5 Social Media Storytelling for Sustainable Destination Campaigns

4.    Lab Journaling

During the module, we propose formative activities, which you could mark to provide teaching advice. The first one of these two formative activities creates the learning opportunity in dialogue journaling as students research the place and compile an archive to work from. The second will be to write a series of 3 short campaign posts for Instagram or Facebook to push readers to the longer blog post of the summative exercise.

In our book, you can read an exploration of field notes that would begin to answer that assessment brief: ‘Memories from Montenegro’ Case Study 2 pp.104-105 (print edition)  

The Ethnobotany Checklist

A valuable resource for helping students how to find and integrate sustainable products into their writing is the Ethnobotany Checklist on page 83 (print edition). By linking a cultural artefact with the regional climate and local food preferences the student of content authoring can create a story. This is not necessarily a story of scenes and completed actions but rather a connection. It offers an experience to the visiting readers by enriching each of the components. For example, in our project on Brežice, Slovenia, we discovered a local painting in the museum of buckwheat in flower, and later found a local dish made from buckwheat, štruklji.

Good dialogue hinges on good questions. First, allow yourself to be questioned on your own writing by sharing a page of your journaling in the team’s OneNote notebook. Then design thoughtful questions to elicit more from your peers in their writing. This is the basis of dialogue during learning. To pose a good dialogue question you are aiming to be intellectually stimulating to your respondent. To do this well, you need to read their piece of journaling with care so that you can select a point to ask them about. For ideas on what to ask for, please take a look at the first 6 evaluation criteria listed on page 114 of the print edition of our book.

Storytelling is a balance between telling your readers enough to engage them whilst not explaining so much that it will become tedious; leave full explanations to the encyclopaedia. Let’s use the journaling from my fieldwork in Cherbourg to explain how you can complete the formative activity. You will need to write a piece about a place yourself. You could use the view from the classroom window. You can also go on fieldwork just outside your building to use your local urban space.

 

An MS OneNote “Note Container”

Please paste your written piece of place journaling into the Note Container (Microsoft’s term for the moveable boxes or fields in each note) labelled as Journaling. Put your initials or name and a date and time stamp before your journaling.

 

On page 111 (print edition) you can find ‘The plateaus of the travel story for public readership’, this is the Cherbourg project. By this stage we were back in the lab, step 3 of the writing process. Later, when you have completed this activity, you can go back in this chapter to see our step 1 route planning that preceded Step 2 the fieldwork and Step 3 the lab work. Let’s explore the plateau called ‘Bouquiniste – Second-hand book-dealer’, first to see how we can ask our respondents a question that will draw them into dialogue, and then how we might respond to a question from them.

 

CM 11:24am 14-Dec-23

‘By 7:55am on a warm Thursday morning, 12th May 2022 I was already on the Quai Caligny. Cirrocumulus clouds in a blue sky suggested I would need no umbrella. Henriette Binger was only 22 in 1915, when she came to live for a short time here in Cherbourg.’ (p.111).

 

Down in the Note Container for dialogue, as the content author, I ask a question to my peers that could help me improve the plateau piece.

CM asks: 13:25 14-Dec-23	I think now that using the technical term for those clouds might overload my readers, and I have no reason to be so specific. I never refer back to the clouds. I do want to keep the mention of umbrellas, though; they are part of Cherbourg culture. Can you suggest a re-write of that sentence, for me, please?
23-Jan-24 SB replies:	SB: I had to look up Cirrocumulus clouds on the Met Office website. It was useful because it says that these cloudlets are often given an imagistic name ‘mackerel sky’, which might help you better in your seaport story.

 

Notice how CM has made a point that they will not refer to an item later. This is another key element of storytelling design. As you create your story from your collected journaling notes you will select items and cultural ideas that you will accumulate to mention more than once in the story. This builds story in your readers’ minds, as they begin to recognise those items. In our book, we call this accumulation and patterning, the twill process (pp.20-23). Umbrellas are part of what is called the backstory of Cherbourg as a destination. Umbrellas and Cherbourg are already mediated in the tourism literature, in guides, and even in a film, so you, as a travel content writer, need only mention them without any explanation. Your readers will then have the experience of recognition or will notice umbrellas when they read more on Cherbourg.

The next type of dialogue question is to open the page of another person in your group, read their journaling then pose a question to encourage them to extend their work. This is an intellectual stimulation for both you and the respondent because of the care needed.

Then, the final stage of dialogue is to read and respond to a question that others have posed to you. Your response will be an answer within the dialogue Note Container, and also be your edits within your main journaling Note Container. Make these clear, to let your lecturer know that you have made edits. A short plateau text of, say, 50 words or less, could be copied into a tabbed lower cell of the journaling Note Container. This will let you retain older, unedited versions of the same plateau text, and thus retain the genealogy of your journaling.

Can you see how this means you have 4 basic types of dialogue activity when you share journaling with others? These are (i) contribute a new page of journaling onto a shared platform, (ii) request dialogue on a specific point in your own shared piece, (iii) seek out another person’s journaling and pose a new dialogue question to them and (iv) respond to a dialogue question about your own work both as an edited re-write and as an explanation in response. In a group or class setting, you can store a tally list, to ensure that everyone has completed all four types of activity. You can use this as the basis for formative assessment with the lecturer awarding up to 25 marks for each of the 4 types of dialogue:

Student name	Contribute	Request	Seek & Question	Edit & Respond	Out of 100 [25 each]
Sam Best	15	14	17	18
	⭐️

 

Creating Social Media Content Assets whilst Completing the Brief

So far, although the short plateau text on Cherbourg has introduced two characters, it still needs to meet the requirements of the brief. The brief asks the learner to ‘Explore 3 artefacts or processes within the story scene from a tourism point of view’. These then can become a longer post for the blog or the LinkedIn article. Please take a quick look at the process model in Table 5.7 on page 95 as a reminder of when outputs can be posted publicly in your social media campaign.

I sat in open air seating in the Café du Port to look across at the façade of the Ambassadeur Hotel.  Here is my view from there:

 

It is not quite good enough quality for a social post on Instagram, but it would be a useful catalyst for establishing dialogue with the hotel to ask if they can supply a better-quality image for your social media posts. Along with the image request what other dialogue questions could you ask them that will answer the assessment brief about a building and give you good quality backstory for your text content? I hope by now that when I pose a question like this that you immediately add a new page to Step 1 LIBRARY and begin journaling to create rich content assets.

What questions can I ask hoteliers to collect good backstory for the hotel building?

 

 

CM asks: 14:06 14-Dec-23

When did the Hamel family start to manage the hotel? Why did you choose Cherbourg? What do you love most about this building or its location, please? Has any famous writer ever stayed at the Ambassadeur? French translation: Quand la famille Hamel a-t-elle commencé à gérer l'hôtel ? Pourquoi avoir choisi Cherbourg ? Qu’aimez-vous le plus dans ce bâtiment ou son emplacement, s’il vous plaît ? Un.e écrivain.e célèbre a-t-il ou elle déjà séjourné à l'Ambassadeur ?

23-Jan-24 SH replies:

 

 

Interrogating your own story for completeness and quality

From page 55 in the book, we can ask ‘What are Aristotle’s seven aspects of a good story?’ This quiz type activity will help you remember his 7 aspects but also let you interrogate your own story for these aspects in a personal dialogue.

 Aristotle’s seven aspects of a good story

THE 7 ASPECTS p.55	How have you included any of these aspects from Aristotle in your story?
P _ _ _	Why have I chosen this seaport? The reason becomes clear as the story unfolds.
C _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
T _ _ _ _
D _ _ _ _ _ _
M _ _ _ _ _
D _ _ _ _
S _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

 

 

 

2.    Assessment Discussion

I want to talk about assessment here before you set an exercise that could be marked. We mark written work mid-semester to help the student-writer improve, this is called formative assessment. Then at the end of a module we mark a summative assessment.

 

Making the Learning Outcomes form the Basis for the Brief and the Marking

On degree programmes we mark for summative assessment to determine if the candidate has taken onboard the attributes, skills, and knowledge (ASK) that we integrated into the module. In degree modules these three types of learning are called the learning outcomes (LOs) and can be grouped into competencies. Here are 3 example LOs for the competency of critical thinking.

LEARNING OUTCOMES (LOs) Critical thinking competency can be tested by ASKing if the student can do this:
Attributes & values	Skills	Knowledge
Demonstrate how the student’s own sensibilities have developed from literary reading.	Mediate a complex concept into a narrative form of writing for to reach a wider, non-specialist readership.	Use published scientific research to understand reduction of carbon use.
A	S	K

 

Please turn to pages 116-117 in the print edition of our textbook. If you have the eBook, then please search for a keyword, for example, ‘criterion’. You will see a mark-sheet set out as Table 7.1. Four criteria are sufficient to guide the student to areas of strength and weakness in their work. As a lecturer and marker, 4 criteria are as much granularity as you want to cope with when assessing a whole class of student scripts. 

Let’s explore each criterion for the purposes of designing and assessing an exercise on the journaling of place that we are currently working on:

So, Criterion (1) Content (out of 30 marks) – in our design we want to make the piece of writing long enough in word count to have some content, so we could propose in the exercise brief that the learner must include 3 observable items in their final piece; then explain as we design our marking scheme that each item included in the written piece will provide the opportunity for the marker to award up to 10 marks. The marker uses their professional judgement of how well the submitted work has achieved the learning outcome that is being assessed. You can see here how an initially quantitative mark scheme becomes qualitative when dealing with complex, structured creative non-fiction.

 

Criterion (2) Use of relevant theory and literature including correct Referencing (maximum mark 30). We deliberated over whether to use criteria from essay marking for marking creative non-fiction and agreed that using the same criteria keeps the assessment process within the parameters of a degree programme. Both lecturer and student must search hard to make this fit. Theory can be literary theory, a key pair to look for are metaphor and simile in imagistic language. However, it could also include a theory from tourism, for example, Bourdieu’s personal cultural capital theory. Relevant literature can include other travel texts, novels, poems, and theory texts. In destination stories, too, demonstrations of reading scientific articles on the climate, geography and geomorphology can also tested and earn marks.

 

Criterion (3) Knowledge and understanding (maximum mark 30) – this can be knowledge of both the place, and of the industry that will be publishing and consuming the written text. Our discussion of the concept of the discourse community from the first chapter of our book will make this clearer (please read pages 4 to 8 of the print edition).

Marks are earned not just for repeating the item of, say climate information read in a textbook, for example, ‘onshore wind in autumn in the ports is caused by the land cooling more quickly than the water 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’; this piece of reading would need to be integrated into the narrative in order to earn higher marks. 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 climate and of transport technology by integrating them into the story as he returns to the scene of the old railway station, here:

‘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).

Writing Comments and Feedback to Participants’ Writing

As you begin to comment on someone’s writing, please read the last section of chapter 7, called ‘The meta-language of feedback in writing’, pp.129-130; in the printed editions of the book it is only just over a page but it shows you how you can embrace grammar, linguistic terms, and technical literary vocabulary to help pinpoint what is good and what needs more work in the piece you are assessing. In my experience, by mid-semester the students want to know what they can improve in their pieces to earn higher marks. It is a moment when learners are receptive to the technical knowledge and the terminology of writing. Telling them to improve the opening sentence is not enough to help them. Saying that this piece needs more work is usually not enough to help a writer in the early stages. The teacher needs to pick examples, using the meta-language in a questioning dialogue with the learner to instigate close reading. For example: Is the wind warm or cold in Sartre’s scene? How do you know that? In grammar, what do we call the word, ‘icy’ that gives a particular quality to a noun? The learner may need help here with the grammatical term, adjective. Finally, ask how could you change the quality of the wind very simply if you were editing this sentence?

When you start to write feedback for learners, do, please read the section ‘Giving feedback on writing’ on pp.127-129. If students are going to provide peer-review feedback for each other then do go through Kara’s 12 tips which we reproduce in that section, on page 128 in the print editions of our book. An important role the reviewer plays is that of copytaster. A copytaster approaches content with the attitude, if I cannot understand this part then a wider public audience will not understand it, so it needs editing. For example, as a copytaster I think that in Sartre’s piece above, that the French name of the bar might need skilfully explaining in a pretext somehow, if it were non-fiction. In a novel, I would leave it as it is because it is what we call ‘languaging’.

Just a note, although peer-review is very useful, I think peer-assessment should be avoided. It is unfair to ask a learner to take on the responsibility of synthesising all the pedagogical concepts we have touched on above into a mark that will affect the degree of another learner. It is unfair on the student being assessed, too, to treat their degree to assessment by those who are unqualified and are not even studying education. Further, by formalising judgements within student groups, friendships can be broken and thus students will lose one of the key support foundations in their lives. It is very difficult to separate the assessment of a piece of output from the person feeling that they are being judged as people. An experienced, trained and qualified educator can manage assessment in-line with the LOs to ensure that it is part of a positive learning experience rather than undermining the learner’s confidence. 

 

 

 

Appendix A. – Storytelling Components with Sustainable Regeneration examples

 

 

STORYTELLING COMPONENTS	SUSTAINABLE OR REGENERATION EXAMPLES
1 The I-narrator and other characters.	Character always asks or chooses food based on provenance, or meat-free options.
2 Historical background to place or a cultural practice or artefact.	Describing re-used building materials, re-purposed medieval stone.
3 Imagistic language. Simile and metaphor.	Using the phrases, carbon footprint, food-miles, green-washing,
4 Movement by the narrator, a vehicle, or other agents in the scene.	Deciding to walk from the ferry terminal to the railway station rather than use car or taxi.
5 Plot. Aristotle defines this as creating reasons.	Why I chose a destination that did not require high carbon use to travel there.
6 Dialogic voices. Two or more voices that do not fully agree.	Two characters discuss using cane sugar or sugar beet as a sweetener in a European destination.
7 Spaces of mystery. Not quite giving your readers the full picture.	Wildflower garden obscuring a public building  University of Caen, Normandy
8 Change. Unfolding, progressing, developing, growing. Becoming more dangerous then being resolved. Building up and revealing. Leaving unresolved strands, like component 7 for mystery.	Describing a return to a building which is being transformed with solar panels. Or to a city park that is introducing permaculture beds or flower beds which require no artificial watering requirements. The Lurie, Chicago
9 Twill. Recurring pattern of a character or theme.	See how Patrick Modiano uses a local mineral water in his novel, on pages 20-21 of the textbook.

 

 

 

 Please use our "Follow by Email" sign-up below to be sure that you receive every post in the series » 

 

.

 

References

Mansfield, C. & Potočnik Topler, J. (2023). Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding - Urban Place Writing Methodologies. Abingdon: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003178781

Potocnik Topler, J. & Mansfield, C. (2024). Social Media Storytelling for Sustainable Destination Campaigns: A teaching companion with instructor resources. Totnes: Travel Writers Online.

The whole Teaching Pack is now available as a free eBook on the Google Play Bookstore - please click here to view