Voice and Agency in Digital Storytelling

ABSTRACT

When I returned to the high school classroom in the fall of 2022 after pursuing doctoral study and teaching college English, much of what I experienced was familiar. As a new teacher, I had to work to earn the trust and respect of my students, who were in grades 10 through 12. With that trust came students' willingness to explore, experiment, and try new things together. And, of course, tenth-grade students were just as rambunctious as I remembered. What was unfamiliar was that my students' high school experience had been severely altered by the COVID pandemic-a pandemic we now know was in no way finished influencing teaching and learning. One constant across my many years of teach...ing is that even students who trust themselves in the English classroom balk when encountering Shakespeare. The anxiety bubbled up when our class embarked on a study of The Taming of the Shrew in the second semester.