Category: Issues

My History is alive in my skin,

Dancing across my pores like sweat, oil, melanin.

 

My History is in my hair,

In my eyes,

Sparkling as I absorb the new world around me.

 

The life of my History may die.

It’s in the hands of a man who doesn’t even know

The history of himself.

---

About the Author

Myah Overstreet was born and raised in Oakland, California, and studies Journalism and English Literature at  San Francisco State University. She has always had a passion for creative arts and the written word. Overstreet worked on school productions at Berkeley High School’s Drama Department, produced short films, and wrote articles published in The Jacket, an independent publication of Berkeley High School students. Her love for working with nonprofit media arts organizations began during her time as Production Assistant intern at TILT, a project of Ninth Street Independent Film Center in San Francisco, with Jason Wyman. Wyman later introduced Overstreet to The Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, where she accepted the position as Producer of Youth Engagement and Blog Editor for The Alliance’s Youth Media program.

Words to inspire the future the next generation desires and creates.

My mom used to say “each time you go through fire, like gold, you become more pure.” She would say that to me after another encounter of challenges in my young adult life, whether from a friendship falling out, another racist or objectifying remark, or the influx of competing demands — belonging versus being the one who stood out.

She would say that sometimes you have to get burned several times to become that shiny version of yourself — strong, flexible, wise.

When I was a teenager, my desired future was to leave a prison developed by society. Under the haze of the New Jersey hot summers where I grew up, the elements of sexism and racism and the power imbalance as they intersect were so suffocating and pervasive you could literally feel the oppression pushing against your skin. As a mixed race young person, the odd sensation of privilege adding to those elements at intermittent moments was both bizarre and exhilarating. Like some kind of weightlessness that arrived to alleviate the heaviness of oppression as if it were a passing weather pattern within the social sphere. Passing — as if Nella Larsen’s concept and a new astrophysics/social phenomenon merged together that Octavia Butler would have surely discovered and written about.

As a teenager, I would often wonder, “How many times do I have to be burned to turn into gold? How many times does the fire need to touch us — me, my mom, my family?”

It turns out that there’s fire everywhere — the ones we all experience as individuals, the literal fires that swallow us whole, and those that we battle everyday in the streets, from our eyes intaking what we see — messages, media, stories, singular representation — and those that we experience in each institution we participate in. I recognized the few adults in my life, whether a teacher or passing mentor, who made me inquire, dig or think deeper, discover new modalities to explore.

Once I had graduated high school and then college, I re-connected to a desire to be bold and free. I explored, challenged myself, connected with different communities and experiences. I gravitated towards camaraderie with other women and music as a form of creation and as a means to discover through touring and traveling. Without a smartphone to document what I witnessed or experienced, or even the directions we needed to get to the next destination, I had to simply take in the reactions of people in small towns or urban cities who saw radical grrls traveling together, taking to their instruments or pumping gas at a station.  I witnessed the unpleasant discomfort that crept on the faces of the locals — taking in difference, unleashed, desired, and threatened. I had the fortune of capturing some of that observation on radio during phone interviews from the van.

After touring, I became more involved in my career and  took to creating spaces that empower young women and young adults, whether through initiatives like the rock camp for girls and, specifically, the youth media field, where adults had a deep intention to provide to the next generation what they didn’t have — a platform to be recognized, heard, to explore your identity and create media to represent your community. Media was a tool for that expression and discovery, which then aligned with career possibilities as a growing digital age and tech sector requires both these relevant hard skills and social soft skills in leadership, agency and risk-taking.

Youth media is a unique space for social impact in predominantly underrepresented communities, creating a subculture that can examine those very dynamics of power, race, class, gender, identity. It didn’t necessarily offer that kind of tool kit for school-based learning or for the dominant culture at large, and too often it fell under the radar of any major media outlet to capture as the spotlight to uncover. Practitioners and leaders were too busy being hands on, on the ground, and all-too-often, in conflict with one another due to the very limited resources they had to work with to keep the lights on, the media programs robust and up-to-date; and, to keep the funders engaged with the high impact and quality but limited number of teens served. To memory, no one considered bringing on a public relations and marketing expert to their organization, network, or collaboration. Turns out, impacting the lives of young people takes a lot of ongoing, consistent, real effort beyond and outside of schools, competing demands, changing moods and shifting priorities. We all had this interesting dynamic of being an advocate, inspiring rapid growth of teens in our care, being captivated by their challenges and watching them, more often than not, surmount them. I’ll never forget an 8-year-old tell me after a workshop “thank you for teaching me about gender dichotomies” and seeing the expression of woke faces. Makes you want to take every crack you can at dismantling those prison walls.

Now in my tenth year of being involved with the youth media world, it is time to see how to turn the camera on the field, its best practices, and how technology can provide a much more widely accessible platform for youth leadership, engagement, inquiry and media creation. Getting their active participation and peer-to-peer connection, with components to build the confidence and ability of their teachers, has the possibility to transform learning. That’s something the team is designing at my current outfit we hope to launch in 2018.

Youth media programs continue to weather significant change — in the digital age, from where the resources come from, the angles to which the initiative is re-aligned. Youth media is still relevant because young people still don’t have that platform to create and produce the media and representation they want — to practice analyzing, resisting, re-designing messages of inequity, power imbalance, social norms. There’s a hunger to have that space, even when it isn’t quite conscious. John Hughes brought the eighties the brat pack. Those dynamics still exist today and we have a President that I hope will spur the change we crave by the leadership of an engaged, woke, and radical next generation. A generation that doesn’t just pass, consume, belong. A generation that creates the culture and future it desires, which in fact, is the very future we need and that has to stand out, no matter how many times it gets burned.

---

About the Author

Ingrid Hu Dahl is the Director, Service Design Education at Capital One, scaling cutting edge design tools to impact human-centered services. Dahl was previously the Managing Director of KQED’s Learning initiative where she oversaw the development of products, platforms and content. And prior to KQED, Dahl was the Senior Director of Education and Field Building at Bay Area Video Coalition where she designed programs to bridge underrepresented young professionals to the tech sector from an innovation and social impact lens. Dahl is a founding member of the Bay Area Youth Media Network and a participating partner that formed The Mix — a creative media lab for teens — featured at the San Francisco Public Library. Spurred by a grant from the California Endowment she developed a rapid response youth advocacy program that launched in San Francisco and San Diego for teen journalists and media producers, one of several innovative partnerships that followed including web native filmmaking and Popcorn.js with Mozilla Foundation, an all-girl game design series with Zynga.org, a tech immersive fellowship program funded by the National Science Foundation, and a remix game and coding program for teens supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Formerly a Program Officer of Youth Media and Editor-in-Chief of Youth Media Reporter at the Academy for Educational Development, Dahl has extensive knowledge of the youth media field as an intermediary, leading a National Youth Media Summit in 2009 and the Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media’s Investing in Youth Media funder briefing. Prior to leaving New York she launched a middle grade “Youth Create Media Project” throughout the boroughs in New York City and Newark, NJ; and, helped found the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls (Brooklyn, NY) where she taught girls empowerment through music, identity workshops and collaboration. She has published articles on the youth media field, tech and education, leadership and case study results. Dahl lectures nationally and internationally, has taught courses at Rutgers University on imagery and culture, designed and facilitated leadership workshops, and created a public speaking Riot Grrrl course at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. A musician for over 15 years, Dahl has toured the nation and plays synth, bass and guitar. Dahl is a board member of the Bay Area Girls Rock Camp, participates in the diversity and tech movement, and is a TEDx speaker.

Author’s Note:

This exercise is taken from a two day training titled, Cultural Fluency: Transcending the Boundaries of Power. The training seeks to redefine how we understand and relate to culture; how we understand the “other” by identifying our own “otherness.” Using Countee Cullen’s poem, “Incident,” this exercise explores how our past experience of difference affects our present lives and relationships.

---

Lesson Plan Goals

• To wrestle with participants’ own situations by reflecting on Countee Cullen’s poem.

Intended Audience

• This activity is for all age groups.

Materials Needed

• A copy of Countee Cullen’s poem, “Incident.”

Overview and Context

There is continuity between the past and the present. We all carry our past experiences with us and don’t often have the opportunity to reflect on how those experiences are playing out in our current reality. At some point in our past we have learned about difference, oppression, and separation. I have a poem that I think will stir our memories from the past. Let’s read it, and then we’ll have a conversation about it.

1. Say: Take a moment to read the poem silently to yourself and underline any words or phrases that stand out for you.
2. Read (or have participants read) the poem out loud two or three times.
3. Ask: What words, lines or phrases did you underline? What were you reminded of in your own life? What was the “difference” you were made aware of? What was your experience when it was happening? What role, if any did adults play? What is the impact of your incident on your life? Where do you see it playing out now in your work or your relationships? If there was an ally at the time of your incident, what would you have liked them to say or do? Who do you feel needs to hear this poem? Why?
4. We are products of our pasts yet they do not have to control our present. Thank you very much for sharing your stories.

Final Thoughts

This activity can be done in a large group setting or you can have pairs interview each other and then share in the large group.

 

Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,

Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,

I saw a Baltimorean

Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,

And he was no whit bigger,

And so I smiled, but he poked out

His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore

From May until December;

Of all the things that happened there

That’s all that I remember.

Countee Cullen was considered by many to be the most promising of the young poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Cullen preferred not to be considered as a Black poet, but rather wanted to achieve success on the basis of traditional English standards. However, in spite of this, it was his race-conscious lyrics which were his most powerful.

---

About the Author

Stacey Daraio brings 30 years of experience working in the field of youth development as a designer, facilitator, trainer, evaluator, and coach. She has experience training and coaching diverse audience groups, from afterschool practitioners to funders and technical assistance providers. In her prior life she did professional theater, both acting and directing and was a drama therapist.  She lives in San Francisco with her partner Kari, two children—Keana and Kai, and two creatures—a husky, Coda and a cat, Simon. Left to her own devices, she would be either sitting in the sun with a book and cup of coffee, or curled up on the couch with the creatures (all of them!), a book and cup of coffee.

Author’s Note:  

A few years ago, after reading Peter Gray’s 2013 essay, The Play Deficit (cited below), I was so reminded of my own childhood learning through play that I felt obligated to discuss the article with my closest childhood friends, with whom I’m privileged to still have as integral part of my social circle. At the time I didn’t know if I would continue working in youth development, but now, as I coordinate the Youth Media Department at a community media center, I keep coming back to this conversation; my thoughts in that conversation, updated with further research and experience, formed the foundation for this essay.

---

“The imagination is essential for moral action. Because unless one can imagine predicaments other than one’s own, one would never act to alleviate or to remediate those predicaments. We would all be narcissists. And the only cure for the narcissism that comes of the natural parochialism of inherited circumstances…the only thing that corrects for that is empathy, the only thing that creates empathy is imagination, and the only thing that schools and trains the imagination are the arts and the humanities. So in a sense, art is a foundation of empathetic, ethical action—the very foundation for it…. It is that fundamental.”

-Drew Gilpin Faust ¹

 

Where I live, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, we have one of the largest achievement gaps in the country—a divide between those students who are afforded the conditions to succeed, and those who are not. And although our conventional definitions of and requirements for “success” are certainly part of the problem, it’s no doubt that there’s a lot of work cut out for those of us involved in the education and support of Minnesota youth.²  Resonant, engaging storytelling will be an understated but vital part of our local and national healing, more important now than ever before. In an era of media quickly becoming defined by fake news, a denial of bias³ and the miscalculation of media literacy training⁴, how do we identify and relate stories that can bridge the gap of understanding, let alone of academic and professional achievement? When the stories of our collective futures are still so hard to see, we need to invest in play to help us imagine them. Because play is necessary to investigate the imagination, and imagination is necessary to envision new ways to understand our past, our current standing in the world, and our potential futures. And we can go even further with play that is collaborative, to network our imaginations into wholly new visions altogether.

As media makers and educators, there should be play in everything we do. Without it we lose our ability to create new ideas, to inspire ourselves and others, and to rejuvenate our minds. That may sound bold, depending on your definition of “play”; it is a word that means a great many things, depending on who you’re talking to. For us, let’s define “play” as the practice of taking risks on matters of the imagination. When we play, broadly speaking, we engage in imagining a potential (even if only a fantastically potential) event or sequence of events. And within that realm of the imagination, we make educated presumptions and actions based on these presumptions. This doesn’t just apply to well-defined games and young children playing pretend. Play is trial and error, helping us find what works and what doesn’t. Play is internal, private, and play is social and collaborative. Play is the basis for all creative experimentation.⁵ And this of course is a necessary aspect of creative problem solving and overall youth (human) development. People who frequently engage in play can learn more from their mistakes because they’re doing it all the time. And it’s only through taking risks, often failing more than not, that we can learn new ways to succeed.

There’s much more to play than having fun. It helps us develop strategies and understand experiences that occur in the rest of our lives. It’s an integral part of our lives, and we’ve been doing it for as long as we’ve been a species. As play-theorist Bernard de Koven recollected last year:

“The excitement that kept me writing came from the discovery that I wasn’t really writing just about games and play. Every time I put the practices of play into words I experienced a kind of resonance with something that penetrated much deeper: into society and morality, community and culture, art and religion, politics and human nature. I’d write about strategies for a game kids play in kindergarten and learn, some thirty years later that I was also revealing strategies for surviving in the Death Camps. I’d describe an experience I had playing ping pong with a friend and find that I was writing about an experience of communion with the divine.”⁶

But keeping play at the heart of our work can be difficult in the context of curricula standards, grant reporting requirements, and the ever-growing need to find measurable data to keep the lights on and the cameras running. Play, and its role in imagination and creativity is not always able to provide us with the tangible data funders of youth development or the arts like to see. Likewise, media literacy is inherently harder to measure than, say, English literacy, and one student’s new ability to share her truth is harder to prove than how many students passed a test on using this or that kind of software. Both are important, sure, but our priorities often slide into numbers and graphs—things that can be represented in a PDF for easily consumable grant reporting. As much as out-of-school-time youth workers may try, we end up falling into traps of borrowing from rigid standards, to fit into often too-narrow funding restrictions.

I would never claim that English literacy isn’t an important skill in the 21st century United States. But when you think back to the learning that defined your childhood—the things that really made you “grow up”—were they reading tests? I doubt it. Standardized tests, as are so often derided by us education professionals, are anathema to learning. Instead of diagnostic, they have become prescriptive. Teachers spend precious time and resources ensuring that their students will be able to pass tests, and are left without enough time to invest in the kind of learning our students will really need for a rapidly changing future. The kind of learning that expands divergent thinking. We all have the capacity for divergent thinking as children—the ability to see many possible ways to interpret a question, and many answers—but it generally deteriorates as we go through the education system, rather than develops; as a society, we’re having our creativity educated out of us.⁷ And as educationalist Ken Robinson has said, “in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity…. We all create our own lives through [the] process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization.”⁸

That leaves a lot of this work to out-of-school-time learning. As a child, I was always encouraged to join more extracurriculars. “Colleges like to see that,” I was told. This may be true, and I did join a few structured activities, between Cub Scouts, summer camps and organized sports. But looking back, what had the greatest effects on me—the activities that taught me how to think about things differently and adapt to new problems— weren’t these structured, organized activities where I was told what to do and how to do it. What outlined the greatest learning in my childhood were the moments of unstructured, creative play—independent and collaborative—that I engaged in.

The play I engaged in as a kid revolved around media—writing stories about my favorite cartoon characters, making stop motion Lego animations, recording angsty songs. Looking back, I can’t help but cringe. But I also can’t deny what that play has done for me. Writing stories about fictional characters helped me see my own actions and the actions of my friends from an outsider’s perspective. Using Legos to create science-fiction animation made me think about the technical process of animation, but more importantly, made me consider what a future world might look like, visually, culturally and ethically; it made me consider why the “bad guys” did what they did, and wonder if the “good guys” could ever be misguided. Role playing on the playground during recess helped me define my values; who I wanted to be and who I didn’t want to be. And more than anything else, these things helped me find voice. My friends and I learned systems of play together—N64 and Xbox, the board games we made, the music we produced together—and once we taught each other how to be proficient in those systems, we continued to negotiate, react to and create narratives around them. We used them to analyze our own lives and desires for our futures, and we learned to point to and create analogies between fictions and realities.

Between pulling each other on skateboards with bungie cords connected to the backs of our bikes, or putting our most vulnerable selves on stage for all our friends to judge, we learned through these risks—playful experiments—with stakes that we set for ourselves. This sort of unstructured play, and the community we built together, was so vital to our development as people—but what if we’d had access to greater resources and mentorship? My grandfather, for example, instilled in me a love for craft, by teaching me how to make model cars and airplanes. This fueled my imagination for career, for working with my hands, and for an eye for detail. Now imagine if the games that my friends and I had created had been backed by mentoring relationships with older peers who could’ve helped us learn and inspired us to continue learning? Or the music, or the animations? What could we have done under conditions where we had better mentorship, resources, and community? Where those mentoring relationships would have been able to teach us not just the skills of our interests, but been a one-stop resource for all our questions, be them social, professional, or whatever.

Hopefully many reading this have experienced those conditions for themselves. As an educator in the media arts, I see my students and teen interns engaging in the same kind of play. And I am privileged to serve as that mentor. Working with youth to guide their passions (or sometimes just their curiosity) for media production through an in-depth process of creation proved to me that when teens craft media that speaks to their lives and concerns, they develop new ways of seeing the issues they’re approaching. It’s often the kind of collaborative play that Henry Jenkins talks about in regards to participatory culture—online and other communities that embrace multi-level learning to teach and produce social narrative-creation, and then using the skills they develop to, in his words, “find a vehicle to think politically through these kinds of interest-driven networks,” whether that be through political advocacy for domestic labor rights, or fighting human rights abuses abroad.⁹ The ability to define and craft narratives about our lives and socio-political contexts takes us to the next step of redefining how we understand our lives and contexts—in past and present—and of devising steps to understand and make happen our desired futures.¹⁰

By providing teens with a place and space to engage with narrative creation, to dissect the stories they watch and to gradually—and often chaotically—piece together new stories through negotiating with each other, we’ve formed a community that continues to grow and develop, based around our mentorship. We empower them to investigate their passions and create the narratives they want to tell. And on top of that, they learn technical skills, job preparation, and are guided in social-emotional development like collaboration and self-reflection. After all, we’re not just preparing them as media-creators and fellow people; we have a duty to help prepare them for a future that we can’t yet imagine, where work may appear wholly different than it does today.^{11 12}

Lately I’ve noticed some of our students are moving away from interests in documentary media. They say “I just want to help people laugh. To help people de-stress.” There’s a need for escapism there, but there’s also a vision for a reality that’s more lighthearted than our everyday experiences. A vision of optimism.  For a couple years now, I’ve assigned a day for students to compete in our own Worst Short Film Ever competition. This is one of the most playful days of the year, and helps teach our teens what not to do the rest of the time we meet. Students have an hour to write, film and edit the “worst short film ever”; the results can be hilarious or excruciating—and sometimes both—but they are always great stretches for teens to think about what they could possibly do to produce something worse than their peers. And in being asked to imagine a pinnacle, they take step one to make it happen.

For me, that’s the true power of youth media programming. Some of our teens are already making innovative, creative, sometimes weird and sometimes civically-engaged work before they walk in our doors. Some of them don’t have the resources until they get here. But our programs and mentorship serve as a one-stop resource for their systems of play; play that results in professional development, new visions for their futures, new skills and new friendships. As psychologist Peter Gray wrote, “children are biologically designed to educate themselves, through play and exploration; we don’t need to educate them, we need to provide the conditions to allow them to educate themselves.” ¹³ What are these conditions? In our field, they include access to equipment and a safe space—a place and space to hang out, mess around, geek out. As media makers, both youth media educators and learners, we have many unique responsibilities. The most important of those might be to be able to create new narratives with which we can understand our lives and our possible futures. Without being able to speculate our future narratives, we have no way to imagine new ways to guide our futures for the better.

This isn’t the final solution to closing the achievement gap of course, locally or nationally. This isn’t going to make our students’ or our own hardships go away, or change every policy creator’s mind about serving the needs of those students who continue to be disserved. But it can be a beginning. And it can provide hope where seemingly none may have existed before. Play is, above all, about taking risks, failing, and learning. There’s a lot of talk about taking risks, but it’s about time we normalize the latter two as well. Because the most impactful lessons start with making mistakes together, and end with making change together.

---

About the Author

Jordan Lee Thompson is an art worker and educator who has been working with digital media production since he was 12 years old—starting with stop-motion Lego animations, through a period of recording angsty folk-rock in high school, to creating obscure projection-performance art in college. Jordan now works in a variety of mediums including performance, installation, video production, projection, drawing, animation and other new media to combine his passions of participatory art, critical theory, sociology and storytelling. Jordan spends his days at CTV North Suburbs where he directs the Youth Media Department, helping teens write, produce and distribute their own short films, and serves as the Film Festival Coordinator for Mizna’s Twin Cities Arab Film Festival. Most recently, Jordan co-produced The Beginning of Things + Fictions in a guest residency at the Southern Theater’s ARTshare program as Creative Director of Dance & Other Behaviors. Jordan has also worked with organizations including James Sewell Ballet, the Minneapolis Television Network, and the Twin Cities Media Alliance. Jordan holds a BFA in Painting, a BA in Art History and Arts Management, and a certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Iowa.

This post is part of a series submitted by Gabriella Huggins, Community Programs Mentor at Spy Hop in Salt Lake City, Utah. The four posts in the series — The Window, Mock Identity, CO2, and Dancing with Thorns — are all created by youth from Spy Hop. Gabriella offers a perspective on the series that offers her insight into the connective tissues between the media and how it connects to the central theme of this Special Issue.

Time is fluid. To disconnect past, present, and future is a nearly impossible and arguably irresponsible task. Though specific to each individual in the intimacy of the here and now, the time of “now” is inextricably connected to the events of the past and crucial in shaping transitions into the future. As an individual, a woman and person of color, the child of immigrants, I am always aware of how my person is connected to time. The past trauma of my ancestors lives in my body, challenging me in the present to learn self love, as well as to practice boldness moving forward, to imagine a time in which equity and understanding are truly foundational in our global community. As a mentor to youth, I encourage in my students this critical understanding of the connectedness of their actions to the past and future, especially as they decide what stories to tell and the messages they want to send. How has the past limited people like them, and people unlike them? How is broad access to media in the present important in shaping cultural narratives? How are they, as citizens and creators, responsible to themselves and others in creating a future they can feel safe in and proud of?

 

Megan Aubry’s 2016 Reel Stories piece, Mock Identity, follows drag queen Mona Diet through her physical and emotional transformation from one self into another. Mona’s work mocks ideas of woman and manhood, in a time where issues of gender equity and traditional social norms around female representation are at the forefront of progressive conversations.

https://youtu.be/rpND8FOAxxc

---

About the Author

Megan Aubry is a seventeen year old high school junior who is starting her filmmaking career with Mock Identity. She hopes to continue along this path and attend film school and/or major in English to write screenplays.

Author’s Note:

History is more than the facts that you read in a book or see in a documentary. History is the YouTube video a young person creates in a media class or the Instagram photo they share with their friends. History can be a flash of fist-raised resistance during a Super Bowl halftime show or a movie that makes you see the world differently. An innovator in youth-led media for social change, Global Action Project (G.A.P.) recognizes that history is a big part of who we are, but that often we don’t see ourselves in history. In the following article, G.A.P. demonstrates how our new Media History Timeline supports young people to position our personal stories within greater movements for social justice!  

---

In a public computer center in New York City, media educators are walking through history. Long rolls of craft paper bursting with images of popular media hang from the walls, forming a patchwork display. The makeshift exhibition includes scenes from war, watershed moments in the advancement of LGBTQ rights, the uprising against police violence in Ferguson, Missouri, the backlash against migrants and refugees of global oppression and many, many more.

Guiding educators through this media gallery are youth leaders and adult staff from Global Action Project (GAP), a youth media organization, based in New York City that works with young people most impacted by injustice and builds community power through media production, political education and leadership development. For this workshop, GAP staff and youth leaders are leading a professional development training for digital media educators working with youth in afterschool programs across NYC  who seek to bring curricula that integrates advanced digital skills, team-building and political education to their youth.

The media gallery walk is an activity from GAP’s curriculum that focuses on an online learning platform: the Media History Timeline. The Media History Timeline is a new program for the 25 year old youth media organization, with origins in the era of digital video tape. Today, GAP is moving into a storytelling space where non-linear stories move to the multi-linear rhythms of posts linked inside a dynamic and shifting Internet.  

Before moving to the online world, media educators in the workshop are asked to walk through the paper gallery version of the web-based timeline and look closely at the different media stories. Which stories stand out? Which stories do they remember? Which stories are missing?

A media educator working in Crown Heights, Brooklyn speaks up immediately about the torture photos from Abu Ghraib that she remembered seeing in 2004. She speaks of how these images shocked the consciousness of many and starkly conveyed the barbarity and dehumanization of war. The Brooklyn-based teacher also recalls how an artist took these images of torture and mixed them with contemporaneous advertisements for Apple’s new iPod. Vibrant colors of dynamic, silhouetted dancers in a frenzy of musical euphoria are replaced by hooded prisoners in postures of humiliation and suffering. As the group discusses this media moment, culture jamming comes to be seen as a mechanism to respond to a consumer media system that relegates critical and relevant stories to the margins.

A media educator based out of Harlem remarks, “how relatable things are by looking at a timeline.” He points out the interconnectedness of these stories by looking at the opening of Harvey Milk High School in NYC in 1985 and joins it to the 2008 release of the biopic, Milk, starring Sean Penn. One story is a movement story for LGBTQ rights with the founding of a high school designed for transgender, gender-nonconforming, gay, lesbian and bisexual youth. While the other is a story of mainstream Hollywood acceptance. A media educator observes how Milk, a film about the first openly gay politician elected to public office in California, is a story that needed to wait years for a popular retelling and release. GAP youth leaders encourage further conversation by asking what happened in the intervening years within our popular culture, our media policy, our movement history that prepared the way for a film like Milk? What other stories made this one possible? And whose stories still need to be told? Through processing questions, educators are invited to continue the discourse, examining how stories can affect change and how stories reflect the change or maybe do a little of both.

After the gallery walk through, GAP youth leader Giselle Bleuz, presents a story she placed on the timeline: Beyonce’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime performance of her new single, Formation. It is a video steeped in contemporary African-American history with images of oppression and resiliency: the flooded 9th ward of New Orleans, a line of militarized police, raised fists of the Black Power movement and a young boy dancing in defiance. It is a story that Giselle, a black woman of trans experience living in a city with one of the largest municipal police forces, connects with and a song that speaks to her reality. In response to the anti-Beyonce backlash by former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani and other “law and order” czars, Giselle counters that as a person of color she has never felt protected by the police. This song, this video, this performance by a strong and talented woman of color is one that Giselle recognizes as a media moment that has connections to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the past and the Black Lives Matter movement of today.

At this time, Giselle models the interface of the Media History Timeline tool, showing how the Beyonce video runs along a track of media stories that show a chronology of policing alongside a track for youth organizing and another track for media policy. Weblinks expand the story and draw connections between stories to create a deeper and more comprehensive analysis. What happened in federal policy that led to high incarceration rates? And is this policy shift connected to the financing of local police? What about immigration policy reform and the simultaneous growth of private and public investment in surveillance technologies? Media educators are encouraged to look closely at the stories along the timeline as Giselle clicks through. What stories are there? What stories appear again and again? What stories aren’t there but should be?

An educator from East Harlem reflects on the entry that establishes origins of policing to the slave patrols of the 1800s, patrols that arrested freed blacks and escaped slaves and sent them to the South to be enslaved. Policing has a persistently brutal history, a history with an origin date, a starting point, a time when municipal police forces were established. Through stimulated discussion many in the room quickly draw the conclusion that this also means there was a time before the police existed. What was this time like? And how can we use this historical insight to imagine and work towards a future when there is no need for an institutional police force. A future where we have transformed our collective understanding and practices of creating safety and community well-being.

Digital tools like GAP’s Media History Timeline may one day develop and become digital catalysts that inspire the unimaginable. As online stories are connected by time and arranged across tracks that overlay, dissolve and alter elements around them, they become a new story because of their arrangement. Timeline stories have the power to take the past, identify connections to today, and with vision, build bridges to tomorrow.

To quote the writer and civil rights activist, James Baldwin, “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”

If we imagine a  history we can define and transform through the stories we share, then perhaps we can begin building a narrative for our liberation.

---

About the Authors

Giselle Bleuz is a youth leader working as a part of Global Action Project’s Outreach and Distribution Fellowship, SupaFriends program and Media History Timeline project. She has facilitated workshops at schools, organizations, and conferences and has produced several videos with GAP.

 

 

Carlos Pareja is Media History Timeline Coordinator with Global Action Project. He is a longtime media educator, digital storyteller, and activist who fights to change narratives, public policy and our world.

Author’s Note:

As a teenager, I was one of those political junkies who read the newspaper daily in my high school library, surrounded by a small knot of likeminded peers. So yeah, not the coolest, but definitely the most informed. I would have given anything to be able to vote at 16, especially since I’d been paying taxes since age 12 (through a job delivering newspapers, then working in a local restaurant). Unfortunately for my teenage self, passionate, action-oriented organizations like Vote16USA didn’t exist in the 1990s. No one in my small California town would have given more than an eye roll to the idea of 16 year olds casting a ballot. Fortunately for youth today, the issue of lowering the voting age in local elections is gaining the attention it deserves. As an educator, I was thrilled to write this lesson plan on an issue so close to my heart (going on decades now…). The plan is meant to give an overview of the issue and spur debate. Some young people are eager to vote; others may not feel ready. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, it’s important to talk about what it means to participate in a democracy—and what it means to be a taxpayer and rely on public services without having a voice in helping shape policy, especially at the local level.

---

Featured resources

• KQED’s The Lowdown blog post and video: Should San Francisco Lower Its Voting Age?
• Forbes: No, We Shouldn’t Lower the Voting Age to 16

Lesson Objectives

• Students will evaluate the arguments for and against teenagers ages 16 and 17 being allowed to vote in local elections and reflect on their own views of the issue.
• Students will respond both in writing and orally to argue their own position and counter opposing arguments.

Lesson Rationale

Youth civic action and participation has arguably never been more relevant. Recent environmental and civil rights protests have put the voices of young people front and center. Yet while these youth activists can post on social media, join protest marches, and even sue the federal government, they cannot cast a ballot until they turn 18. Efforts to lower the voting age to 16 are gaining traction, but are still largely unknown. The purpose of this lesson plan is to get students thinking and talking about whether or not they and their peers are ready to vote and what it could mean if they do, both now and in the future.  

Common Core Standards

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.7: Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W1: Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence

Key Vocabulary

Word	Simple definition
To canvass (v.)	To speak or interact directly with people regarding their vote on a specific issue or for a political candidate
Disenfranchised (adj.)	Not able to vote
Inclusive (adj.)	Including all services, participants or items that are required
Municipality (n.)	A city or town that has a local government
Ordinance (n.)	A law or piece of legislation

Essential Questions and Lesson Context

What are the best strategies for getting teens under 18 involved in political issues that affect their lives? What are the reasons for and against lowering the voting age?

Several countries, including Brazil and Great Britain, and two towns in Maryland have lowered the voting age to 16 or 15 for local elections. Arguments in favor of lowering the voting age point out that teens deserve a voice since they often work, pay taxes and rely heavily on local services, like public transportation and education. Research also shows that when teens vote earlier they are more likely to vote as adults, thus boosting voter turnout nationally. Counter arguments claim that 16 and 17 year olds are not mature enough to vote, as demonstrated by other laws that view those under 18 as minors. San Francisco voters didn’t pass Proposition F in November 2016, which would have made San Francisco the first major city to lower the voting age. However, efforts to lower the voting age continue throughout California and the nation.

Lesson Opening: Quick Write   

Do you think 16 year olds should be allowed to vote in local elections? Why or why not? If it were legal, would you choose to vote at age 16? Explain your answer.

A quick write allows students to write down their thoughts before discussing the opening question in order to increase participation and make the discussion more accessible to English Language Learners.

Guided and Independent Practice

1. Discuss the quick-write prompt. Do students think 16 year olds should be allowed to vote?
2. As a class, watch the video featured in The Lowdown post, “Should San Francisco Lower Its Voting Age.” After the video, let students know that Proposition F didn’t pass, but several cities around the world have lowered the voting age to 16. The issue isn’t dead, as the following readings will show.
3. In small groups or individually, students read the text of The Lowdown post and the Forbes article, then make a list of the arguments in favor and against the issue.
   
   Model making the pro/con list if needed by starting the list after watching the video. Then have students break into small groups to read the suggested articles, which offer further arguments.
4. After students have made the pro/con list, ask them to choose any argument they personally disagree with and make a case for their own viewpoint in writing. They should prepare their argument in a way that can be shared with the class, either orally, on paper, or in an online document.
   
   Model the written response, if needed. A response could look like: I disagree with ____________(name of person or writer who made the argument) when s/he said, “___________” (direct quote from article). Instead, I believe ___________(what the student believes) because _____________ (student supports argument with evidence.)
5. Have students share their responses with the class or in their small groups.

Discuss the following questions or ask students to complete them in writing as part of a lesson reflection or exit ticket.

• One of the arguments against lowering the voting age is that 16 year olds aren’t mature enough to vote. If you disagree, what could teens do to prove to their local election commission that they are responsible enough to vote?
• One of the reasons in favor of lowering the voting age is that it may encourage people to continue to vote as adults. Do you think this would be true for you if you could vote at 16?
• Do you think lowering the voting age is the best way to get teens more involved in civic issues? If so, why? If not, what might be a better way to get teens involved?

Extension/Homework Options

• Don’t hate, annotate: Students comment on each other’s written arguments on lowering the voting age and can respond directly to the featured articles online using an annotation platform like Hypothes.is. Visit these sites for a quick teacher tutorial and further resources.
• Write/speak locally: Students turn their pro or con arguments into a letter, short speech or presentation, then research ways to make their voices heard in their community. (Example: Speaking during the public comment section of a city council meeting, posting on an online forum, etc.).  

Author’s Concluding Note

Regardless of their stance on lowering the youth voting age, young people can make their voices heard in many ways beyond the ballot box. Encouraging active civic participation is not a partisan issue. It is necessary for a democracy to flourish. All of our voices matter—and the earlier young people come to see themselves as active and engaged, the healthier our democracy will be. The debate surrounding the youth voting age reminds us of this. Whether your students are reading the newspaper every day as I did, protesting policies they disagree with, writing letters, speaking to elected officials or simply trying to figure things out, helping them make their voices heard will always make a difference.  

---

About the Author

Rachel Roberson is KQED’s news education manager. Previously, she was a writing and humanities teacher leader on three continents, having served on the founding staff of KIPP Bayview Academy in San Francisco before moving to schools in Abu Dhabi and Austin, Texas. She started her teaching career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon. After 11 years in the classroom, Rachel worked in Oakland public schools as a senior program manager for Reading Partners and later as a trainer and staff development consultant for nonprofits, schools and women-owned businesses. A graduate of Northwestern University, Rachel was a journalist in the Bay Area before becoming an educator.