Stories beget stories, so be careful of the ones you tell—or listen to or share.
This past week I was a participant in the StoryCenter‘s webinar “Defining Compassion in Nursing” based on the Nurstory digital storytelling project founded by Dr. Sue Hagedorn from the University of Colorado School of Nursing. I was intrigued by the title of the webinar as well as by the opportunity to learn how digital storytelling is being used in nursing education and advocacy.
Digital storytelling (DS) refers to short video segments (typically 3-5 minutes in length) personal narratives that incorporate digital images, music, and voice-over narration by the person making the video. They are typically created within a workshop-based process that includes a Story Circle to share, critique, and refine stories-in-progress. Developed in the early 1990s by media/theater artists Dana Atchley and Joe Lambert and promoted through their StoryCenter (formerly the Center for Digital Storytelling), DS has been used for public health research, training, and policy campaigns (such as the powerful Silence Speaks global women’s health/human rights campaign); community building (such as the now archived BBC Capture Wales program); literacy programs; and reflective practice with health science students. DS is increasingly used as an innovative community-based participatory method that is especially effective at informing program planners and policy makers about the lived experiences of marginalized people.
Besides the fact that not all stories can or should be told in a nice, neat, linear 3-5 minute format, there are numerous ethical issues to consider. A brief overview of some of the ethical issues with DS is included on the StoryCenter website under “Ethical Practice in Digital Storytelling.” And, with their permission, here is an excellent overview by Kelsen Caldwell (formerly in the University of Washington School of Medicine, Health Sciences Service Learning and Advocacy group) of ethical considerations of storytelling in health advocacy work with communities: “The Ethics of Storytelling.”
I have worked with groups of people experiencing homelessness, as well as with health science students working on community-based service-learning projects that include homeless people, and have helped them to make some of their own DS videos. I completed a participatory digital storytelling video workshop in August, 2015 with a group of homeless youth through the Zine Project Seattle (sadly, no longer in existence). With their permission I share links to two of their videos here: “Harm Reduction is Good” and “Tug of War.”
“Soul Stories: Homeless Journeys Told Through Feet” is a DS video I made to accompany a show of my photographs and poems/prose that then became the book, Soul Stories: Voices From the Margins (2018). Also from this book, I made “Listen, Carefully” (at 7 minutes a bit long for a DS). In a StoryCenter workshop at the University of Washington, Bothell campus during the summer of 2016, I made my “Homeless Professor” digital storytelling video which was based on a portion of my medical memoir, Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net (2016). My very first DS video I made was “My Story of Community Health Nursing” that I continue to use in teaching population/community health nursing. In reviewing these DS videos, I am struck by their staying power and relevance for me. Although technically rough in places, they tell stories I want to share.
I have concerns about how empathy and compassion are defined by nursing and how we as nurse educators have our own unpacked, unexamined, uncritically looked at stories of what nursing should and should not be. Who gets to decide what is a “proper” nurse story of compassion? Shouldn’t it more properly be Nurstories instead of the singular Nurstory? That said, after viewing all of the DS videos on the Nurstory website, I am struck by how powerful and even subversive several of them are. Rawaih Faltatah’s “Circle of Care” is an ode to her older sister, a nurse, and the effects of her caring and compassion on her own life and choice of a career in nursing. A more difficult to watch and listen to, yet subversive and important DS video is “Invisible Touch” by Kate Clayton-Jones.
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