“The Story I Couldn’t Tell, but Could Finally Show”: From Eurocentric Pedagogy to Localized Digital Narratives

This arts-based qualitative study investigated how Digital Storytelling can function as a postcolonial empowerment strategy in English language education within the Bangladeshi context. A three-hour Digital Storytelling workshop involving seven university instructors and twelve undergraduate students generated participant-created digital stories and a pedagogical model of digital storytelling that can empower storytellers. We examined storyteller (participant) multimodal assemblage using Social Semiotics to understand the representational, interactive, and compositional meanings. The findings demonstrated that Digital Storytelling enabled learners to construct culturally grounded narratives that repositioned English as a medium for expressing local identities, memories, and traditions. The multimodal assemblage further revealed evidence of learner agency, postcolonial empowerment, and intercultural communicative competence. We argue that localized Digital Storytelling offers a culturally responsive pedagogical model for English language education in postcolonial contexts, easing but not solving the tension between postcolonial ideas and the need to teach a colonial language.