How can a digital storytelling project be formed? In this series we present projects from around the world to give you inspiration to your work with digital storytelling.

In the line of digital storytelling projects, we hereby present one of the most famous dealing with adolescents, the so-called D.U.S.T.Y. program.

“Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.” (Illich 1979: 34)

Digital storytelling as a scientific research field is still young, less than six years. One of the main contributors in the academic field of digital storytelling is Glynda Hull, a professor in Language and Literacy, Society and Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2001 Glynda Hull and Oakland filmmaker, Michelangelo James, founded a digital storytelling after-school program for at-risk youth, DUSTY, with a donation of old computers from CDS.

DUSTY (which is an acronym for “Digital Underground Story Telling for Youth) started out as a center for making powerful forms of signification available to children and adults who did not otherwise have such access to new communication technology (Hull & Nelson, 2005: 7). Today, DUSTY, offers digital storytelling and literacy development activities for children and young people as after school programs and short-term workshops. They do it in an effort to bridge the digital divide, an increasing problem all over the state, as well as in the world .

In 2007 the DUSTY program is run at two elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school with help from The Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley and the Prescott-Joseph Center for Community Enhancement in Oakland and UC Berkeley undergraduates and graduates who tutor the students enrolled in the program.

To read more about DUSTY, please visit oaklanddusty.org