Earlier this month, TIRF Trustee Dr. Polina Vinogradova, Hurst Senior Professorial Lecturer and TESOL Program Director in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at American University (Washington, DC, USA), was one of two keynote speakers at the NNETESOL (Northern New England TESOL) Conference. In this piece, we highlight information about her talk.
Dr. Vinogradova’s talk, “Digital Storytelling Projects as Multimodal Advocacy Spaces for Multilingual Voices,” was well received by attendees. Under the conference theme “Advocacy: Voice and Access,” her presentation concerned how digital storytelling (DST) projects can be incorporated in English language education to support and provide multimodal spaces for English learners. She highlighted several recent DST projects conducted by English language educators, discussed how DST projects support multilingualism and translanguaging, and established connections between these projects and advocacy.
Digital storytelling has long been an interest of Dr. Vinogradova’s. She received a Doctoral Dissertation Grant from TIRF in 2008 that helped to support her research on the topic. Fourteen years later, she remains an advocate for the use of digital storytelling in language learning classrooms.
Commenting on the conference and her work with DST, Dr. Vinogradova noted that, “It is such a privilege to continue working with digital storytelling – it brings great creativity and engagement to our teaching and learning. And it is really inspiring to see that digital stories resonate with TESOL colleagues. I am very grateful to the organizers of the NNETESOL conference for inviting me and for this opportunity to talk about my most recent DST work.”
NNETESOL is an affiliate of TESOL International Association and serves ELT professionals in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Click here to learn more about the organization.
