Facilitating Cultural Competence in Teacher Education Students with Digital Storytelling: Implications for Urban Educators

This article discusses the use of digital storytelling to help pre-service teachers learn to be more culturally sensitive in urban classroom settings. Each student created a digital story about his/her own culture and presented it to the class. Students responded in writing at the end of the semester regarding what they had learned by creating and viewing the digital stories, and this writing was subjected to qualitative analysis. The primary findings that emerged from the data were that creating the digital stories increased students' awareness of their culture. By so doing, they recognize cultural differences as well as commonalities across cultures.