The Ways You Make Me Feel: Digital Storytelling as Translanguaging ​in Hong Kong for Higher Education

Key literature reviews suggested digital storytelling supports multilingual students’ disciplinary knowledge and language skills (Ho & Tai, 2019; Ma & Zhang, 2024). In the case of Hong Kong, tertiary teachers and students are facing dynamic challenges in reshaping their classroom meaning-making patterns in the digital age (Lim & Querol-Julián, 2024). Still, multimodality-oriented pedagogy has yet to take full advantage of deploying digital storytelling in plurilingual, pluricultural higher education. Resonating dynamic changes in educational semiotics (Cope & Kalantzis, 2021; Lim et al., 2022), this paper reports design-based research (DBR) highlighting digital storytelling as translanguaging (Linville & Vinogradova, 2024) for disciplinary learning and personal growth in higher education.​To co-engage tertiary students across disciplines to develop digital multimodal composing (DMC) competence and trans-semiotic creativity (Siu & Lin, 2022), the Multimodalities-Entextualization Cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2016, 2024) was fractalized (Lin & Siu, in press) by the teacher-researcher as both a curriculum genre and AI-empowered heuristic tools in various fractalized digital storytelling circles (Lambert, 2012). Triangulated with the conjectural mapping (Hjalmarson & Parsons, 2020) of iterative course materials design and review, MEC-artefacts, telling case informants' digital storytelling, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussion, research findings and discussion in this study (a) explicated dynamic roles of translanguaging-friendly teacher-to-student and student-to-student dialogic scaffolds in digital storytelling through both formal and informal epistemological sources and (b) examined digital storytelling in relation to four main themes in translanguaging: (i) heteroglossic co-becoming, (ii) fractalized self-directed learning process, (iii) non-hierarchical knowledge co-making and (iv) affective personal growth and community discovery.