Abstract:

This study aims to understand how teachers make meaning of their teaching-learning processes through their experiences during Covid-19 pandemic, expressed in two online Digital Storytelling Workshops (DSTWs).

The collaborative co-creative atmosphere of DSTWs provides the ecology for sharing and listening to the other’s stories in a facilitated environment. The power of digital stories (DSs) comes from the personal narratives of the workshop participants and in the context of a set of DSTWs facilitated with teachers, that are the key component of the education system, the experiences reflected in these workshops regarding the teaching-learning processes during the pandemic, have brought forward teachers’ views, beliefs, expectations, and needs.

This qualitative study relies on the two online DSTWs, facilitated by the researchers. Five teachers attended the first workshop and four teachers attended the second workshop. The online DSTWs, based on the workshop methodology initially developed by Story Center, comprised several steps: story circle, writing stories, voice recording, preparing visuals, video editing (creating DSs), and in-group screening of DSs. These steps were conducted asynchronously or synchronously. Although the same stages were conducted in both workshops, the number and duration of the steps differed according to the group dynamics. The data were obtained from two data sources. The first one is the transcribed stories told by the participants in the story circle and the remarks they made during the in-group screening sessions. The second set is the text of the DSs of the participants. The data were analyzed through content analysis. To ensure the credibility and consistency of the results, all researchers worked together about the coding and interpretation of the data, following data analysis.

The study shows that the DSs from the first workshop focus on the meanings of being face-to-face at school, whereas the participants of the second workshop, point to their self-exploration in their professional and private lives. The analysis of the data shows that the stories of the teachers’ cluster around three main themes: The meanings of being a student, the meaning of being a teacher, and the meanings of school. Firstly, the pandemic has revealed the inequalities that students face in education clearly. Secondly, one of the most significant outcomes of this study has been to rediscover how important it is to accept the teacher as a concept of diversity and multitude with intertangled aspects of identity in operation. Finally, school is a central concept with various meanings. Teachers see school as a living organism with the students, teachers, and parents engaged.

In conclusion, it can be argued that the online DSTWs and the DSs provided a rich data set. The online DSTWs provided the teachers to express their experiences during the pandemic and listen to the other teachers with their self-questioning about their lives and professions. In this respect, this study highlights the importance of examining the experiences of teachers, in addition to the studies on the effects of technology on learning and performance in literature. To sum up, the study shows, the aspects that are vaguely taken into consideration while questioning professional skills such as gender, beliefs, how one positions one’s self in life, are a core part of meaning-making in learning and teaching processes.

Keywords:

Digital storytelling, workshop, teachers, experiences, Covid-19 pandemic.