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Lorraine Calbow and LynnAnn Wojciechowicz spent five weeks in Australia and two weeks in New Zealand during summer 2003. They were both accepted to participate in the summer faculty exchange with Riverina TAFE and Charles Sturt University. Both faculty members are from South Mountain Community College and were chosen because of their passion for storytelling. LynnAnn was slated to go the previous summer, but ran into a passport problem because of her Canadian citizenship. The District held her spot for the following year while she got her American citizenship. This situation allowed Linda Hicks and Rachel Woodburn, both from Scottsdale Community College, to go and share Digital Storytelling in Australia. Having Lorraine and LynnAnn go the following year allowed the exchange to build on storytelling. This time the focus would be storytelling from an oral tradition perspective. While in Australia, LynnAnn and Lorraine did 19 storytelling presentations to audiences of faculty, staff and students, and traveled throughout New South Wales to the various Riverina TAFE campuses.
The main emphasis for LynnAnn and Lorraine was to focus on the power of telling stories whether biographical, personal, or traditional as an effective strategy for teaching and learning. Both faculty members extended their stay in Australia and traveled to New Zealand by writing successful summer professional growth projects to experience stories of the people of Australia and New Zealand.
The seven weeks in Australia and New Zealand were so rich with experiences and stories for us. Rarely, do we get an opportunity to communicate the integration of those learning moments to other faculty members. So often, the programs that provide these cultural experiences never get to see and know the lasting effects they have on the faculty members who participate. It was through the digital storytelling process that we decided to relay to others what we received.
Storytelling has always deepened our experiences as well as our relationships. I know we felt that way about the people we met in Australia and New Zealand as well as the Maricopa people who went with us. Because Rachel Woodburn and Linda Hicks went the year before and shared our passion for storytelling, the many hours we spent together working on our digital stories were rewarding and fun.
LynnAnn and I were motivated to do the digital storytelling projects because we needed a way to capture for ourselves what we learned and then to communicate it to others. We wanted to let other faculty members as well as administrators know that learning had occurred. Initially, we thought we could do one project. We met several times brainstorming, trying to narrow our focus. It was really hard. Then, we tried prioritizing alone just to see what was important to each of us. When each saw our respective lists, we recognized immediately that we had two complimentary pieces. After we wrote our scripts, we met with Linda and Rachel. They too noticed how well the two stories went together. However, our stories were much longer than the normal two-to-three-minute digital storytelling pieces, which caused us to spend many hours hunting, scanning, and formatting pictures. We were fortunate that our colleagues on the exchange had shared their pictures with us. Also, Linda and Rachel as well as Alan Levine shared their Australian pictures with us. Linda even sent an email to Gail Farran in Australia requesting specific Australian photos. After the photos were secured, we went into the recording studio and did our voiceovers and moved everything into iMovie where pictures and sound came together.
It's our sincere hope that we were able to tell our stories effectively to give faculty, staff, and students a glimpse of what we brought home to Maricopa Colleges. We hope that our digital storytelling pieces will give others a small orientation to the possibilities of faculty exchanges and the rewards of visiting other cultures.
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