SLLC Professor Transforms Personal Narratives into Digital Stories

Dr. Ana Patricia Rodríguez, faculty member in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, has been spending her summer delving into the world of Digital Storytelling. Her first workshop was the Educator's Workshop completed at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, and she recently completed her second workshop through the center, but this time in Washington DC, titled Voices of Change: Intergenerational Digital Storytelling About Purpose and Activism.  This project was produced entirely on a mobile device. She invited her student Karen Contreras, a UMD Government and Politics major and US Latino Studies minor, to collaborate on the final project.  To date, Dr. Rodríguez has completed two digital stories, titled "Cinco/Five" and "Being Salvadoran: A Digital Story Across Generations." In the Fall 2013, she has been granted a Senior Research Leave by the SLLC to work on the production of a website that will store transnational digital stories of the Salvadoran migration involving partners in San Francisco, Washington, DC, and El Salvador. She will incorporate digital storytelling into a class to be taught in the Spring of 2014.