Bonus Post: The Requisites and Raptures of Digital Storytelling by Brett Pierce

 The Requisites and Raptures of Digital Storytelling

by Brett Pierce

This blog has the singular aim of introducing, for your reflection, consideration and practice, the idea of integrating digital storytelling – the ‘writing’ side of digital literacy – into your classroom; of making this normative. The reasons are multifold and, I would argue, critical to the future success of your students. But I’ll begin with our burgeoning understanding of the moving target that is encompassed by the word, ‘literacy.’

Amidst the technological maelstrom that has enveloped us all, text is no longer the only game in town. The 2020 NCTE Committee on Global Citizenship wrote:

At its simplest, literacy is the way that we interact with the world around us, how we shape it and are shaped by it. It is how we communicate with others via reading and writing, but also by speaking, listening, and creating. It is how we articulate our experience in the world and declare, “We Are Here!””

Think about it: how do students ‘interact with the world around [them]’ and how do they ‘articulate [their] experience in the world and declare, “We are Here!”’? The answer: digitally.  The digital realm is their communication platform. It’s their social life. It’s their source of knowledge. It’s their language. It’s a full-blown communication spectrum the breadth and depth of which is unprecedented in history. 

Has there ever been a more all-consuming and far-reaching literacy? Has the need to teach toward ‘writing’ fluency in this literacy ever been greater? The question then is: Are we preparing our kids to be meaningful contributors to this digitally literate universe; to declare, ‘We are Here!’ in a meaningful and impactful way? And the answer is mostly, ‘No.’  

This is where digital storytelling comes in. Digital Storytelling is the capacity to communicate using text, sound, music, and imagery – still and moving. You don’t have to use all of these tools, but they are the main components of digital storytelling. If we think of this in terms of primary and secondary colors, then text, sound/music and imagery are your primary colors. Pacing, visual palette, graphics, voice, tone, and genre (comedy, game show, news, mystery, etc.) might be your secondary colors. It’s a relatively vast range of tools with which to work in order to effectively communicate. And in that range lies both its complexity and wonder, challenge and opportunity. 

Is it teachable without prior media production knowledge? Yes! All you need to know is what you know: the content. The answer to any question from the students about digital production and IT-related questions is this: “You figure it out.” Here’s the reality. In traditional text-based literacy, you, the educator, know the rules and you teach those rules to your students…whether you are teaching science, math, history, or literature. Text-based literacy is powered by rules of syntax and grammar, word choices and punctuation. Digital Literacy is not about rules as much as it is about mechanics. Digital Literacy is about knowing 1) the individual operations of the different digital parts (imagery, music, sound, editing, zooms, etc.); and 2) how those different digital parts all synchronize with each other. For the students, discovering these digital mechanics – including cool apps that let letters fly or distort an image to comic effect – is like letting them loose in an educational playground designed just for them. Except it’s digital.

Discovering the various components of digital literacy is part of the learning experience. Teaching you, the educator, what they, the students, have discovered, is also a vital part of the learning experience. We all know the power of this flipped classroom model, even in this micro format. But it still takes guts and confidence to yield that control of information and knowledge. 

But the payoff is huge. 

Can you assess a digital story like you grade a paper? Yes-Plus, is the answer. Your assessment falls into four categories: Content Command, Storytelling or Narrative Command, Digital Literacy Command, and Human (or 21st Century) Skills Command. To see some free examples of how digital storytelling projects approach the curriculum and provide clear assessment rubrics, check out the free language arts projects from the non-profit, Meridian Stories, as well as the annual Digital Storytelling Competition for middle and high school students that I run.  

One of the many beauties of digital storytelling is the depth of the narrative bench at its disposal. In addition to traditional text-based narrative genres, there is well over seventy years of television and twenty plus years of the Internet that has yielded myriad narrative forms that can be applied in the classroom. We are talking Game Shows, Reality Shows, Sitcoms, Music Videos, Sketch Comedies, Vlogs, How-To Tutorials and Product Reviews. Imagine asking students to create a Product Review of … a novel, a current global leader, or your town’s recycling commitment.

Digital Storytelling in the classroom is an invitation to students to utilize their intimate knowledge of television, podcasting, and social media narrative formats to explore curricular content. That is part of the attraction for students – tapping into their practically organic knowledge of these genres of storytelling. 

All of these different narrative structures champion different storytelling strengths. From the personal journey of the vlog to the focus on voice and character in the radio drama; from the variety of perspectives and expertise in the special news cast (think anchor, color commentator, field reporter and interviewee) to the use of comedy to communicate important, visceral content in an SNL-esque parody sketch, the digital story offers students a seemingly infinite series of creative choices that open portals into understanding and communicating serious content, and all inside of the digital universe in which they spend half of their lives.

In the end, if we are to properly prepare our students for life after secondary school, we need to set them up to succeed digitally; to communicate meaningfully inside the digital landscape of stories; contribute responsibly to these new libraries of digital stories. This means consistently experimenting with text, sound, music, imagery, voice, story, tone, perspective, narrative format, time, color, …the list goes on. And to do this, the students need to collaborate, create, think critically, problem solve, work iteratively, present publicly, manage time and schedules, make decisions, master digital apps, …that list goes on too. The educational value is clear and inexorable.

And here’s the concluding killer piece to it all. For the students, …it’s a blast!  

Finally, if you’ve made it to the end here, I’ll assume that something here has captured your creative educational imagination. Meridian Stories can help jumpstart your integration of digital storytelling in the classroom and I am happy to offer it to WPCTE members and their schools for free ($300 value) for this school year. Just drop me a short email (brett@meridianstories.org) and we’ll make it happen. 

Thanks for your time and mind. 

About the Author

Brett is the founder and Executive Director of Meridian Stories, a Digital Storytelling nonprofit for middle and high schoolers that challenges students to create digital narratives around core curricular goals in a friendly, annual competition (brett@meridianstories.org). Brett recently authored his first book with Heinemann Publishing, Expanding Literacy: Bringing Digital Storytelling into Your Classroom, and wrote the National Geographic Storytelling for Impact course series in 2022 which won the Gold Anthem Award.

Brett has spent much of his professional life at Sesame Workshop in New York City, serving as a Co-Executive Producer on media projects about literacy, math, science, global citizenry and conflict-resolution for youth around the world, including projects in China, North Macedonia, Indonesia, Poland, Iraq, and South Sudan. He is currently working on a new SEL television series for pre-schoolers that is slated to launch worldwide in 2026.

Brett began his career teaching English in a high school in Virginia, and has continued teaching intermittently at Fordham University, University of Southern Maine, and Colby College. Brett has a BA from Kenyon College, and Masters Degrees from Middlebury College (English) and Columbia University (Education). He is married with two grown children and lives in Freeport, Maine.

Literacy for Liberation: PCTELA ‘25 Behind Us, and the Future of our Classrooms Ahead by Hannah Lewis and Sarah Wilt

 Literacy for Liberation: PCTELA ‘25 Behind Us, and the Future of our Classrooms Ahead

by Hannah Lewis and Sarah Wilt

This post celebrates Mx. Sarah Wilt and Ms. Hannah Lewis’s experiences co-chairing the 2025 PCTELA conference in October, and is co-written by the two of us.

Collaborating on the PCTELA '25 conference was a new experience for us, but we agreed to the task in part because we value and appreciate one another’s approaches to our work, but in larger part because we felt an imperative: to address the inequities in PA classrooms that the Covid-19 pandemic had made visible, exacerbated, and created the opportunity to address, but which instead had gone largely ignored.

As the year of planning went on and threats to literacy education proliferated, we wanted to organize our conference in a way that would empower educators–help us to see the urgency of the work we do. We needed to reclaim literacy as a liberatory force, and ensure our pedagogy aligned with that goal. So we came up with the conference theme: Literacy for Liberation.

From the featured speakers who shared their unique and diverse perspectives with us to the classroom teachers who showed up with strategies to uplift student voices, our community of educators came through. This conference was an incredible opportunity to think together as a community about what it means to harness the liberatory power of literacy in Pennsylvania classrooms in 2025 and moving forward.

We’d like to highlight a few of the exemplary presentations for members who could not attend.

Featured Speakers

Featured speakers included youth librarian and mental health advocate Caiden Feldmiller, whose insights into the needs of LGBTQ+ teens and those with mental illnesses provided thought-provoking guidance that all of us can use to better handle sensitive topics in our classrooms and ensure each and every student we teach is seen and has a space to be their authentic selves. Find out more about his work at the Sewickley teen library here.

Saturday, former NCTE president Alfredo Luján started our day with his own story of his ongoing literacy liberation–you can find his take-aways later in this post.

Finally, professor of education and advocate for sex education and bodily literacy Dr. Stephanie Jones reminded us of the imperative to create space for students to learn about their bodies and how they exist in the world. With a prolific career and a significant online presence, it may be difficult to know where to start exploring her work, but this provocative podcast episode provides a way in for those who missed her talk, and introduces the exciting liberatory practice of a “read in” for a book challenged for its LGBTQ-supportive content.

In addition to our featured speakers, we want to highlight a few other conference attendees, but we invite you to review the full program to see all of the great work that was showcased.

First-Time Presenters

We want to share work from presenters new to NCTE affiliate conferences, but whose participation in PCTELA and other NCTE affiliate events we hope to see continue in years to come, including at NCTE in Philadelphia in 2026.

Dr. Jim Gerencser of Dickinson College’s Digital Resource Center for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School provides primary sources and free teacher resources that we can use to educate ourselves and our students about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the widespread assimilationist mission of boarding schools for Indigenous children in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Americas.

While his colleague, Dr. Amanda Cheromiah, was unable to attend, her work with the college’s Center for the Future of Native Peoples deserves mention, too. We invite you to explore the myriad resources and initiatives the Center makes available.

Dr. Karen Detlefsen of the University of Pennsylvania Project for Philosophy for the Young, along with colleague Dr. Dustin Webster and veteran Philadelphia educators Kathryn Sundeen and Francesca Canterini shared resources to promote reasoned ethical discourse in the classroom. Their work focused on Ethics Bowl events, but the resources they shared, including the National Ethics Bowl Case Library, are excellent tools for use in middle- and high school classrooms. In fact, Hannah’s already used one of the cases in her A.P. Seminar classroom this year, and her students loved it!

WPCTE members who double as WPWP teaching fellows, with WPWP director Dr. Khirsten Scott. Left to right: Heather Bixler, Khirsten Scott, Hannah Lewis, Carol Frow, and Katie Katkich.

WPCTE Members

And we’d love to acknowledge the work of WPCTE members below:

WPCTE Executive Director Carol Frow presented “Do You Want to Learn about Upstanders or Be One? Teaching Holocaust Literature to Create Student Upstanders,” highlighting how discussions around literature can inform students’ attitudes to their agency when others are treated in ways they know to be wrong.

WPCTE Slam Poetry Coordinator Katie Katkich presented “Amplifying Student Voices Through Slam and Spoken Word Poetry: Culturally Sustaining and Socially Engaged Learning in the ELA Classroom.” Check out her related work on the WPCTE’s Poetry Slam page.

WPWP teaching fellow Heather Bixler presented “Family Matters: Adapting Our Literature and Lessons for Adoptive and Foster Families,” reminding us that youth in foster care or who have been adopted deserve to learn in supportive classrooms.

Featured speaker and former NCTE president Alfredo Luján and WPCTE Vice-President Hannah Lewis co-presented “Free(ly) Writing the Word and the World,” exploring the ways we can disrupt traditional attitudes towards literacy in our classrooms and celebrate our students’ literacies (plural), including in free writes and sustained multimodal projects.

We’ll leave the last word on the experience to Alfredo Luján, who expresses the take-aways we’d hoped all our members would internalize, and leaves us with a call to action that we hope to echo and amplify:

This literacy event has helped me realize what my daughter Amanda, an ASL interpreter, said to me one day when I was espousing Vygotsky’s theory on language acquisition. “Language is never acquired. It is always being developed.” Each of us continues to develop liberation through literacy, as do our students. Our literacy is everything under our hat, the air and things around us, plus what we listen to, what we read and write, what we say and do, our home languages and cultures – our heritage. Our ability and each student’s ability to claim our, her, his, their own name and identity through being, reading, writing, and listening is emancipation from assimilation. The Secretary of Education and the Federal Administration should embrace and respect multi-cultural/multi-lingual literacy in current America.

Dear literacy educators, grow a thick skin to repel the bureaucracy. Resist. As you help liberate your students through their literacies, your way to heaven is being paved.