Personal storytelling for wellbeing; form, content and process

Nature and scope: This enquiry examines personal storytelling in the form of the practice of digital storytelling. Digital storytelling is seen as a craft, a creative making practice. The enquiry examines what impact engaging in this practice has on wellbeing. It is a practice based enquiry which draws on art and design research methods and considers the many facets that the author brings to the table, including her identity as a maker and occupational therapy educator and especially, the way her own engagement with making enabled personal, transformational learning and recovery from mental illness, shame and grief. The purpose of the enquiry is to bring these new insights back to occupational therapy and science. Contribution to knowledge: Knowing through making, as conceptualised through art and design research methodologies, has the potential to enable occupational therapy and occupational science to realise the original intensions of its founders. A study of the collaborative process of digital story telling has offered a worked example of this. Comparing and contrasting digital story telling with other collaborative making practices uncovered what digital story telling is and what it is not. Digital story telling is a high-status craft. The key to understanding its potential impact on wellbeing is to understand it as a craft – a making practice. Further, the potential impact on wellbeing is determined not by the process or properties of digital story telling itself, but by the care and attention to the detail of the experience and how connections between the people involved are made. A digital story telling workshop is a non-generalisable event, unique to that time and place and those people. What digital story telling is not, is an ideal method of co-production. Its uses as a participatory arts-based research methodology has been well documented, but I contend that the ideal collaboration is one where the team is assembled first. I propose The crystal model of transformational scholarship in human health and wellbeing which sets out how this may be accomplished.