This week I hosted a conversation with Dr Mary Hess from Luther Seminary about Digital Storytelling in the context of lifelong faith formation and education. Mary is Professor of Education and Leadership at Luther Seminary, Minnesota USA. The online session was part of our new monthly series on Blended Faith Formation – how can the church grow disciples online as well as face to face. Mary has an extensive background in studying, writing and teaching about media, communication and religious education, including theological education. Her personal blog is here.
Mary is from Minneaoplis, and the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement provided a poignant but important starting point for talking about the power of stories to challenge and change. We talked about the central place of stories in faith formation and education, narrative pedagogies, personal stories, what it means to live in “the tragic gap”, and why and how we can be teachers who collect, create and curate stories. It was a wonderful and generous conversation. Many people joined us on the day and you can read the chat comments here on on Presbytery Facebook page.
This version of the video has the audio looping glitch edited out! You can watch or download it from Youtube.
You can download the PDF of Mary’s slides here.
A number of resources were mentioned in the conversation. Here’s a list of them and there are more in the PDF.
Parker Palmer – The Courage to Teach, Healing the Heart of Democracy
Irshad Manji – Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times
Bryan Stevenson – Just Mercy, A Story of Justice and Redemption
Tex Sample – Ministry in an Oral Culture
Thomas Groome – Christian Religious Education
I want to add in the Eight Aboriginal Ways of Learning which is a fantastic local resource for thinking differently than European mindsets about teaching and learning, and story sharing is key.
Huge thanks to Mary for an informative and encouraging session.
Our previous online conversation on Digital Discipleship was with Dr Bex Lewis from Manchester is here. Stay tuned for info about next month’s guest.
This was my first time using Ecamm Live for live vision mixing on my Macbook Pro. I skyped Mary in the US. Ecamm treats Skype video as a virtual camera source. Unfortunately I also had my iPhone connected wirelessly as a camera source, so there were two microphones picking up my voice and then they got looped through the computer system audio (as that was also turned on as an audio source. You live and learn. Having the iPhone as a second wired or wireless camera source (using NDI/HX Camera) will be really helpful in future.
Anyway, the output went to our Facebook page. I had three scenes set up – the pre-session countdown screen, the split screen with Mary, and a scene with Mary’s PDF and her video in the corner. I’m pretty happy with the ease of use and quality of output from Ecamm.
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