Jennifer LaFontaine, workshop leader at Digital Storytelling TorontoWhat does Digital Storytelling Toronto do?
By Ashleigh Gaul
Jennifer LaFontaine helps people tell their stories. With the Canadian Centre for Learning and Development in Regent Park, she digital storytelling programs within the community where members share and workshop their life stories. Digital Storytelling Toronto has workshopped stories from various communities throughout Ontario, including an immigrant women’s group, a Sault Ste. Marie queer community, and displaced residents of Regent Park, among others.
LaFontaine talks about why people need to hear and tell stories more than ever in Toronto below:
1. What does Digital Storytelling Toronto do?
We teach people how to tell their personal stories in their own 3-5 minute videos. They’re all life story-based, and we use voice, image, video clip and then sort of collage together a “digital story” out of that.
Altogether, it’s a 24-hour program that starts with oral storytelling, so we listen to each others stories in a group, and then we work with individuals to craft their story, to understand why they’re telling it, and from there to actually record their voice, take photographs and then learn video editing.
Digital Storytelling Toronto is part of the Canadian Centre for Learning and Development, which is a larger nonprofit that offers literacy and life skills programs for communities. We run workshops with an immigrant women’s group, for example, that meets every day to work on language and life skills. Throughout the year, the women work on their digital story with us as part of the program.
2. Do the stories have to be about Toronto?
Most are. But one of the real values about telling stories about place in general is that it never represents just what the physical space is; it represents all of our memories that connect to it.
For example, one of the women in our immigrant women’s group – she said a place she really cared about was her daughter’s school. But the reason why she cared about that place so much was because when she was exactly her daughter’s age – when she was 8 – that’s when the wars broke out in Afghanistan. And all the schools closed and the teachers and students were all killed, and the girls had to learn in secret.
She told us about her fight to educate herself in Afghanistan, and then coming here, where her daughter is going to this school, of course she’s just got this fierce loyalty to her daughter’s school. She’s so adamant that her daughter has a safe place to go school. That story about a Toronto school is actually about her whole life and experience.
3. Why do people need to tell stories?
I think that people – and especially newcomers to Canada, for example - often get an overall impression in Canada that you’re only supposed to talk about your life in Canada – your Canadian experience – and that we don’t really care what job or life you had before. New Canadians get the feeling that people just want to know, “what have you done here?”
But here, storytellers realize that people are actually interested in knowing their past experiences are as valuable as anything else about them. And this is true for anybody – it’s just a good way to connect, to feel less alone – you share something you’ve never talked about before. That’s healing, that’s therapeutic, and that can be a way to understand yourself in relation to the people around you.
4. Why do people need to hear other people’s stories?
We’ve got all sorts of ideas in our head about people being private and not wanting to share theirstories. I think we think it’s in our culture to say people won’t share.
But then, as soon as you create a space where people want to listen, and people do. They want to be heard, they want to be listened to, and they want to have people believe that their ideas and lives are valuable.
Also, in sharing our stories, we halp each other come up with solutions to our problems. It’s a way to work out the problems that are bothering us.
5. How can people get involved with Digital Storytelling Toronto?
We offer open workshops and customized workshops. The open ones are for the public, and right now, the open workshops cost money – $500 / course, which includes photography and videography lessons, as well as the story workshopping.
We also offer workshops for nonprofit organizations – they’re usually free for the community. So, for example, we offered a free workshop for residents of Regent Park and anyone who loved in the community could register for that.
The gallery wall at Digital Storytelling Toronto in Regent Park
Posted on March 26, 2011 by ashleighgaul