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Dr Teti Dragas: DS LEAD

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Dr Teti Dragas (Associate Professor, DCAD) Durham Digital Storytelling Lead

Dr Teti Dragas is the creator of Durham Digital Storytelling and has initiated, codeveloped and facilitated all the projects that you can read about across this site working with various collaborators from across disciplines and contexts. These projects and collaborations have supported both the development of materials, methods and facilitation of digital storytelling in Higher Education contexts as well as furthering the understanding its pedagogic value in discipline and context-specific applications. Teti works as an academic developer in DCAD, leading on the professional development of staff across the institution and has expertise in reflective practices, curriculum development and in storytelling from an interdisciplinary background in English Literature/Creative Writing and Teacher Education in Languages/HE. She is also a Digital Storytelling HE consultant.

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Teti’s Story Bio

Teti has her own story to tell about stories and their meaning in her life and work. This began once upon a time, sometime towards the end of the last century, with a love of scribbling that eventually led her to do an MA in Novel Writing (Manchester) and then a PhD in Contemporary Literature (Durham) and to author a book on the storyteller (The Return of the Storyteller in Contemporary Fiction, Bloomsbury 2014). Like any wandering storyteller however, her path meandered through labyrinthine professional and educational passageways, where she picked up stories only she can tell. Mostly, these stories involved teaching students from places far and wide (and also a bit local), from diverse socio-cultural contexts (both real and imaginary of course) where she was positioned as a teacher but was also very secretly and absolutely completely, always a learner. And teach and learn she did in farflung countries where cheesegraters became lampshades, and drinks where drunk from tiny carafes that brought glints to the eye, where people spoke in riddles and mountains rose like ships in the sand. But she also taught closer to home in universities surrounded by meandering rivers, haunted castles and magical woods, in others cradled by the bartering cackle of highstreets and traffic, and other still that reeked positively of drowned fish and chips, multicoloured class and perforated seas. Things she taught: literature, creative writing, Modern Greek, English as a Foreign Language. And then she began to teach teachers and lecturers about teaching and all things pedagogic, whilst all the while revising and returning to her all-too familiar stories along the way. She taught and taught and created a plethora of lessons and materials and courses and programmes, putting them in her Special Skills Story Backpack that accompanied her on her travels until it was quite full and became really quite heavy to be honest. She began to question: where was she going and did she need all this stuff? Until one day, she realised, that she, like any storyteller worth her salt, had returned to where she started, to a path that brought her back to her love of stories and to the simple desire of wanting to tell and listen to them always always. And this is where you can find her, at least for now and definitely on this blog writing about and sharing more and more stories…

Link to Teti’s Staff Profile

Digital Storytelling Curriculum Development, Facilitation and Facilitator Training

Feedback on Teti’s Work

The following examples are from the collaborators Teti has worked with on the various digital storytelling projects outlined on this site, who have endorsed and given feedback on her work and interventions. The feedback here outlines Teti’s impact on the staff, the students and the course/context within which she has worked.

Interested? Contact Teti here