This paper reports on the use of Digital Storytelling (DS) as a mode of pedagogy in a year one Education Studies undergraduate module. Building on Bozalek et al’s (2016) research into how an ethics of care may be used to analyse the dialogic aspects of feedback, we consider how DS, as summative assessment, may foreground care ethics such as ‘attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust’ (826). Our interest in this topic stems from concerns shared by the authors over the impact on staff and students of the massification of higher education, defined as the rapid increase in student enrolment from the end of the twentieth century onwards (Hornsby & Osman, 2014). Although the expansion of higher education (HE) has been broadly welcomed, international research on the massification of HE has noted numerous concerns including changes to the content and delivery of courses that negatively affect course outcomes (Monks & Schmidt, 2011); the diminishment of interaction between staff and students (Wang & Calvano, 2022); a reduction in the variety of teaching and assessment methods (Msiza, Ndhlovu & Raseroka, 2020), and an increase in ‘work-related stress, burnout, and mental health difficulties’ amongst staff (Brewster et al, 2022, 549). Research indicates that overworked staff often provide generic and superficial feedback to students who are ‘fixated on grades’ (Jones et al, 2021, 446) and who sometimes resort to plagiarism ‘to find the shortest and least stressful way to complete their coursework or program requirements’ (Fatima et al, 2020, 35).

Massification presents several challenges to the ethics of care. First, exponents of the ethics of care reject the utilitarian tendency to think of the ‘moral good in terms of acts that produce the greatest good for the greatest number’ (Noddings, 2013, 154). Second, exponents of the ethics of care reject traditional theories about ethics that place justice as the foundation of morality (Gilligan, 1982), arguing instead that care should be the foundation of ethics, with justice as the superstructure (Noddings, 2013). This approach requires us to establish a ‘sensible, receptive, and responsive’ relationship with individuals (Noddings, 2013, 42) rather than ‘abstract away from the concrete situation those elements that allow a formulation of deductive argument’ (42) about the optimal way to interact with them. Under massification, ‘engrossment, or “feeling with”’ (Diller, 2018, 327) students is often difficult for staff, as it is seemingly impossible for a large cohort of students to fill our ‘field of attention’ (327) in the same way that a smaller group might. Arguably, the widespread use of student satisfaction surveys exemplifies the shift towards the formulation of deductive arguments about the optimalisation of staff-student interactions under massification (see for example Winstone et al, 2022). Third, if diligent teaching staff attempt to implement an ethics of care on massified programmes they may compound their ‘work-related stress, burnout, and mental health difficulties’ (Brewster et al, 2022, 549) by going “above and beyond” already unrealistic performance expectations.

Mindful of these concerns, this study asks if DS has the potential to facilitate compassionate enquiry grounded in the ethics of care in the context of a large, international cohort of first year undergraduate students.

Digital Storytelling (DS) is an educational practice informed by the belief that ‘narrative is one of the fundamental sense-making operations of the mind’ (Lodge, 1990, 4). For DS, this sense-making has two salient dimensions: (i) by telling stories about our lives, we become aware of the dynamic forces that shape our values, behaviours, and motivations (Ward, Mazzoli Smith & Dragas, 2023); (ii) by combining these stories with digital media such as images, audio, and video, we create multimodal vignettes that help other people “walk in our shoes”. At the end of the Education Studies module, students attended three lectures on the purpose and method of DS and two seminars in which they (i) viewed and discussed examples of DS; (ii) shared their stories about a learning experience that was of value to them. As part of their summative assessment, the students were asked to (i) combine their personal narrative with voice recording, text, and music to create a DS that could be uploaded to the online assessment portal; (ii) write a 500–1000-word Reflection on their DS, exploring connections between their personal experience and theories/theorists encountered on the module. Our analysis of the students’ work was informed by Noddings’ (2013, 186) rejection of the deification of abstract goals such as ‘“critical thinking, “and “critical reading,” and “critical reasoning”’, which often feature as intended learning outcomes on undergraduate modules. In asking students to create a DS and reflect on it, our aim was to help them think deeply about educational theory, and to care about it, through dialogue that enabled them to ‘come into contact with ideas and to understand, to meet the other and to care’ (Noddings, 2013, 186). This approach required us to acknowledge that whenever we describe ourselves or our actions to others, we are creating a story about ourselves (Parry, 1997). A reflection on how we came to create a DS is, then, a story about a story, so instead of asking if the students’ Reflections were authentic accounts of their storytelling process, we assessed their ability to articulate how a real-world experience (e.g., exam anxiety) finds expression in/is explained by educational theory, and why we should care about this. To discover how the classroom helped this process, we held a teaching-team focus group to share our experiences of working with the students as they developed their personal narratives.

The images used in the DS ranged from bleak to humorous: some students created animations or still images to convey their emotions, and many of the students used their Reflection to articulate alignment between their DS’s audio-visual content and the module content. Many of the students’ personal narratives invoked experiences of constraint and release, and collectively the DS and Reflections tell a story of oppressive educational practices that young people are subjected to internationally. As noted by Sykes and Gachago (2018, 95), we are always ‘entangled in each other and in the world’, and the students used their storytelling to respond to this entanglement with compassion, often thanking people who had helped them at school or college and promising to help others. We began our focus group discussion with our most pressing concern, which was the lack of continuity with seminar attendance that made it difficult for seminar leaders and students to build rapport. Although some of our students seemed unable or reluctant to engage consistently with their designated seminar group, they were willing to ‘become a witness to the other’ and to themselves (Ellis, 2017, 439) in their DS seminars. Personal storytelling seems, therefore, to help overcome some of the issues around massification identified in this paper. Educators who care for many students risk becoming exhausted (Brewster et al, 2022), and the wellbeing of our teaching team on this module is an important consideration. However, in our focus group we agreed that the use of DS was not onerous, and that it afforded us pleasure to view and read the students’ work. Arguably, the DS and Reflections helped our students to discover how their lived experiences fuse with educational theory and helped them to find community in the classroom.

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