Making Stories Matter: Using Participatory New Media Storytelling and Evaluation to Serve Marginalized and Regional Communities

Oral historian Linda Shopes (2002: 594), in the oral history interviews she gathered in the regional communities in Pennsylvania, has observed that 'place mattered in an individual's consciousness' and 'a shared sense of identity, a sense of community, includes a set of spatial referents: While engaged in the task of training regional communities scattered throughout the Australian state of Queensland to gather local narratives - particularly following natural disasters - we found that regional locations produced a series of unique regional narratives. Katherine Cashman and Shane Cronin (2008: 408) observe that a crucial step in recovery after disaster is the community's capacity to incorporate the experience of disaster in both personal and community worldviews by developing explanations, particularly through stories. Storytelling projects in regional areas thus need to allow local communities to narrate their own place stories in a manner that encourages the development of a shared community worldview.

In this chapter, we draw on our experiences facilitating community storytelling workshops in regional Queensland in partnership with the Queensland branch of the Oral History Association of Australia (OHAA Qld) to develop a best practice model for promoting creative approaches to recording oral narratives using digital tools, informed by creative writing practice and embedded evaluation (Klaebe 2012, 2013). These experiences offer an insight into how creative approaches to training can facilitate the sharing and preservation of stories in regional communities.