Category: 2005

A recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that over half of all American teenagers could be considered web “content creators,” meaning they have created a blog or webpage, posted their own writing, art, photography, or videos online, or made their own creations by remixing preexisting online content. Findings indicate the web has given rise to a new generation at ease with digital publishing technology.

Twenty teen girls from New York City high schools are now on staff at 3iYing, a new design and marketing firm that advises companies on what works and what doesn’t when marketing to girls. The girls, who call their ideas “Girl Made, Girl Approved,” have come up with concepts for selling and designing everything from condoms and lingerie to cell phones and food. “To design for a 13-year-old girl, it doesn’t matter how much we observe them — we live in the mind-set of a 25- to 45-year-old,” one client told Business Week.
“These young girls are tackling serious subjects like feminine products, which have been traditionally designed and marketed by men at big corporations — [men] who don’t have a clue to the emotional needs of the customer,” observed another. “That’s pretty powerful.”

Rebecca Renard, co-director of the Educational Video Center (EVC) documentary workshop, cues up a 10-minute tape of her class preparing to make a documentary. Then she presses “play.”
“Get into your group and brainstorm ideas,” Rebecca says onscreen.
Aureliano, also on the tape, leans forward and says, “I think homelessness is definitely a problem for teenagers.” He adds, “But a lot of times they’re homeless because they don’t want to work.”
“But mostly they get caught up in a system where their family is thrown out of housing and there’s nothing they can do about it,” Shinnel counters. “We need to find out about groups that help build more housing. Maybe we can volunteer for them.”
Rebecca stops the tape and asks the EVC staff where they see the teaching of inquiry practice, a method of having students’ own questions drive learning.
“I think what happened would have been totally different if the young people weren’t in a group but were sitting by themselves,” one colleague says.
“Getting the students to go to a deeper level of questioning, to researching and reading is a real challenge,” says another.
“So, how do we get them to really research their issues? To get in the habit of asking questions and pursuing them further—even when there isn’t one clear answer?”
This is the Educational Video Center study group in action. Every two weeks, they spend a morning over coffee and bagels reflecting on challenges and grappling with how to better teach their students to be critical thinkers. The staff also meets regularly with other New York-based video youth media groups to learn from other organizations and discuss the critical issues they face.
These forums for professional development were founded on the belief that practitioners most effectively improve their teaching when they have regular opportunities to learn from each other. By engaging each other in ongoing discussions about the theory and practice of their craft, staff develop a critical sensibility. EVC’s study group helps build and sustain a culture of a “learning organization” in the office—a place where staff learning is collaborative, public, nonthreatening, and integral to the daily experience of both students and staff.
Virtually no colleges exist where one can earn a degree or certificate to be a media educator. Perhaps the most common way that media educators learn their craft is through trial and error, and they largely do so in isolation.
The challenge of having no formal training is compounded by comparatively low salaries and the lack of a secure career path, which leads to high rates of turnover and the necessity of training new staff. Groups like EVC’s go a long way toward helping youth media educators improve their teaching and feel supported in their learning. That, in turn, can encourage them to stay at an organization longer.
But many organizations don’t have this kind of staff development, and of those that do, too often the lessons learned in individual sessions never find their way to the outside world, where others can benefit from them. As an emerging field, youth media work is not yet professionalized with a commonly accepted set of best practices and standards for teaching, media production, or organizational management.
Part of the challenge of professionalizing youth media is that the field encompasses such a broad range of organizational models as well as various forms of media. Some programs operate as part of larger community media arts institutions, youth organizing projects, or after-school centers. Others are stand-alone organizations operating independently. Some focus on media literacy or building youth skills in preparation for college or a career. Others focus on media education, the arts, recreation, or using the making of media as a therapeutic tool. Still others are driven by goals of civic engagement and social change.
While we have yet to agree on common standards for teaching, producing, and distributing youth media, progress has been made towards finding common ground. New York City’s youth media film and video community, which meets regularly to discuss their work, is doing a particularly good job at forming opportunities for learning among the many local organizations.
In the coming year, both EVC and the Global Action Project will publish curricula to disseminate their youth media practices and principles to teachers and community youth workers across the country. The Manhattan Neighborhood Network’s Youth Channel offers training modules for local organizations wanting to replicate parts of their program.
Video groups have also collaborated to form the Urban Visionaries Festival in New York City, where local youth media groups put on a festival showcasing their work. And many New York-based organizations have formed networks connecting youth media groups and educators, especially those working in video. These include ListenUp! PSA network and MediaRights.org‘s youth media distribution project.
These are all positive steps that can and should be replicated by organizations working in various media—print, radio, film, and multimedia. However, individual collaborations aren’t enough to truly professionalize the field and exploit to the fullest the creative ideas and energy produced by these and other initiatives.
Towards this end, we need to establish an effective network—on the local, regional, and national levels—that will move the field beyond simply information- and resource-sharing to collective knowledge-building. Such a network would allow administrators and practitioners at the grassroots to help each other make sense of, and apply new knowledge coming out of the field. In turn, they could contribute back to the field their own innovations and lessons learned.
In addition to professional development, networks can address issues that will help build the field, such as effective distribution of media and curriculum, and how to raise money.
Ultimately, if youth media groups formed a national network, we would most likely attract larger grants from private and federal funding agencies than we do as individual organizations. With support from funders who encourage a culture of cooperation rather than competition, a range of cross-organizational initiatives could emerge, such as institutes facilitating intervisitation of each other’s programs, practitioners conducting case studies of their own projects, a collaborative publication containing essays from the field on the theory and practice of youth media, and a traveling youth media festival.
The point is for us to create meaningful ways to share each of our organizations’ accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience, and to build upon the new information and lessons learned.
EVC is laying the groundwork for such a network by working with the Education Development Center’s YouthLearn. We are taking the first steps to form the Learning Network, which will engage teachers, youth workers, as well as emerging youth media practitioners in forums where they can learn from each other. These forums will be sponsored in partnership with organizations from intersecting fields such as youth development, civic engagement, journalism, and the arts. The network will also invest in a select group of emerging and mid-career practitioners who will serve as youth media fellows, honing their leadership skills together as a cohort and engaging in intensive projects designed to capture and disseminate promising practices to other interested practitioners and institutions.
Through these various field-building initiatives, a base of shared language, practices, and goals can emerge. Each organization will then become not only a producing and teaching organization, but perhaps more importantly, a learning organization.
Steven Goodman (pictured above left) is the founder and director of the Educational Video Center and author of Teaching Youth Media. “Cultivating a Field” was adapted and updated from a paper commissioned by OSI for a March 2004 convening on youth media.
This article is part of a series exploring a new phase of introspection in the youth media field, in which educators have begun placing a premium on reflecting on their work and thinking and planning on a macrolevel.

Continue reading Cultivating a Field

“Many highly educated, well-intentioned, middle-class nonprofit professionals attempt to reach out across the class divide. All too often, these attempts fail,” reports a recent Public Education Network Weekly Newsblast. “Though rarely discussed in America, the subtle differences between social classes lead to major misunderstandings in the classroom, the workplace, and in many nonprofit settings. Understanding how social class shapes conceptions of the individual may ease tensions and promote equality. Teachers encourage sensitivity and self-expression. Lower class parents want toughness and discipline. Social service providers expect cooperation and disclosure. Their economically disadvantaged clients find their prodding intrusive and impolite.” The full article, written by an anthropologist, can be found on the Stanford Social Innovation Review articles page.

Change Matters, an organization that “works with arts and social change organizations to make breakthroughs in fundraising, capacity, and grown,” has its own blog filled with fundraising advice. A recent post warns of the all-too-common pitfalls for many nonprofit start-ups.

Advocates for public-access TV say proposed legislation could end public-access TV nationwide and jeopardize community-based programs that “mirror community interest and needs,” like Manhattan Neighborhood Network’s Youth Channel, the New York Times reported. Advocates of the legislation contend that these fears are exaggerated.

“War is decided by older people and carried out by young people,” said Claire Holman, director of Blunt Radio, a Maine-based youth media organization. Iraq is no exception, said Holman, which is why young people at organizations like Blunt Radio are creating radio spots, videos, articles, and other media documenting their perspectives on the war. Some projects aim to help educate other teens, like Paper Tiger’s video “Military Myths,” which compares the reality of war to military ad campaigns and comes equipped with lesson plans for teachers and organizers. Others, like Chat the Planet’s MTV-broadcast series of young Americans talking live via webcam with young Iraqis, have helped personalize war coverage.
The following organizations have received special recognition for their coverage of Iraq.

“Reflections on Return”

Since the U.S. invaded Iraq, teen producers at Blunt Radio have made several spots about young people’s experiences of the war, including an interview with a young Iraq war veteran who returned to the United States after suffering a devastating throat injury. The soldier would not speak to adult reporters, but responded to teen producer Spencer Scott because he felt a peer could understand him. The interview became part of “Reflections on Return,” a radio series produced primarily by Bay Area-based Youth Radio and featuring voices of young soldiers returning from Iraq, struggling to re-enter their civilian lives. Much of “Reflections on Return” aired on National Public Radio and the series won an Edward R. Murrow Award of the Radio Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), arguably the most prestigous electronic journalism award in the country, said RTNDA chairman Dan Shelley.
Judges chose this entry, which competed against radio networks including ABC, CBC, and CNN, said Shelley, “because it provided a perspective on the Iraq war consequences that had largely been unreported in the other media, and that was youth voices. It is a critical perspective that people need to be aware of.”

“All That I Can Be”

In their video “All That I Can Be,” teens at the Educational Video Center (EVC) documented an EVC alum’s decision to join the army not out of patriotism, idealism, or a sense of duty, but because he needed money and saw the army as his only option to get ahead. It “is an exceptional example of how sophisticated youth-produced media can be,” said Shira Golding of Arts Engine, Inc., which featured the video in its Media That Matters Film Festival, where it received the Economic Justice Award. “Rather than conveying a heavy-handed and simplistic ‘military recruitment is bad’ message,” says Golding, the video “puts the issue in context. The young man grappling with whether or not to enlist wants to make something out of his life, and he has been made to feel that joining the army is his only real option. ‘All That I Can Be’ captures his choice from an intimate angle.”

“The Hard Sell”

Teen writer Cara Brumfield at Youth Communication went undercover. She approached military recruiters, pretending she was interested in joining the army. One recruiter told her about the vacation-like postcards he received from friends stationed in Iraq. The more questions Brumfield asked, the seemingly pushier the recruiters became. When she said she needed to consult her mother about joining the military, a recruiter treated her as though she was wasting their time. Her article “The Hard Sell,” published in Youth Communication’s New Youth Connections, won second place for investigative reporting for New York City’s Independent Press Awards. “The writer showed impressive determination in reporting the story—in using her personal experience to reveal the hardball tactics and deceit military recruiters use to get young people to sign up for service,” said City Limits editor Alyssa Katz, a judge for the awards. “She bravely put herself in the fray to get the story, and persisted even when she had opportunities and reasons to back out. And her writing moved us—as readers, we could feel what she was going through and understand what it’s like to be a vulnerable young person in the sights of military recruiters.”
New Youth Connections editor Hope Vanderberg hopes the story brought home something even more personal for the many teens who read it—“the fact that the war is not just something that is happening far away but something that they themselves might be involved in someday. They could easily become the ones fighting in it, so they need to figure out what they believe in.”
Above left: Will Solomon in EVC’s “All That I Can Be” prepares for Army life.

Continue reading Life During Wartime

A guide from the Dougy Center for Grieving Children & Families walks educators through the dos and don’ts of dealing with grieving students and communities. The advice is applicable to any organization or individual working with a young person affected by death.

“For years, I taught workshops on time management and burnout,” writes one contributor to Nonprofit Online News. “It dismayed me how organizations and individuals pathologize some very natural, human responses to unhealthy working conditions. Staff would be sent to my workshop to be ‘fixed,’ and while many would return with healthier habits, some would make the bold decision that they needed a better place to work…I always appreciated a healthy tension between those two outcomes. One of the books that helped me work with organizations that were prepared to take a more systemic approach was Katrina Shield’s In the Tiger’s Mouth: An Empowerment Guide for Social Action. With very little wasted space or fuzzy thinking, this is a book that will help any organization with sustainability.”

In the name of protecting young people from cyberpredators, a New Jersey Roman Catholic high school now prohibits students from posting personal blogs on the Internet, raising “interesting questions about the intersection of free speech and voluntary agreements with private institutions,” the Associated Press reports (here via the New York Times; registration required). This is one of several recent efforts in the United States to restrict students’ Internet postings.