ABSTRACT
This chapter will look at ways that digital storytelling facilitators continuously negotiate complex and diverse dialogic spaces that exist within digital storytelling practices. This will help assess the hierarchical expert paradigm of many teacher/student and researcher/participant relationships. Facilitators should work to engage community members as experts in the production processes of co-creative media at all stages: Story-sharing, storymaking, and dissemination. This further includes not only teaching the digital literacy skills needed to ensure participant-led creation and dissemination processes, but also the ability for participants to feel confident they have the ability to respond and be responded to by the facilitator, the others in the room, and potential audiences. This chapter steps outside of traditional digital storytelling scholarship to invoke a range of practices from other co-creative arts practices and by no means constitutes a comprehensive examination of the best practices for responsible facilitators. Rather, as a means of identifying how these witnessing, response-ability, and care can be applied to the digital storytelling workshop, the author provides practical tools and tactics that can be and have been used by myself and other facilitators in a wide range of artistic applications.
