Teacher professional identity development through digital stories

Digital stories are powerful instructional tools that allow students to communicate complex concepts and emotions through both linguistic and nonlinguistic modes. A digital story is a 3–6 min multimodal video through which students can engage in critical reflection about their experiences, participate actively in the learning process, and give voice to their identities. This study analyzes two digital stories created by teacher education students in a graduate course; using a new framework that draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics, we demonstrate how these beginning teachers used digital storytelling to shape their professional identities. The results show how valuable digital stories can be in fostering reflection and teachers' development as professionals. The paper also introduces and illustrates an innovative systemic functional linguistic approach to analyzing digital stories as complex multimodal objects.