Chloë Brushwood Rose

The (Im)possibilities of Self Representation: Exploring the Limits of Storytelling in the Digital Stories of Women and Girls

So, when sitting in a buttercup field one Sunday morning in June, watching the Downs emerging from the mist, I checked the impulse to make a water-colour sketch which was certain to be a failure. Instead I concentrated on the mood of the scene, the peace and the softness of the colouring, the gentle curves of the Downs, and began to scribble in charcoal, letting hand and eye do what they liked. Gradually a definite form had emerged and there, instead of the peaceful summer landscape, was a blazing heath fire, its black smoke blotting out the sky. This was certainly surprising, in fact it was so surprising it was hard to believe that what had happened was not pure accident... But the following week-end I was again urged to draw something beautiful, when sitting under beech trees on another perfect June morning and longing to be able to represent their calm steadiness. Once again I had tried my experiment of concentrating on the mood and letting my hand draw as it liked. After absent-mindedly covering the whole page with light and dark shadings I suddenly saw what it was I had drawn. Instead of the over-arching beeches spreading protecting arms in the still summer air, there were two stunted bushes on a snowy crag, blasted by a raging storm (Milner 1971, 6–7).

Unexpected self-expression and the limits of narrative inquiry: exploring unconscious dynamics in a community-based digital storytelling workshop

This study explores the tension between self-knowledge and self-expression, and how it manifests in the processes of storytelling that unfold in digital storytelling workshops offered to new immigrant women living in Toronto, Canada. Both in their multi-modal complexity and in the significant shifts from their original telling, the digital stories produced seem to offer something in excess of the storyteller’s conscious intention. Here we consider what these unexpected self-expressions might mean for theories of narrative and practices of narrative inquiry: How do the unconscious dynamics of storytelling complicate our notions of narrative? How can narrative inquiry account for the unconscious? To explore these questions, we begin with a conceptual exploration of narrative and its limits and possibilities, followed by a discussion of two case studies that illustrate a range of dynamics – telling several different stories, telling a contradictory story and repeating the same story over and over.

The Significance of Emotions in Teaching and Learning: On Making Emotional Significance.

We follow the insights of psychoanalytic theory to offer a way of thinking about emotional life in the classroom. Using three case studies, each of which illuminates an aspect of emotional difficulty in relation to learning and failing to learn, we argue that educators and educational leaders benefit from attending to and listening for difficulties in making emotional significance, that is, in refusing to separate affective and cognitive processes, in encounters with knowledge and with others.

Finding space for technology: Pedagogical observations on the organization of computers in school environments

With the large-scale acquisition and installation of computer and networking hardware in schools across Canada, a major concern has been where to locate these new technologies and whether and how the structure of the school might itself be made to accommodate these new technologies. In this paper, we suggest that the physical location and organization of computer technologies, whether in the lab, classroom, library, or even school hallway, delimits and shapes the ways in which teachers talk about and make use of computers in their schools. As with the distribution of and access to any kind of resource, the distribution and organization of computers has an impact on the frequency and quality of teachers’ integration/implementation efforts. We focus on three case studies that highlight how the structuring and re-structuring of space in schools can be a significant factor in whether and how this technology is used by teachers and students.

The subjective spaces of social engagement: Cultivating creative living through community-based digital storytelling

Many community-based organizations use digital storytelling as a strategy for community development, aiming to cultivate increased social agency and community leadership in participants through practices of storytelling and media production. Reporting on a three-year study of digital storytelling with newcomer women in Toronto, and drawing on Winnicott’s theories of creative living, this paper suggests that the successes of such social justice projects might be better understood if we consider the ways in which the capacity for social engagement is cultivated through experiences of emotional risk-taking and psychological creativity, and made possible by the holding environment offered to participants.

Making Emotional and Social Significance: Digital Storytelling and the Cultivation of Creative Influence

Brushwood Rose examines how the creative experience of Digital Storytelling (DS) is essential for cultivating an increased sense of social agency for participants by also making room for the psychological complexities of such an achievement. Drawing on her study of a DS workshop for newcomer women in Toronto, Brushwood Rose argues that the social change engendered through digital storytelling projects is grounded in the emotional worlds of participants and their experiments with psychological creativity. The chapter complicates and enriches current understandings of DS as a method of community development and social transformation by suggesting that there can be no social relation without the potential space in which to take the emotional risks that animate a creative life.