ABSTRACT
In every digital storytelling workshop, as in every research project, there are outliers, those participants who don’t seem to fit so easily into the culture of the project and the group, who struggle with the methods and frameworks offered, who make “trouble” for the facilitator and the researcher. In the workshop setting, facilitators tend to work very hard to make sure these participants complete the digital storytelling process and produce a finished work. In research, these are often the participants that don’t get mentioned in the final analysis-they are the exceptions that the norm of typical experience in the group tends to obscure. This absence is not necessarily a problem. Indeed, we know that research, like the group practice of the digital storytelling workshop, or indeed any kind of curriculum, cannot address each individual precisely. And yet, to understand listening requires that we attend to moments when we see it break down or occur in ways we never imagined. While Chapter Three addressed the power of the storytelling group to function as a listening environment and a holding environment that might cultivate listening, this chapter explores what we learned from observing the limits of listening in the digital storytelling group and in our own research. Perhaps surprisingly, attending to these limits of listening also reveals some of its greater possibilities, and considers how conflict and resistance, which at first might appear to denote the absence of listening, offer vital methods for listening differently, actively, or “at an angle” (Thompson 2010).
