ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the potential of collaborative digital storytelling production to deepen the social class identity of first-generation college students and to support the collective voice of first-generation students in discourse about educational equity on campus and beyond. First-generation college students occupy a distinctive social class position. Most, by far, are from poor and working-class backgrounds; their college ambitions are inextricably entangled with hopes for meritocratic social class mobility through success in school. Yet the odds are firmly against them: decades of evidence indicate that higher education replicates rather than eradicates inequalities. Absent substantive discourse about social class barriers within educational settings, first-generation students too often internalize struggles in college as evidence of personal failure. Instead, in the three-day digital storytelling workshops discussed in this chapter, first-generation students invest in collaborative digital storytelling for deepening and representing individual and collective social class identities. As they create agentive first-person stories that are simultaneously inwardly reflective and outward facing, the chapter considers what happens as stories – located at social class borders – become part of public discourse on their campuses and beyond.
