Engaging Students In Video Creation On Crosscultural Understanding: A New Approach Toward Digital Storytelling

Abstract

Digital Storytelling is one of the multiliteracies’ pedagogy. It is not only helping students learning theoretical knowledge but also developing their competencies in term of listening, speaking, as well as reading and writing skills. At present, video creation also becomes an effective media in observing, learning, and also developing students’ abilities, especially in cross-cultural understanding class. In this study, I suggest performing digital storytelling in making video creation on the cross-cultural understanding material. The purpose of this study is to build the student’s multiliteracies, that is Narrative literacy, Information Literacy, Visual Literacy, Media / Technology literacy and also Multimodality literacy. I organize an activity for undergraduate students to create digital stories. Participants are divided into 5 groups. Every group create digital stories and have his own theme; i. e. American Values, Stereotypes, Male and Female Relationship, Non-Verbal Communication and Culture Shock. The findings of this study suggest that the technique of digital storytelling can be used effectively in classroom settings to teach cross-cultural understanding.