Digital Storytelling and Social Realism Cinematic Practice as inclusive learning approaches

Starting from the premise that educators have a responsibility to not only teach, but also to contextualise the learning for students so they appreciate the content and its potential relevance to their lives (Lee, 2007), this chapter will reflect on our experience of applying Digital Storytelling and Social Realism Cinematic Practices as collaborative approaches to co-create inclusive learning environments, in particular when working with a cohort of international students. We explore the “democratic potential” (Couldry, 2008) of these participatory approaches, applied in the classroom to disrupt the teacher-learner hierarchical dynamic and expand opportunities to practice collective creativity as a way of producing new forms of shared knowledge, while expanding human connections and collaboration. Since it aims to develop existing technical and linguistic skills through the linking of histories and multicultural contexts, our approach considers bi/multilingual digital storytelling and social realist cinematic practice as sites of relationality by applying the concept of vincularidad, or interrelational reexistence, defined by Andean Indigenous thinkers such as Nina Pacari, Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, and Félix Patzi Paco “as the awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms (in which humans are only a part) with territory or land and the cosmos” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018). In other words, the site we operate within is a site of related aesthetic, sociolinguistic, psychological and cultural experiences; and by site, we mean the materiality of the place the creative process literally takes place in. The digital storytelling and social realism cinematic practices we teach serve to orchestrate embodied or rather materialist language learning and teaching not only through embodied learning in naturally occurring language learning interactions, but also through the complex transmedia methodologies we deploy on our courses. ‘Learning to learn’ remains an essential skill for students’ future success in our rapidly changing society.