Transforming social identities through intercultural digital storytelling: multimodal learning between young people from refugee and host communities

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Mass media culture is pervasive in the digital age with visual, aural and print media messages shaping and expanding young people's evolving sense of identity, community and outlook on the world (Buckingham, 2007; Potter, 2012). It has created new spaces of agency and opportunities for building ties between social groups (Putnam, 2001): promoting wider community cooperation through the coproduction and sharing of multimodal texts that do not rely on a mastery of spoken or written language (Kress, 2010). Yet, all too often, the increasingly prescriptive literacy curriculum does little to accommodate the forces that are shaping young people's out-of-school literacy practices, with the attendant danger that it narrows the scope for inclusion and overlooks valuable opportunities to understand different cultural groups from the stories they tell. This three-year research project will address these issues by seeking to locate and harness the nascent literacies of isolated refugee communities whose digital compositions might serve as mediating artefacts that have the potential to speak back to the curriculum, build social capital and bridge sociocultural divides (Field, 2005).