667 W ith the current global refugee crisis, the United Nations has estimated that more peo- ple have been displaced than at any time since World War II (Cooper, 2016). As refugee children make their way into North American classrooms, teachers will become the front line for addressing the complex educational needs of children and adolescents who are traumatized and who may never have had an opportu- nity to attend school (Brown, 2016). Education has long been upheld as the only future for children displaced by war. The cruel reality of this future, however, is that the longer children are forced out of schooling, “the less likely they are ever to return” (Brown, 2016, para. 4). Even when refugees have been in camps or displaced for an extended period, lack of fi- nancial support makes it difficult, if not impossible, to offer them education. In this article, we offer a starting point for thinking about how to help refugee students and adults (re)begin their educational journey. Our study features a digital storytelling project conducted in a school district’s transition program, in which adolescent refugee and immigrant English learn- ers (ELs) were invited to share aspects of their identi- ties and social worlds through a range of modes (e.g., visual, audial, linguistic). This project, with its empha- sis on multiple modes of communication, is particularly important for students of refugee backgrounds, who often have minimal reading and writing skills because of limited or interrupted formal education. For these students, a multimodal approach to literacy is signifi- cant because it can open up powerful possibilities for expressing their knowledge and identities. In particular, we look closely at Yaqub’s (pseudonym) digital story, “Impossible Is Nothing,” which demon- strates how a multimodal pedagogy enabled him to care- fully select images and music to meaningfully depict the more emotionally challenging aspects of his journey fleeing war in Iraq and moving to Canada. Our analy- sis of three slides from his story reveals how engaging with nonlinguistic modes provided Yaqub (age 18) with enhanced opportunities to explore and make visible complex and abstract facets of his life and identity, par- ticularly as they relate to difficult past experiences. Why a Multimodal Approach Matters The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the pedagogical potential of a multimodal digital story- telling project for facilitating meaningful expression among refugee ELs. In this section, we outline our con- ceptual framework and situate our study within rel- evant literature, making a case for why a multimodal approach to pedagogy better enables the communica- tion of difficult knowledge. Refugee learners contend with innumerable chal- lenges in school and beyond. Yet, they bring a wealth of life experiences and knowledge to formal learning spaces, and it would be inaccurate to characterize these FEATURE ARTICLE “Impossible Is Nothing”: Expressing Difficult Knowledge Through Digital Storytelling Lauren Johnson, Maureen Kendrick Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy Vol. 60 No. 6 pp. 667–675 doi: 10.1002/jaal.624 © 2016 International Literacy Association LAUREN JOHNSON is an English-language instructor and project coordinator for the Illustrated Journey Youth Project of the African Stages Association of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; e-mail lauren.johnson@alumni.ubc.ca. MAUREEN KENDRICK is a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; e-mail maureen.kendrick@ubc.ca. Digital storytelling extends possibilities for students of refugee backgrounds to communicate complex or difficult aspects of their feelings and personal experiences.