Building undergraduate students’ cultural identity through digital storytelling

Abstract

For many years, intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has been discussed to elucidate the development of students’ awareness, skill, and experience in regard to intercultural communication. Yet, practical suggestions for enhancing teachers’ or teacher educators’ practice in intercultural communication classrooms are scarce. To fill this void, this article presents the use of culture-based digital storytelling (DST) tasks to promote intercultural awareness and identity in multicultural classroom settings. To begin with, this article explores how DST tasks are designed to mediate students representing their cultural identity and building their intercultural awareness through a pedagogical intervention of DST. Then, reflection is presented to give potential practical implications for teachers and teacher educators in designing and implementing DST-mediated cultural learning. Courses: Language, Culture, and Society; Intercultural Communication; Cross-Cultural Understanding; any course with an intercultural communication unit/cultural study. Objectives: After completing this project, students are able to: (1) express their cultural identities from their point of view verbally and visually; (2) maximize their multimodal literacy and design creatively; (3) activate their background experiences to illustrate their intersecting cultural ideas critically; (4) further enhance their critical thinking and cultural awareness; (5) reflect their cultural identities in enhancing their intercultural competence; and (6) apply cultural identity theory to demonstrate and analyze their cultural ideas.