Digital storytelling (DST) has found its way ‘into every corner of higher education’ (Lambert 2017:vi) because of its potential to empower students through personal reflection, growth, and the development of new multimodal literacies. DST has also found a niche as a qualitative research methodology, notably in health sciences and health education (Gubrium, Hill & Flicker 2014; Haigh 2017; Hardy 2017; Hill 2014), but also in our own discipline of teacher education (Condy et al. 2012; Gachago 2015; Gachago et al. 2013; Livingston 2014; Stewart & Ivala 2017; Thomson Long & Hall 2017).

There are many definitions of DST, reflecting its diverse applications, but for the purposes of this study we follow that of StoryCenter,¹ founders of the specific flavour of personal DST that is widely adopted in higher education contexts (Hessler & Lambert 2017). DST here is defined as the process of creating a personal narrative that documents culturally and historically embedded lived experience, by combining voice, sound and images into a short video, developed by non-professionals with non-professional tools, during a structured workshop (Lambert 2010; Reed & Hill 2012). We have found this approach particularly useful as a pedagogical tool to unpack issues around students’ identity and positionality and to start difficult conversations in the classroom around race, gender and class (Benmayor 2008). Sharing personal narratives on these issues often elicits strong emotional responses; many of our students, given South Africa’s troubled history and present, have suffered traumatic experiences and these can surface when students bring their personal stories into the classroom. Not every DST project is equally charged, especially when the process is adapted to support content-based storytelling, but we have encountered these responses often enough to warrant an engagement with the ethical implications.

Our position is further complicated by the fact that in addition to being educators, we are also researchers, and so our DST work has combined pedagogical and research agendas: we have wanted not only to use this tool, but also to study (and hopefully improve) its application. Those in our position have written about ethical dilemmas when using DST as a pedagogical practice before (see for example Gachago & Sykes 2017; Sykes & Gachago 2018). However, in this article we will focus on the ethics of using DST as a research methodology.

Research involving humans is highly regulated, to protect participants from varieties of harm, and also to protect universities and other communities of science from the potential expense and damage of litigation (Posel & Ross 2014). Traditionally, the approach to ethics in an educational setting is normative and deontological: decisions are guided by a set of rules or code of ethics (Archer & Prinsloo 2017; Sevenhuijsen 2003). As researchers we have followed all the established bureaucratic routines for obtaining ethical clearance, but we are increasingly aware of the limitations of this approach. As Posel and Ross (2014) argue:

Although StoryCenter offers guidelines for an ethical practice of DST, this is an area that is currently under-researched, specifically in higher education and when using these stories as research data (De Jager et al. 2017; Rieger et al. 2018). A recently published anthology on DST in higher education features only one chapter on ethics (Gachago & Sykes 2017), although some chapters do refer to ethical challenges when introducing DST into teaching, research or community engagement (Jamissen et al. 2017).

In this article, we will first introduce DST as a research practice before discussing the StoryCenter guidelines and how higher education institutions around the world have adopted and adapted these. After describing our own context, including the case study methodology of this study, we will unpack some of the issues we encountered in our practice (with a particular focus on the collection of data, the anonymising of that data, the manner in which the participants are sampled, confidentiality and their right to give and withdraw consent).

Finally, we will suggest a different approach to ethics framed by Joan Tronto’s Ethic of Care framework (1993, 2001, 2013), which allows for a more practice-based, contextual, relational approach to negotiating ethical dilemmas.

StoryCenter has attempted to move beyond generalised ethics to create situated guidelines for the ethical practice of DST. Their guidelines stress the well-being of storytellers and the importance of ongoing consent, as well as ethical knowledge production and ownership, cultural sensitivity and contextual awareness, and ethical dissemination of digital stories (StoryCenter 2018). The guidelines have been adopted and adapted widely to suit different contexts, such as research into gender-based violence and human rights (Silence Speaks²), health (PatientVoices³) or aging (Silver Stories⁴).

However, there has been little adoption of these guidelines into higher education. Ethical guidelines for storytelling research, in both oral and digital forms, have mostly grown from the lessons learnt in university history departments. Oral historians have long known about the ethical dilemmas and dangers inherent in collecting personal stories and were the first to put ethical practices in place. At the heart of ethical behaviour in collecting oral histories is informed consent, mitigation of harm and the right to withdrawal (Concordia University 2018). Specific interviewer behaviours have also received ethical discussion, such as dealing with cultural sensitivities and responding to emotional reactions by storytellers.

The use of images in DST complicates the issue: images may reveal identities of storytellers and others, there may be issues of copyright and ownership, and some images may be particularly disturbing to view, raising the possibility of harm to an audience. In conventional filmmaking the rights to use a person’s image will often be granted using a standard release form which assigns extremely broad or even unlimited rights without time limitation (Rabiger 2004:253–254); this is legally safe but may not meet the higher ethical expectations of DST projects.

Internationally, institutions have started developing specific ethical practice guidelines for DST: the University of Wollongong⁵ (Australia), the University of Toronto⁶ (Canada) and the University of Brighton⁷ (United Kingdom), for example, have placed caveats or offer training on their websites regarding ethical behaviour in DST. However, our literature review suggests that these guidelines often draw only from two specific disciplines, oral history and photography and filmmaking (Concordia University 2018; Jessee 2011; Prager 2017), tend to engage only certain ethical aspects of DST and are not as holistically concerned with the well-being of the storyteller as those of StoryCenter.

This is a conceptual article, born from an attempt to narrate and theorise our own practice and its ethics. We use a single case study and attempt to narrate our experiences to allow for a systematic and thoughtful reflection (McDonough & McDonough 1997; Stenhouse 1988:50). We aim to bring to life the ethical conundrums we have encountered when doing research on DST, long after ethical clearance was given.

In 2013, we ran a voluntary, non-assessed project in pre-service teacher education, aimed at exploring how autobiographical learning, using DST, could be applied as a tool for improving students’ ability to engage in art appreciation. The project, which students could include in their fourth-year student portfolios, invited students to make digital stories that linked personal narratives to contemporary artwork.

We facilitated the process of creating the digital stories and conducted the subsequent narrative analysis (Clandinin & Connelly 1994; Clandinin & Rosiek 2007) of students’ stories and reflective writings. We followed the ethical procedures prescribed by the faculty ethics committee: completing a form that included an abstract of the project, describing sampling procedures and describing how the data would be collected. We attached copies of the data collection instruments, explained how data was to be kept confidential and participants’ anonymity ensured, and addressed questions about risk and harm that needed to be addressed.

After ethical clearance was granted, the project was introduced to a group of students. One of these students was Nadine, a young artist who volunteered to participate as part of her fourth-year final exhibition. Nadine was a gifted artist and pre-service teacher who fully embraced the DST process. In her digital story, she revealed that she had been sexually abused as a child. Nadine’s illustrations, reflections on the process of developing her digital story and Candice’s and Daniela’s contemplations on using this and other stories for their research provide rich insight into the ethical complexities of using DST as research data:

The researcher was particularly touched by Nadine’s beautifully drawn artwork (see Figures 2–4), poetically inspired prose and the sensitive manner in which she spoke about a deeply traumatic event from her childhood. Yet Nadine’s story and the ethical dilemmas it raised have haunted us ever since. It is for this reason that we chose Nadine’s story, exemplary of many other cases that we have encountered (Yin 1994, 2009).

In this section we use vignettes and reflections by Nadine and other authors to discuss ethical dilemmas, that became apparent long after ethical clearance for the study had been granted, particularly in four identified areas of our research practice: the collection and interpretation of data, anonymity and confidentiality, sampling and consent, and the adage of ‘do no harm’.

In this article we have tried to unpack some (by no means all) of the ethical dilemmas we have encountered in our use of DST as a research methodology, to open up a discussion about the challenges of only adhering to traditional research guidelines and processes (we recognise the importance of ethics processes, but an ethical practice must go beyond ethics approval). We believe DST can create a valuable space for sharing and learning about self and other, which is rare in the higher education context in which we operate. However, to continue promoting this practice we have seen the need to alert colleagues to the ethical perils they may encounter when working with the most powerful and personal forms of DST, especially when using these stories as research data.

Following political philosopher Joan Tronto’s Ethic of Care approach, we believe that ethical practices come down to everyday decisions of care in caring relationships (Tronto 1993, 2001), rather than adherence to guidelines. It is in our everyday practices of caring for ourselves and others that we most need to consider and practice ethical behaviour (Tronto 2001). Tronto defines care as a complex ethical relationship, in which all participants or actors need to be involved:

There can be no one person solely responsible for decision-making in a caring relationship or web of relationships such as the DST research practices discussed in this article: all parties involved should contribute to the discussion on caring, needs and how they should be met.

Tronto’s five-phase model (1993, 2013) and Maio’s core elements of Ethic of Care (2018) could be used as a template for engagement in the DST research process and we propose that the following moral elements and phases of this approach be considered as guidelines for how to ethically engage with DST as a research method.

The collection of DST research data, from an Ethic of Care perspective, is situation orientated (Maio 2018:57) and relies on practical and situated wisdom. Researchers are required to adhere to what Tronto (2013) calls ‘Attentiveness’, where the researcher suspends own judgements, where the unmet needs of the participants and is able to see the world from the perspective of the ones in need. Tronto calls this the ‘caring about’ phase, and it is essential that any researcher involved in the collection of DST data be attentive. Being attentive in the research process, also requires that one is responsive (Maio 2018:58). Tronto (2013) states that responsiveness is a phase of ‘care receiving’, where you listen to the responses of the participants being cared for or, in the case of DST, who are sharing their stories. Being attentive to the needs of the participants in your study and responding to their needs, places a burden of responsibility (Tronto 2013) on the researcher, in which one enters into the phase of ‘caring for’, and the researcher takes on the burden of responding to the needs of their participants.

The next phase that the researcher then enters into with their participants should be that of ‘caregiving’ (Tronto 2013) and it highlights the competence of the researcher to care. As a researcher in DST, one should be competent to care, but what this entails on a technical, moral and political level, is open for discussion. This is one of the limits of an Ethic of Care though (Maio 2018:61), as this approach still places excessive demands, both technical and emotional, on the researcher (although care is shared among all participants) and also points to the often competing needs that emerge in a care relationship. The final phase in Tronto’s model (2013) is that of ‘caring with’ or engaging in solidarity. This implies that the research process is one of collective responsibility, where both the researchers and the participants act as receivers and givers of care.

When storytelling enters higher education, the educator and researcher becomes an active participant in this process, learning from and with students and participants, through dialogue and mutual respect. It is essential that we as academics and researchers learn to navigate this terrain, not by consulting a checklist of ethical rules relating to gaining consent and ‘doing no harm’, and making the requisite ticks. Rather we argue that we need to see DST from a situated practice perspective as explained above, where consent is a contextual, scaffolded, ongoing and layered process and the principles of mitigating risk and harm become embedded in the project, before, during and long after the process has been completed.

This would allow us to seek guidance for the ‘sometimes impossible choices between doing what is professionally required and what seems personally necessary to do as an ethical human being’ (Posel & Ross 2014:5). There is a need for improvisation and flexibility, rather than rigid rules and regulations, in teaching, learning and research practices of this nature (Bliss 2017:326). We as facilitators are challenged to think on our feet – together with students and participants. If the ethics of care is to be embedded in a DST project, we will have to begin with an ethical appraisal of ourselves and our motives, as photographer Paul Weinberg (Posel & Ross 2014, emphasis added) states:

In essence, the rules of engagement have to be continually negotiated and agreed upon, not only with regard to issues of scaffolded consent and choice, but also to those of power sharing, ownership and digital afterlife of the stories as more than data. We also need to accept that ethical quandaries sometimes ‘don’t resolve clearly or fully, even with the advantage of hindsight’, as Posel and Ross state (2014:6).

This means that all of us, lecturers, students, and researchers, need to take responsibility for our DST projects – and to care for both ourselves and others involved in these, by actively engaging in the phases of care ethics. Communication, negotiation, active listening and response, and witnessing are important elements in this process. Telling stories about stories, the research on DST, then becomes a caring, consensual mutual practice (Bliss 2017:329) of ethically sharing and listening, responding and acting in and beyond the higher education classroom.