With StoryCenter, the Oklahoma Community Literacy Project, and other academic and community allies Brooke Hessler co-facilitates digital storytelling workshops with public participants, students, and educators. Their aim is to help people make space in their lives to reflect on significant experiences, create narrative videos using their own voices and images, build connections with others, and share perspectives that may not otherwise get spoken or heard. Here are a few recent collaborations:

California Listens: Stories About Being Californian is a collaboration between StoryCenter and the California State Library, gathering people at their local libraries to help them share, write, and create short digital stories about their lives. The stories are curated and digitally archived by the State.

 

 

The Survivors in Motion: Weather Recovery Project is a public digital storytelling program for survivors and caregivers responding to natural disasters such as tornadoes.

Sample media coverage of their Moore, OK workshops (NPR affiliate KGOU): Tornado Survivors Share Stories of Strength

 

The StoryAbroad Project is an international collaborative launched in the European Union to generate, share, analyze, and promote stories by people aged 15 to 25 who have studied and worked in other countries. Along with students, community partners, and fellow educators from 11 countries, they co-facilitated the creation of over 100 digital stories. The group shared their findings at the Spring 2016 storytelling festival and conference at Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa and in the publication Travelling Stories.

 

Brooke also facilitates professional development workshops regionally and nationally to help faculty use digital storytelling methodologies for critical reflection, student engagement, cross-disciplinary community-building, and Universal Design for Learning implementations. Her scholarship on digital storytelling as a means of critically reflective, arts-integrated learning includes Threshold Concepts in Digital Storytelling (co-authored with Joe Lambert in Digital Storytelling in Higher Education: International Perspectives, Palgrave 2017).