4 Social Media Storytelling for Sustainable Destination Campaigns

3.    The Field Journaling Step

 

Link to PowerPoint Storytelling2 here for readers to download a copy to their own computers:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1W2kU0SinamVigxNlV01-bZM1kCxa-HXH?usp=sharing

 

Slide-by-slide Script for the Slides

1.      This PowerPoint guides you to specific pages in the text to help use our book for teaching complete projects to students with Assessment.

2.      Under Creative Commons, you can copy and edit these slides for your own use and for teaching and sharing with students. Please reference our teaching pack as a book to help others find it and to fulfil the attribution part of Creative Commons ‘BY’. Using this Reference, please:    Potočnik Topler, J. & Mansfield, C. (2024). Social Media Storytelling for Sustainable Destination Campaigns: A teaching companion with instructor resources. Totnes: Travel Writers Online. ISBN 9781838096458

3. These can be delivered as lessons created from our book. The pack has full page references so that you can re-use these slides with your own groups of students in tourism or in English for place-making with narrative non-fiction.

We include theory to give a background for developing the narrator of stories of place and travel.

We also help you to start the process of Dialogue Journaling, in this case, using Microsoft Teams and MS OneNote. 

 

4. Storytelling needs the creation of a narrator. In travel stories, a traditional, but effective voice is the I-narrator. In the textbook we focus on first-person narrative to recount the story of the visit to a destination. You can write as yourself, like this ‘I went there’ ‘I saw that’ with ease and as you do, you are becoming an I-narrator that your readers can trust, care about, and even begin to identify with. Where does our textbook tell you about the theory of writing the self?

5.      Please turn to page 92 where we explain Self-writing from Foucault in the early 1980s to Braidotti in the 2020s.

p.92	Self-writing.   Please turn to page 92 where we explain Self-writing from Foucault in the early 1980s to Braidotti in the 2020s

 

Journaling from Roman times was ethical in Spinoza’s sense of the term, ‘ethics’.

•        As the Roman writers collected quotations and notes they were concerned with care of the self.

•        Seneca, for example, reads and takes notes even from authors he does not agree with.

•        Seneca sees the journaling writer like a bee, gathering and digesting food.

•        Consequently, writers’ identities grow all the time as they complete journaling in their research practice.

As our textbook makes clear, writers as researchers keep notebooks. Foucault researched the journaling notebook. The collection of notes and making of notes is deliberately heterogeneous. Your notes are mixed in voice, in formality, in source, and in theme.

6. Over on page 93, we call this deliberate choice to grow intellectually and thus, to change identity, the development of the writer’s sensibility. In that phrase we want to show how exposure to new cultural readings makes the writer develop a sensibility that is both more open the world during their inquiry and, at the same time, creates discernment in the mind of the writer.  

Because the researcher is looking for affect from cultural artefacts, then a direct way into this experience is a literary text from the destination. When you read a novel that is set in the place that you are investigating then you can allow the literary author’s text to initiate affect in you. You can take quotations as notes into your journaling pages. This will lead to our first activity that you can do with the whole class. But first, we need a literary text to work from.   

7. Let’s turn back to page 88, please. Here are two of paragraphs from the novel called Nausea, written by Jean-Paul Sartre. We know that the port city that Sartre describes is Le Havre in Normandy, France. As a first activity, please read that first paragraph, commencing “10.30 From my window I can see […].” Now please look out of from the window where you are working, if you can, or at least, glance across the room. Write in your notebook using very careful, clear handwriting for later scanning. Please use the same approach as Sartre, by journaling what you can see.

8. Unpicking items from a scene shows the spatial deixis and point of view. These answer the questions: where is the narrator standing when telling the story? And what is selected as worth mentioning for the narrator’s story?

What did you write? Please add it to the online journaling, instructions below…

Add a page to the Notebook that you are using in MS OneNote, please.

+

 

Please give it a title with your initials included to distinguish it from others in the class, for example

CM Point of View

Then paste this into the catalyst note container:

Unpick items from a scene to show the spatial deixis and point of view. The list tells us: ‘What is important? What has value for the story?’

 

And, in the Journaling note container, please type in your own description of the scene you have just explored:

The sun has just come out. I can see two people standing outside the restaurant, staring at the wall, I think they must be reading something. It is probably the menu because it is lunchtime.  It is making me feel hungry.

 

Depending on group size, share it with the class, or with your peer-partner, and pose this question in the dialogue note container: Can you extract a list of what the narrator saw, in the same way that was done from Sartre’s journaling?

CM asks: Can you extract a list of what the narrator saw, in the same way that was done from Sartre's journaling? 23-Jan-24 SB replies: 1. Weather at the time. 2. Two

 

 

9. We give page numbers from the printed editions of our textbook. If you are using an eBook edition, then please search for a keyword or a unique combination to pinpoint the reference. The Kindle edition does show page numbers since 2023.

10. We will do some more work on that piece of journaling that you have just completed and analysed. First, though, how do students earn marks for what they include in their narrative non-fiction writing on place?

Marks are earned not just for repeating the item of, say climate information read in a textbook. A small mark would be given for repeating, for example, ‘onshore wind in autumn in the ports of Normandy is caused by the land cooling more quickly than the sea of the English Channel’. Or a cultural point, that you discovered while reading, ‘French office workers normally dine at 8pm, rather later than those in the UK’. However, these pieces of reading would need to be integrated into the narrative for it to earn higher marks. In its formal voice, scientific writing is not in the correct discourse practice for a story.

pp.4-9

Discourse Communities   In our introduction we explain discourse communities and their role in tourism and heritage, along with a look at the growing profession and job market.

 

 

Another example of earning marks is to integrate a point from the history of transport technologies into the story. You can see Sartre demonstrating understanding of French dining culture, climate and even of transport technology by integrating them into his story as he returns to the scene of the old railway station, later in his novel:

‘It’s half past seven. I’m not hungry […] An icy wind is blowing […] on the right-hand pavement, a gaseous mass, grey with streaks of fire, is making a noise like rattling shells: this is the old station. Its presence has fertilized the first hundred yards of the boulevard Noir – from the boulevard de la Redoute to the rue Paradis […].’ (extract from page 88 of the print edition of Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding).

Sartre shows us more storytelling in this short journal-style entry. He begins to use imagistic language. First a simile, ‘like rattling shells’. Then, by using a verb normally associated with living beings, ‘fertilized’, he gives agency to the old railway station. If you read the full extract in our book from page 88, you can identify more, that you can use in your narrative non-fiction writing.

11. Now, as we set a brief for an assessment, we have much more knowledge of storytelling to draw upon. Our example brief, which you can re-use, makes specific points to ensure that learners have understood the technical aspects of storytelling. For example, asking for an I-narrator, simile and metaphor.

At the same time the two learning outcomes, ‘Skills and Knowledge’, are tested in that. These are ‘mediating into a narrative discourse practice’ and ‘using published scientific research’.  

 

BRIEFING

Brief for an assessed exercise

Establishing a Story Scene This assessed writing exercise gives you the opportunity to build storytelling components into your interrogation of place. In the journaling note container of a new OneNote page write a story scene set in an urban destination. Word count 350 words. Please include an I-narrator telling a readership what the narrator saw and did. Include a simple action of movement in that space. Give your readers an insight into the developing sensibility of the I-narrator. Use simile and metaphor for communicating affect and the narrator’s experience. Explore 3 artefacts or processes within the story scene from a tourism point of view, these are: (i) an aspect of travel technology, (ii) a snack or food item, and (iii) a cultural artefact or building that has a public or ceremonial function.

 

12. After additional teaching on sustainability in tourism, the assessment brief could demand more learning by adding:

Show, using storytelling, how one of the 3 artefacts or processes has reduced carbon use or could reduce the use of fossil fuels or contribute to carbon capture. This more demanding work could become the brief for the summative exercise.

We have created an Ethnobotany Checklist for travel writers which helps students to find more sustainable artefacts and cultural practices when they are writing about destinations. From food to “building with botanics and using local production knowledge and labour” (Mansfield & Potočnik Topler 2023, 83). With these clues in mind the researcher can often discover local home-made buildings in parks and gardens, and wildflower planting for pollinators.

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