply reflectiveof it.

Creating a “Holding Space”

The need to provide continuity in such transfor-mation evokes the need for a “holding space,” anenvironment that exists on both sides of the trans-formation. On the one side it is a space that sup-ports cross categorical thinking, while on the otherside of that transformation is a space that supports


construction of cross-categorical knowing. Whensomeone exists in a frame of mind that can onlythink in cross categorical terms, rather than con-struct cross categorically, and that process of think-ing is disrupted, when the underlying assumptionsbecome no longer adequate to the spaces being en-countered, and when the reality—for instance—isthat a digital space is experienced as more deeplyembodied and relational than an “in-person” space,the resulting contradictions are so destabilizing thatpersons might be tempted to flee either into fun-damentalism (“no digital space can hold religiousformation”) or into relativism (“digital spaces andin-person spaces are equally problematic”). Scholarsare beginning to note, for instance, that the strug-gle to embrace the deeply contradictory reality ofreligious institutions is often too much for people,who flee either into fundamentalist religious spaces,or flee religious spaces all together (the so-called“spiritual but not religious” stance).

Yet when there are bridges built to cross-categorical construction, when there is a wider,deeper, community into which one is invited, thenmeaning can be transformed and the “holding en-vironment” allows the new frame to become solidi-fied. Here, to keep with my earlier examples, thereis a community that welcomes engagement in dig-ital spaces and perceives some of those spaces asbeing capable of embodied relationality, and othersas being distorting or even destructive of such re-lationality. That same community perceives some“in person” religious spaces as being quite “dis-embodying” and provides theological arguments tosupport the distinctions.

John Roberto, in his provocative attempt to in-vite communities of faith to take seriously a num-ber of inter-related dynamics that are emergingfrom the sociological literature on religious com-munities, has developed a form of “scenario-basedthinking” that is yet another invitation to a wider“container” for re-imagining faith formation. Hisframework posits a matrix with two perpendicu-lar axes: one that marks a spectrum from resis-tance to receptivity with relation to religious insti-tutions, and one that marks a spectrum from lowpersonal hunger for spiritual engagement, to highhunger for personal spiritual engagement. This ma-

trix then offers a way to recognize that there mightbe at least four scenarios in which people could befound: one in which they experience a high recep-tivity to religious institutions and a high hungerfor spirituality; one in which there is resistance toinstitutions yet high hunger; one of low hungerand high resistance; and one in which there is re-ceptivity to religious institutions but low hunger:

I have found this matrix particularly helpfulin stretching the imagination of church-based re-ligious educators, who have a tendency to fix theirattention on the upper right hand quadrant of“high receptivity, high hunger” and so in the pro-cess miss three quarters of the people they couldbe engaging.14 There are many other frameworksfor creating such environments, the “art of host-ing” practices among them, but for the purposesof this essay I will focus on the art of digitalstorytelling.

Digital Storytelling as a Form ofFaith Formation

How do we design learning that is capable of at-tending to integrative religious practices within dig-itally mediated spaces? How do we create spacesthat allow for, even support, transformation ofmeaning from third to fourth order frames? Oneshort answer is digital storytelling in the serviceof faith formation. To unpack that phrase I needto note that when I write of “digital storytelling”I am referring specifically to the form of digital


storytelling that has been nurtured by the Cen-ter for Digital Storytelling based in California andColorado. The CDS “family of origin,” if you will,is community theater and improvisational theater.From those roots they have grown, with the adventof digital tools— first Quicktime, then iMovie andiPads—into a center that privileges, first, the cre-ation and sharing of stories, and then from there,digital stories. This form of digital storytelling, then,is not a loose umbrella for any and every story tobe found in any digital format. It is not shorthandfor film and tv, or even much that can be foundon YouTube or Vimeo. It is, rather, a communityof practice that focuses on helping people to findtheir own voices, to hone stories from their ownexperience, and then to craft and share their storiesusing digital tools.

Such a process has several immediate advantageswhen engaged in the service of religious educationand faith formation. To begin with, far too manyspaces that people inhabit these days are structuredby time constraints that privilege short attentionspans and invite only superficial reflection. Lis-tening for, honing and then digitally embodyinga short story (most CDS stories are on the or-der of 3–5 minutes) not only creates an opportu-nity to slow down, it requires attentive, patient andthoughtful reflection. An entirely delightful side ef-fect of this process is that people inevitably be-come more critical of other digital media they en-gage: there is something about “seeing what’s in thesausage,” so to speak, which invites critical engage-ment.

Further, as anthropologist and observer of digitalcultures Michael Wesch has pointed out, the com-bination of “anonymity + physical distance + rareand ephemeral discourse,” which is increasingly apart of the genre of vlogging (“video blogging” orshort, self-reflective video pieces), can lend itself “tothe freedom to experience humanity without fear oranxiety.”15 He also notes that that same equation,paradoxically, can lead to “hatred as public per-formance,” although this more dangerous potentialis less manifest in the form of digital storytellingdescribed here. What occurs, instead, is a rich op-portunity for the development of empathy. I have

written about that process elsewhere, so here I sim-ply want to note that there is enormous potentialin digital storytelling for supporting people in de-veloping from cross categorical thinking into crosscategorical construction.16

Additionally, work within Christian theologicalspaces—particularly that of communicative theolo-gians, who build on Jurgen Habermas’ distinctionbetween instrumental and communicative forms ofaction to define “living learning” as opposed to“dead learning”—offers particularly evocative the-ological framing for this process. Communicativetheologians stress that the source of theological as-sertions must be identified; that the form, mediumand content of communication cannot be sepa-rated; that theology is, by definition, a critical re-flection upon, understanding of, and contributionto, a communicative event; and that all commu-nicative events are fundamentally participatory.17

Communicative theology proceeds in embodied,relational ways that demand that the “I” and the“group” be interwoven with “the it” (or Logos) allwithin the context of “the globe.” These terms carryspecific definitions and weight within communica-tive theology. One way to envision the process canbe found in this diagram:

Theologians have expanded upon this diagram,which was first articulated in Ruth Cohen’s de-scription of theme-centered interaction, by anno-tating the various nodes of the dynamic process asfollows:18


Communication: The Heart of theProcess

Understanding theology in this way demands thatcommunication be seen as the very heart of theprocess. God’s self-communication within God’sown self (communicative theology is deeply trini-tarian) is seen as necessitating communication andrelationship with all of creation. This articulationof theology very specifically foregrounds communi-cation, and embeds it in a deliberately pedagogical(or perhaps it would be more appropriate to call ita deliberately “andragogical”) form of engagement.By demanding that the process of doing theologybe an intimate element of any theological expres-sion, communicative theologians have returned toand retrieved apologetics, in the deepest sense ofthat word, grounding such theology experientially

in a holistic rather than purely cognitive approachto speaking of and with God.

Digital storytelling offers a lively instance of sucha “communicative event” with the bonus of offeringa moment that can be returned to, and that canbe widely shared. Perhaps the single most usefulelement of digital stories, as opposed to storiestold in physical proximity, is precisely this abilityto return to the same story over and over again, inmultiple contexts and from multiple perspectives.The danger of “context collapse” is mitigated hereby embedding the story in the midst of theologicalreflection.19 Even when digital faith stories arenot engaged within theological frames—as, forexample, when someone stumbles upon a story inisolation at YouTube or Vimeo—it usually carriesenough power in itself to invite genuine curiosityand click-throughs to lengthier contextualization.


A good example of such would be the EpiscopalStory Project (http://episcopalstoryproject.org/).You might stumble upon one of the individual sto-ries from that project, but even in that case you aredrawn beyond it (for example, https://vimeo.com/47482587).

Each of these frameworks provides one element,or perspective, for seeing why the practice of digitalstorytelling as a form of faith formation is so fruit-ful in current contexts. In particular, digital story-telling creates a space in which the pleasure of cre-ating with digital tools meets the embodied designof storying faith, and emerges with a public voicethat resists the “context collapse” that Wesch iden-tifies. This is digital storytelling of a particular sort,however, not the commercial form that has becomeso prevalent in commodified media, but rather theintentional practice of storying, which demands therelational discernment of story circles, and the con-templative practice of multi-layered digital design,both of which must occur before a digital story isever published to be shared widely.

There are myriad congregations across the coun-try that have begun to explore digital storytellingas a form of faith formation. News of such work,with requisite links to examples, is regularly fea-tured on the Storyingfaith.org site. There are exper-iments with digital storytelling as a key componentof confirmation programming,20 digital storytellingas a way to transform worship,21 and digital sto-rytelling for biblical learning.22 While this practicespreads across communities of faith, those of uswho tend the scholarly practices of religious com-munities and religious learning are well advisedto consider with communicative theologians whatmight be emerging here.

“ Re—membering”

Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown have per-suasively argued that the new learning culture is“about the kind of tension that develops when stu-dents with an interest or passion they want to ex-plore are faced with a set of constraints that allow

them to act only within given boundaries.” Theyargue for homo faber and homo ludens not to beseparated from homo sapiens. Digital storytelling of-fers this kind of playful and yet serious space, andthe work of communicative theologians provides aprofoundly theological frame for such serious play.In doing so the opportunity to “re-member” andto “re-weave” God’s agency into our storymaking,to lift up the generous creativity which God pullsthrough us is awakened and “re-membered.”23

Endnotes

1. Accessed on Sept 10,2013: http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0--4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

2. A primary bibliography of this research is available online. Ac-cessed on Sept 10, 2103: http://dmlcentral.net/bibliography?page=2&sort=year&order=asc

3. The essay, with its accompanying table is available on-line. Accessed Sept. 10, 2013: http://www.athens.edu/visitors/QEP/Barr_and_Tagg_article.pdf

4. A thorough investigation of these issues can be foundin the report “Enhancing child safety and online technologies”published by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, and theBerkman Center at Harvard University (accessed September 17, 2013:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/ISTTF_Final_Report.pdf). A more accessible, ‘popular’ piece is “Bullying as truedrama” by danah boyd and Alice Marwick, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/opinion/why-cyberbullying-rhetoric-misses-the-mark.html.

5. An excellent presentation of the ways in which trust is the newcurrency in collaborative consumption can be found in Rachel Botman’sTEDtalk (http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_currency_of_the_new_economy_is_trust.html). Accessed 9 November 2013.

6. The most often cited statistics here have been drawntogether into compelling “video short” form by Erik Qual-man: http://www.socialnomics.net/2013/01/01/social-media-video-2013/Accessed 9 November 2013.

7. Thomas and SeelyBrown, 2011, 81.

8. See, in particular Clark 2005, 2011 and 2013; as well as Hess,2008, 2010, and 2012.

9. Using the keyword “ladder of engagement” at google will bringyou to numerous graphic illustrations of the idea that participation indigital spaces begins in relatively passive observation, then “following”and “endorsing” before anyone begins to contribute or lead in ways thatgo beyond purely digital spaces.

10. For more on gaming and making, cf: http://www.slideshare.net/ALATechSource/makerspaces-carnegie-public-library-bibliography. Ac-cessed 9 November 2013.

11. Thomas and SeelyBrown, 2011, 81.

12. This lovely and concise description comes from Chapter 10,“Development of Self-Authorship” in the book Student Development in


College, Theory, Research, and Practice by Nancy J. Evans, Deanna S. For-ney, Florence M. Guido, Lori D. Patton and Kristen A. Renn. Publishedby Jossey-Bass, as found in the Tomorrow’s Professor #1110 (http://derekbruff.org/blogs/tomprof/2011/06/17/tp-msg-1110-kegans-theory-of-the-evolution-of-consciousness/). Accessed on 17 September 2013.

13. Ibid.

14. Please see John Roberto’s work at LifelongFaith.com and a freechapter of his self published book, 2011.

15. The most effective articulation of Michael Wesch’s argu-ment is found in his 2008 lecture to the Library of Congress,“An anthropological introduction to YouTube,” available online:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU, with this referencecoming at about the time mark of 29:13. Accessed 17 September2013.

16. Hess, “Mirror neurons, the development of empathy and digitalstorytelling,” in Religious Education, Vol. 107, #4 (July – September, 2012)401–414.

17. For more on this definition of communicative theology, seeScharer and Hilberath, 2008.

18. Ruth Cohen is the founder of the process of smallgroup learning titled “theme-centered interaction” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme-centered_interaction). A theological introduction to com-municative theology is Scharer, Hilberath 2008, from which the secondof these two drawings is found (#).

19. Hess, 2012.

20. See, in particular, Roger McQuistion’s DMin thesis, Digital disci-ples: Reconceptualizing adolescent confirmation instruction by combining biblicalstorytelling and digital media, presented to the DMin program at UnitedTheological, Seminary, Dayton, OH, 2007. Information available directlyfrom the author at: [email protected].

21. See, for example, the website “Work of the People,”(http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/blog), accessed 9 November 2013.

22. See, for example, the work of Bethlehem Lutheran Churchin Minneapolis, MN (https://vimeo.com/bcieslik/videos), accessed 9November 2013.

23. Here I would commend Jolyon Mitchell’s work, in MediaViolence and Christian Ethics, as a way into the theological reframingpossible in liturgical practices.

a new culture of learning: digital storytelling and faith formation

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