This week I have the opportunity to write about something personally gratifying, an infrequent occurrence given the political focus of many of my posts. The University of Toronto at Scarborough held its fourth annual student digital storytelling competition a few weeks ago and has now posted the winning entries. The awards for which the students compete are named in my honour.

From Inspiration to Competition

Here is the backstory. One of the courses I developed and taught at UTSC was “Narrative and Management.” The syllabus included both personal storytelling and the analysis of films that dealt with management and leadership. When I retired, friends and colleagues raised money to endow an award in my honour. I wanted it to be something more than the typical award for the student with the highest grade in a course. The BRIDGE, a partnership between the Department of Management and the UTSC Library, started with the award and developed a competition.

Students who enter create a short (maximum three minute) digital version of their personal story, such as a video, a podcast, an animated story, or a song. They are thus using two components of my course: personal and moving image storytelling. The staff at The BRIDGE manage the competition and coach the students who enter. They have made this part of their responsibilities, but if you were to cost out their time, it would exceed the modest monetary value of the awards. I am deeply grateful for their efforts, particularly those of Mariana Jardim, who led the initiative this year. They have turned the Sandford Borins Award in Digital Storytelling into a living legacy.

The competition is entitled “Captivate,” which is the intended impact of effective storytelling on its audience. The competition is a noncredit activity, but thirty students entered this year. And it is challenging. For example, students who produce videos must develop and/or find images and a musical background, as well as ensure that the video is accessible to people with disabilities and that permissions for images were obtained and credits included.

The Winning Presentations

Here is a link to the Captivate Digital Storytelling Award website, with the four thematically diverse videos that were judged to be the best.

In “Breathe” Tajreen Ahmed presents her search for a career path that represents her passion. In high school and then university, she tries STEM, life sciences, psychology, and business, doing well in each, but still not finding her passion. She admits that she was consumed by chasing success, especially in the Management program. She concludes that, unlike some of her peers, she hasn’t figured out her career by her early twenties, and that she should take some time to reconnect with family, friends, and hobbies, and “just breathe.”

In “I was Born in a Free Country,” Jaba Beridze discusses the experience of growing up in Georgia before the 2008 Russian invasion and ongoing occupation of 20 percent of the country. Beridze has left Georgia to study first in Germany and now in Canada, but he remains deeply committed to Georgian independence and has been engaged with Georgian émigré communities in both countries. He ends with the affirmation that freedom is the heartbeat of the Georgian nation.

In “One Child, Many Families,” Hiya Bhasin shows us the impact on friendships of being an only child in a family that has moved frequently: throughout India, to Prague, back to India, then to Canada. She concludes that friendship is not one size fits all, but rather that each friendship must be crafted, so that “each friendship [is] its own continent, its own language of care” and that “being an only child growing up across the world never meant being alone, it meant

learning fluency.”

Justin Gu wrote and performed an original song entitled “Light in My Name.” Gu had a previous career in the entertainment industry in which he was emotionally abused. However, Gu was inspired by someone he refers to simply as “his idol,” and as a result of this inspiration was able to recover his self-esteem and passion and return to post-secondary education.

Please Watch

One of things I appreciated about teaching my course on narrative and management was hearing students’ life stories. This competition brings that back for me. The stories from the competition are especially eloquent in their combination of words, images, and music. I encourage my readers to click on the link to the competition and take a few minutes to watch and listen to these students’ stories. You may be captivated.