Analyzing Digital Stories: Tia

John Hunter is an elementary school teacher. I recently saw a TedTalk he gave, discussing his approach to pedagogy.  Here he talks with two former students about their relationship to his pedagogical style, specifically a game he invented called “The World Peace Game.” When I was scrolling through the StoryCorps website, I immediately recognized Hunter’s image, and being vaguely familiar with his work, was curious to hear what the interaction.  The brief interview began, not with Hunter’s voice as I had expected, but with a child student of his.  The interview is structured such that the young student has space to introduce both the concept of the game as well as her own personal experiences of playing the game.  She asks a catalytic questions “,What do you hope we learn from the ‘World Peace Game?’” that allows Hunter to have a mutual moment of reflection about what the game intended to do and what the game actually does.  The conversation is them picked up by another former student of Hunter’s now studying Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina. The interaction is structured in such a way as to allow students to ask questions of their teacher, an reversal of power dynamics that allows those asking the questions to step outside of the, usually subjugated, role of pupil.  Also, given that this is an audio only story, I thought having the clear progression from the adolescent voiced interviewer to the adult voiced interviewer was a seamless way to keep the speaking organized.

The story, “Almost Paradise: A Multicultural Story About A Mother Trying to Find Paradise for Her Children,” was created by Soo Kim, University of Houston student. The story is presented as daughter’s retelling of her mother’s narrative of migration.  Kim uses voice over narration, still images, music and image effects tell the story of a young woman who because of politically repression, had to leave her mother country Korea in 1975.  The sounds, images, and texts Kim are broad in their selection.  The images are sometimes personal, sometimes generic.  The same is true of the soundtrack, there is opera, 1980s pop, and a dramatic orchestral score that are used throughout the video to narrate the images.  The overall story is one that is somewhat familiar, the story of migration, immigration.  What is potentially interesting here is the specifics of how a first-generation child straddles two sets of desires, her mother’s and her own.  However there is something choppy about the arch of the story.  The story seems really to be about the interrelated nature of this mother-daughter relationship, but at a little of six minutes, the story never fully arrives at this inseparability. It is structured on sequences of comparisons and contrasts between the two women. The story’s title, leads us to think that this will be more about Kim’s mom, who’s voice enters at two intervals in the narrative, however the telling of the story ends up being more about the ways Kim’s self is only realized in dialogue with mother.