(VOLUME 5: ISSUE 1)
For four years, Youth Media Reporter has documented stories of young people who discovered confidence, activism, creativity and who they are through the process of youth media. In this issue, my aim was to collect the personal testimonials of youth producers-turned-media educators regarding the impact of youth media on their lives, their peers and their communities and audiences. This issue captures the stories of nine youth media practitioners who are paying it forward, illustrating youth media’s multiplier effect.
The power of experiencing youth media makes a lasting impact on young people, some of who go on to become youth media educators or even start up their own organizations. The stories of these young leaders—some captured in this issue of YMR—speak to the depth, breadth and significance of a youth media education.
Three of these authors— Emily Jacobi, Christine L. Mendoza and Chrystian Rodriguez—experienced the transformative power of youth media programs as teens in the United States. While their stories are unique, as teens in these programs, they developed self-confidence, global citizenship and collaborative problem-solving skills in an environment that privileged peer-to-peer training and youth leadership. As youth media producers they were invited to find their voices—and to help other young people do the same—before they had graduated from high school. Ultimately, Jacobi, Mendoza and Rodriguez graduated from these programs with a greater sense of themselves as leaders and teachers. This confidence, combined with skill and experience, manifested a passion for bringing new generations of young people the life-changing experience youth media provides.
Two articles in this issue document the stories of young people who came into their own as media producers in their late teens, and subsequently became educators. Recognizing the transformative power of storytelling and self-representation, media practitioners Zach Niles, Banker White (with the support of Paula Cavagnaro, Black Nature and Emilie Reiser) and Robert Martin bring storytelling and media production skills to communities who have been historically misrepresented by others. The work of these practitioners has been recognized and supported by youth media organizations, schools, and community leaders, and demonstrates another dimension of the impact media production has on the lives of young people.
Creating this issue of Youth Media Reporter was a joy and inspiration. In the process of interviewing and collaborating with the authors, I felt the enthusiasm, conviction and determination that drives the entire youth media engine forward. The experience of putting these stories together provided the opportunity to see how youth media will continue to build and evolve in the near future. I welcome readers to experience the impact of youth media’s multiplier effect on this issue’s contributors.
Sincerely,
Christine Newkirk
Managing Editor, Youth Media Reporter
Author: Christine Newkirk
Applied Theater and Youth Media
Robert Martin trained professionally as a stage and screen actor and continues to produce, direct, write and perform original stories in schools, theaters, festivals and just about any community setting where a story needs to be told and folks want to tell them. He specializes in the fields of Community-based Arts, Applied Theater, and Digital Storytelling; utilizing his diverse background in alternative styles of theater, hip-hop and oral history to create original media. He currently produces the Clear Creek Festival, a multi-discipline, community arts festival just outside of Berea, KY.
YMR: You have developed a successful approach toward incorporating Applied Theater and media production in the classroom. How did your own background inform the work you do today?
Robert Martin: I became a youth media educator and researcher through a passion for theater and story. Like most of the arts, theater gave me a voice, a platform to explore my identity, and tools to interact with the world. Through theater, I could connect to others, communicate my own experience, and begin to examine the world.
In college, I spent a lot of my time thinking about storytelling—what the tools are that a storyteller needs to successfully honor both voices in the story, that of the actor and character they portray. Theater helped me record my experiences in my physical and emotional memory so I could re-create experience as a writer, actor or director. After graduating, I moved to New York City and was drawn to community-based artists and culture workers—people who did not necessarily identify as traditional theater practitioners, but who had stories to tell about their homes, lives, communities, and place in the world.
I found that when a group is deeply invested and has control over the fate of their projects, the participants often develop a much greater capacity and passion in telling their own stories and incorporating stories they find meaningful. From this place I approached my work as a theater artist and activist, which led to becoming a teaching artist; and, eventually led to work as a youth media educator.
YMR: How did you come to the work of applying theater and media production techniques in the school context? Tell us about your experience in transfer schools and your vision for your work.
Martin: It started when I became a teaching artist with Dance Theatre Etcetera working in NYC Transfer High Schools in Brooklyn. I was wrestling with how to connect my own insights into the power of storytelling with the situation facing Transfer School students. Transfer students are sensitive to failure and doubt, which are aggravated by the traditional top-down, learning-for-the-test, pass/fail structure of the conventional public school system.
Transfer schools are a particular initiative by the NYC school system to address over-aged, under-credited students. These are students that in high school fell behind in their necessary Regents’ credits requirements for reasons of truancy and a variety of other factors, dropped out of school, and agreed to re-enter the educational process through a Transfer School. These schools are typically small (with about 150 students) and have a staff of advocate counselors from a partnered social service agency who meet with students in group sessions each week in addition to their Regents-required classes. Coined “group,” these meetings are a more accessible space to talk about the challenges that affect the school process.
In addition, transfer schools often have a curriculum that is student-based and each student has her or his own trajectory. Additional structures are set up to help re-frame the student’s experience so that they no longer experience failure, including opportunities to work or intern and see society and the workplace differently.
As a teaching artist, I found that an efficient way to cut through the anxiety and insecurity shared by the students in relation to their previous experiences, often with oppressive institutional structures, was to focus my approach as a facilitator using a Freirian approach of Co-Intentional Education—the idea that every person has something to offer, a story to tell, and the capacity to teach as a member of a community if the learning space is genuinely grounded in power sharing and dialogue.
My goal was to help students use media to re-frame their history of experiencing failure within the school system. For many students media was also a tool to examine challenges they felt within their families, their communities, and society more generally—toward an experience of ownership, agency, pride, and community engagement.
YMR: In your work, Applied Theater techniques are a fundamental component of the process through which you support students’ storytelling and media production. Explain a bit more about how this works.
Martin: My aim has been to combine applied theater and critical pedagogy alongside digital storytelling because media and video production clearly piqued my students’ interest from day one. Most students were instantly hooked by the prospect of learning media production, specifically professional camera equipment and editing software.
Students were using media technology as a tool for recording and communicating information. I had only a small role in getting them engaged in this aspect of the class, mostly because new media technology, including video, audio, social media and cell phones, were totally normalized and preferred means of communicating. It took a bit more time to ramp up to the task of telling personal stories, but when framed around assignments—such as: create a short PSA on an issue teens face at school or discuss the challenges teens face getting to school in the morning through a short narrative film—students were able to own their vantage point, become more open to sharing and receptive to other’s feedback as we began to build community around shared experience.
I found that using Applied Theater techniques, such as role-playing exercises, were key. For example, students would role-play as media creators (a role I would ultimately ask them to own by the end of the class) the process of presenting a film treatment to an audience who, in turn, played the role of a production company giving the presenter the opportunity to dialogue around suggestions for improvement and collaboratively arrive at strategies for moving forward.
The combination of Applied Theater and media production, in addition to offering high level tools of expression, creation, and collaboration, positively impacts the lives of students, offering a process that allows students who experienced failure in school to reframe their experiences in a different light with the support of their peers.
YMR: What would you recommend to other youth media educators, given your experience?
Martin: I recently completed my Master’s degree through the first Applied Theater Masters program in the United States at the City University of New York School of Professional Studies (CUNY SPS). At CUNY, I was able to reflect on my teaching practice as a scholar practitioner and go further in capturing the best practices of fusing applied theater with digital storytelling to make the most of classroom learning.
My research evidence includes first-hand accounts from my students who explained why the process engaged them as learners and how it helped change their ideas of what they could accomplish in their lives.
Youth media educators can apply theater and media production to over-aged, under credited students—an important demographic—but also in any school as the goals are the same: to build classrooms that transgress, pursue critical dialogue, support a safe and accessible space for students to explore what ignites and confounds them and their place in society. Such classrooms emulate those envisioned by such scholars as Dewey, hooks and Freire. But the goal is not simply a classroom commitment to “educate” in an innovative way or even to achieve a rise in graduation rates. While those are important outcomes, our approach is fundamentally about valuing young people and their experiences and encouraging them to own and invest in their lives and communities when so many outside influences suggest the opposite.
An Applied Theatre approach to Digital Storytelling will be challenging to the youth media practitioner as it requires group building, acting, devising material, role play, and critical dialogue carefully integrated within a tight media pedagogy. We also know most teachers may not have opportunities to create these learning opportunities left unsupported in their classrooms; but, as alternative educators with access, we can utilize these tools to aid the classroom in becoming a transgressive and safe space that deeply engages story and personal development through theater and media.
Youth Media Saved My Life
Born in Brooklyn, NY, Christine L. Mendoza went to Educational Video Center (EVC) in New York City as a teenager. She returned to EVC after spending two years in Spain where she worked for the Consejeria de Educacion, and taught English using visual media as a facilitation tool. Christine received her Masters from the Comparative Ethnic Conflict Program at Queens University in Belfast and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BA in Media Studies from Hunter College. She has facilitated workshops at an international youth camp in Finland, to Protestant and Catholic youth in Belfast and in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has also interned at ABC News and BBC Northern Ireland. Christine is currently the co-director of the Youth Documentary Workshop and the director of Educational Research and Evaluation at EVC. In this interview, Christine draws connections between her personal experience and her vision of youth media for educators and students she now trains.
YMR: You participated in Educational Video Center (EVC)’s programs as a student, first a high school student then a college student. Now you work for the organization as a full-time staff member. What about your experience there drew you back in as an adult?
Christine L. Mendoza: EVC literally saved my life. When I was 15, I dropped out of high school and was out for a year. I went back to school at City-as-School, an alternative high school program. That’s where I learned about EVC.
EVC made school more relevant, and was exactly what I needed as an independent student who still needed some guidance. EVC provided a program that was part classroom, part workplace. I felt that I was given a lot of responsibility and that I was trusted. So many times before I had been told I was a failure, but the staff at EVC helped me find what I was good at, and supported me so I could succeed. I continued at EVC through the end of high school, and then into college. As a high school student, I participated in the Doc Workshop, and I transitioned into the YO-TV program when I started College. I was exposed to global issues because I was able to travel as an EVC media educator. Looking back, I can see that so many of my choices—from where to go to graduate school to what I want to do for a career—are thanks to my experience at EVC.
When I started at EVC in high school, I was living day by day and school was not one of my top priorities. From there, I became the first in my generation of my family to go to college. I have one older and one younger brother, and their lives have followed a different path which didn’t focus on education.
Because of the skills I developed at EVC and the emphasis they placed on education, I am able to be the person I never imagined I could be—a person that is really contributing to society. For this reason, I have returned to EVC as an educator and researcher—I want to pass on to a new generation of young people the confidence and skills that EVC gave to me.
YMR: What makes the EVC curriculum different from traditional school/educational curricula? Why does this appeal to you as an alumnus and educator?
Mendoza: EVC emphasizes engagement, literacy, and civic journalism. Young people have to be engaged in and like what they’re doing in order to be successful and to make a real difference.
Knowing that, EVC asks young people to create their own research questions and develop their own means for research, helping to support in realizing their vision. At the end of projects, the young people present their research to staff and community members, and their knowledge and insight are appreciated and valued.
I experienced this first hand while I was a student at EVC. The work that I was doing at EVC was project-based, relevant to me and my peers, and it was meaningful. I wasn’t sitting down and memorizing material for class. My learning was connected to something real, and something that would be helpful to the community in the future. I knew that the research I was doing and that the videos we were producing would help other people.
Because of the way EVC’s program worked, it became critical that I was there and that I worked every day. I never missed a day at EVC and I never missed a day of class at school because of EVC. I began to understand why school was relevant to me. When students find this connection for themselves, between a project they’re working on and school, it makes a big difference in the way they feel about school overall.
YMR: Describe a project you worked on that had a big impact on you.
Mendoza: The second video I worked on, through YO TV, was about the juvenile justice system in the United States. We wanted to tell the story of young people who were incarcerated, while showing the broader community issues that led to that moment in their lives. The message of the film was that incarceration doesn’t work because it creates a high level of recidivism and does not, in fact, reduce crime.
The film demonstrated that it’s the lack of resources in a community that lead to crime, and those who do commit crimes need better alternatives to incarceration.
The project had a huge impact on me at the time. We decided that as part of the research for the film, we would go to Rikers Island—New York City’s main jail complex—to better understand the experience of being there. We were given access to inside the Island. There, we interviewed prisoners, saw cells, and saw the church. While we couldn’t film these things, we were able to use the information we gained to create a portrait of that community.
The most notable part of that experience was the time I spent working with formerly incarcerated youth. As part of our reciprocal agreement with New York’s Alternative to Incarceration (ATI) program, we had to go into incarceration programs and teach film classes. My peer filmmakers and myself (all college students) created a curriculum, and did a series of four peer-to-peer workshops. Through the process of these workshops, the young people opened up and told their stories to the EVC students, and we shared stories with them. Not only was I personally impacted by their stories, but I discovered then that I enjoyed teaching and working with young people, and I decided I wanted to be a teacher.
YMR: How did your involvement with EVC impact your educational and career trajectory?
Mendoza: My work with EVC impacted my educational trajectory in a very concrete way. I graduated from undergrad with a major in media and a minor in sociology. I focused on written journalism because I had obtained a very good film education from my work at EVC and other community media outlets in NYC. My interest in sociology was spurred by the research I did for film projects at EVC.
I was exposed to international travel through my work at EVC, and that opened more doors for me after college. I went with EVC to Belfast, Ireland, to work with Catholic and Protestant youth on a project that would build bridges across religious divides through film. While there, I made connections with the University. I went back to those connections later, applied and was accepted to the Master’s program. I graduated with a Master’s in International Politics and Ethnic Conflict Resolution from the School of Politics, International Studies & Philosophy, and wrote my thesis on the education of new immigrants in divided societies. I looked specifically at Belfast and Quebec as case studies. Following that experience, I’ve been able to work with youth in South Africa, and most recently in Spain.
I have to say that staff at EVC was definitely influential in getting me on this path—more so than the curriculum itself. Torrance York, Steve Goodman, and the whole staff created a culture of acceptance and understanding. They were open to what I was going through, and supported me.
YMR: Do you see the potential to expand programs like EVC into the traditional school structure and school day?
Mendoza: Well, right now I am doing research to develop ways in which EVC’s educational model can be replicated in all high schools. I’m finding that there is a big difference between how things work at EVC, and how youth media programs work within high schools. This difference is mainly due to the fact that all students at EVC selected to be here, and the high school students at schools are sometimes brought into the program without the option. However, I’m finding that once the high school students get more involved in the EVC-style work at their high school, they get hooked. They see that they are allowed to work in the building in a way they can’t during the school day. They have ownership of the space and a new kind of authority. They feel more comfortable and this helps them engage.
I am continuing this work, to find out how we can best create an EVC microculture within traditional school spaces. We’re also developing innovative ways to tie EVC curriculum into the high school core curriculum. We have coaches working with history teachers and global studies teachers, but also hoping to partner with math teachers.
YMR: What would you encourage other youth media educators to do for their students, as a result of your life experience and work with EVC? Mendoza: I encourage all of my students to look toward outside opportunities and open their minds to bringing different kinds of people into their lives. I encourage my students to strive to be well-rounded and exposed to lots of different careers and ideas, to find something that they are really good at, and to travel. This could be as simple as getting out of your own borough. Right now, I’m working with a team of youth to do research on the Liberian population in Staten Island—a community of New York City that youth might never see otherwise.
I also encourage my students to be self-reflective about their learning. I see that this helps them get engaged. I ask them to write down their expectations for learning or for the project, and to revise the list every two weeks or so. This practice creates a kind of self-awareness of the learning process. I also encourage them to keep working and keep moving, so that they have no time for self-doubt.
Youth Media: Invaluable and Life Changing
Chrystian Rodriguez is a youth-producer-turned-media educator who currently works at Global Action Project (G.A.P.) in New York City where he writes curricula, develops community relationships, and works directly with a new generation of filmmakers. Since joining G.A.P. in 2004, Chrystian has facilitated a variety of programs with young people from different communities as well as identity groups. He has also devoted his time to co-organizing youth film festivals, coordinating and facilitating media literacy, production and political education programs locally and nationally; specifically, in conferences such as the Grassroots Media Conference, the Allied Media Conference and the United States Social Forum. Chrystian is also a pop-culture guru and has begun research on the subject in educational environments during his time spent as a fellow of the Youth Media Learning Network. He is also very obsessed with zombies.
With nine years of media education experience behind him, Chrystian reflects on his experience as a youth producer, his youth media genealogy and career trajectory, as well as his future goals to open his own youth media organization one day.
YMR: Your first experience with media production was a call-in TV show hosted by the MNN Youth Channel in New York City. What did you gain from this experience and how did it impact your next steps as a media producer and educator?
Chrystian Rodriguez: I had an early interest in connecting politics with media. It came about during a media class at my high school. It offered me a new way to understand what’s behind the media, its purpose and intentions. Even more than that, I started to think about the connection between filmmakers and what they are producing for an audience—what you want them to take away from the experience, the story, but also what you want your audience to take away about you as a filmmaker [and] your world view. My media class teacher took notice of my interests and recommended that I become a part of the MNN Youth Channel (YC); a youth media program within Manhattan’s public broadcast channel. And so, I began working as a volunteer supporting youth in production while exploring my own cinematic/broadcast interests.
I quickly moved from a volunteer to producer. I co-hosted a call-in TV show that critiqued current films and engaged young people in discussions about movies. Youth Channel staff recognized my ability to work collaboratively with other youth, beyond my technical skills, and so they asked me to become a peer trainer. Soon, I ran both technical and editing workshops for other YC participants. I enjoyed it but I was insanely shy, and so it was difficult for me because it was the first time I was in a leadership role and I needed to be able to facilitate and communicate in new ways.
YMR: Not long after, you transitioned to an executive producer role for “Defense Against Media Nonsense,” a role in which you taught yourself how to facilitate the production process with young people. In what ways did you grow through that experience? How did it change the way you view the world?
Rodriguez: Because the staff at YC was interested in my personal growth, they transitioned me out of the peer trainer position, and at age 18 I became the executive producer of a television show called “D.A.M.N. YC NEWS!?” (Defense Against Media Nonsense).” The experience was trial by fire and learning by doing and showed me that you have to grow into being an educator.
When I became responsible for producing—on my own—a 30-minute piece every two weeks, I quickly realized that the format was not going to appeal to a young audience. So I [led] a planning process with my YC peers. [The] vision and new format would soon be identified as an alternative youth news show. Being the point person was new to me—planning, coordinating committee meetings, and then managing production—and challenged me to bring my creative self to become an educator/media maker. Guiding the YC team [I had] to create a learning process for others. At this point there was no room for shyness.
YMR: Soon after you moved into an educator position at Global Action Project (G.A.P.). What were your first few years like? Did you find things that surprised, inspired, or intimidated you?
Rodriguez: I got exposed to NYC’s youth media landscape through the Urban Visionaries Youth Film Festival, which helped me build relationships with many organizations and learn from their different approaches and missions. That is how I got to the Global Action Project (G.A.P.), a youth media organization that works with young people most affected by injustice in order to build the knowledge, tools and relationships needed to create media for community power, cultural expression, and political change.
During the first few years working as an educator there, I developed a new perspective on youth media. I began to see that it wasn’t simply about the production process, but also about exploring identity and helping young people understand for themselves the ways in which they are affected or oppressed by media messages. Most importantly, I began to understand how media could be used as a tool for young people to think critically about the conditions that affect their communities and discover themselves politically.
The kinds of things that encouraged me at G.A.P. included stepping into a co-facilitator model, working in collaboration with another educator to bring our strengths and interests into the curriculum and our programs. A fundamental difference between co-facilitation and working alone is that, as a co-facilitator, you are in constant dialogue with another educator, negotiating facilitation style, communication, curriculum ideas, and hopefully, building best practices together. It also helps us become more accessible to the youth in the program because there are two adults to connect with. When it works, there is a stronger dynamic and peer analysis between facilitators about what young people need, what youth are bringing into the educational space, and how their experiences and knowledge can be incorporated into the media process. That also speaks to the popular education approach that G.A.P. uses.
There are two other things that I’ve been part of that have helped to shape my approach to this practice. First is that I play a key role in constantly revising and applying G.A.P.’s curriculum (http://curriculum.global-action.org), which means that I’ve taken on both staff development support for other media educators across the field through trainings and workshops. Most recently, I worked with folk to revise the structure of G.A.P.’s core framework. Specifically, we worked to make sure that we communicate through our curriculum both the oppressive and libratory potential of media. It’s the idea of praxis—that whenever there is oppression, there will also be people working for justice by identifying the challenge, taking action, assessing the outcomes, and following up on what’s next that can lead to a victory. For us, the key component is the media’s role in this process, for better or worse.
Personally, I have also worked to develop a way to include popular culture in an educational space. I’ve done this for two reasons:
1) Pop culture is a powerful force in shaping the way we think; and,
2) It is crucial to young people’s daily experience—they are immersed in it—so educators must unpack pop culture with youth in the work we do.
I believe that as educators, we need to support young people in deconstructing pop culture without taking the joy out of consuming it. I had the chance to explore this idea through my time as a Youth Media Learning Network fellow by developing a workshop called “reframing pop culture.” The workshop was designed to challenge the universal concept of the “every man” hero reflected in mainstream media. By repurposing characters from movies such as X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Matrix, unrepresented communities like immigrant youth experimented with rewriting and structuring narratives to include their own stories and histories.
As an educator, I am continually learning. For each young person, what he or she takes away from the media production process is unique. There’s no one approach, and no single outcome. I want to give young people some of what I gained through my experience learning media production and analysis at a young age.
YMR: Sometimes G.A.P. requires young people to have challenging or uncomfortable conversations in order to arrive at a new understanding of a social issue. Can you name one project that stands out to you as both trying and fruitful? What did you learn?
Rodriguez: G.A.P. does a lot of political education with youth in the process of making media and supports young people to think about media as a kind of political entity. This means that the workshops sometimes lead people into challenging conversations, as they understand the existing ideological and political components of media. In the beginning, there is often a lot of push back from the young people, particularly if they’ve never had these kinds of conversations before, as they start to see that the conditions they face are not random, but have histories and systems in place to sustain them. Everything is not always peachy. This is about critical thinking.
And while some conversations are difficult, they’re also invaluable. And as an educator/facilitator it’s important that you shape the space for these conversations to be productive and positive for the development of young people as individuals and as a working group.
For example, a few years back I co-facilitated a group that wanted to make a video examining the relationship between beauty standards and race. It invited a conversation about privilege among certain social groups and the lasting impact of colonialism on concepts of beauty closely related to Eurocentric standards. This was a challenging conversation to facilitate in a racially diverse group of youth who rarely get to talk to each other across race and identity about this kind of issue, especially for mixed race youth identifying as white.
The reason it was hard is not simply about “difference,” but exploring identity through history, and supporting youth to critically reflect on who they are. The result was Beauty and the Box, a sci-fi narrative that critiques media’s role in shaping beauty standards. And while the final piece is not explicitly about race and beauty to the extent our conversations were, the process was essential to informing the piece—who they cast as the hero, and the contrasting worlds they created. Their relationships and conversations went way beyond the video and advanced the critical thinking in their daily lives.
YMR: What would you say to a funder that asks why youth media programs are important for urban youth?
Rodriguez: By “urban youth,” do you mean youth of color who come from oppressed communities? If we’re talking about youth media in general, then it’s about providing tools for youth to represent themselves and their communities for the simple purpose of telling a story that is not often heard. It’s a way for youth to explore and “put their voice out there,” but that’s not all it can be. Not all youth media organizations are the same.
For example, at the Youth Channel I learned how to effectively develop and manage production for broadcast in a way that was youth-generated, and at G.A.P. we have a very specific social justice framework. So for a funder, these kinds of programs create ownership tied to youth history, experiences, and identities. And the reason why that’s important is because, as youth are immersed in mainstream media it affects their thinking and provides a space to question and build their analysis of the world. Ideally, it gives youth a way to align themselves with advocacy campaigns through the production of messages used for social justice.
YMR: What three things would you like every young person to walk away with after going through a youth media program?
Rodriguez: I would like young people to leave G.A.P. with the tools, resources and the knowledge to use media practices for their own use—whether or not ideologically motivated—to have access to a supported process of identity exploration. I’d like young people to understand that knowing themselves is a large part of the media production process and leave with the understanding that media is a large part of our culture and society shapes we do. I would like them to have a better state of mind about how to read the media that we’re fed every day, what we’re apt to understand as our reality, and be able to reflect, and question, and to have a critical distance from it.
[As educators, we must help youth] to understand a non-hierarchical model for media production—working collectively [as a] team to identify with and produce something that they can all connect with. When you build on an understanding about how work can happen in a non-hierarchical space, this can also directly be translated into our daily experiences in communication and working with other in our community.
YMR: What is your dream for the next ten years of your work in the youth media field?
Rodriguez: My dream for the next ten years? This is actually a question I asked myself not to long ago. I really want to be in a place where I will be working on my own media projects specifically connected to my ideological beliefs. I also want to extend my experience and knowledge as an educator, providing professional development workshops and/or presenting in lectures available for other educators. [One day, I’ll] create and manage my own youth media organization—a dream I aspire [to fulfill].
Interview: danah boyd
danah boyd is a social scientist at Microsoft Research and a research associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In her research, she examines everyday practices involving social media, with specific attention to youth participation. Lately, she has been focused on issues related to privacy, publicity, and visibility. She recently co-authored Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. She is currently co-directing the Youth and Media Policy Working Group, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. She blogs at www.zephoria.org/thoughts and tweets at @zephoria.
This interview was conducted by Christine Newkirk, the Managing Editor of Youth Media Reporter at the Academy for Educational Development. Christine has worked for several years in the youth media field as a scholar, practitioner, social science researcher and evaluator in New York, Costa Rica and Brazil. She is currently completing her Master’s thesis in International Affairs at the New School University in New York City. Newkirk’s research interests include youth activism, new media technologies, and grassroots social and economic development.
YMR: Some people say that changes in technology inevitably result in changes in society, while others say that society continues as it will and new technologies are used as they make sense within existing social relations. What does your research on teens and new media technologies add to this debate?
danah boyd: As always, reality is somewhere between two extremes: “technology is radically changing and the lives of young people are turning upside down” versus “nothing is changing and the lives of teenagers continue as they always have.” I’ve found that teens are primarily engaged in practices that are common for their life stage but that technology has inflected those practices in new ways. For example, in using major social media, teens have to make sense of communicating in a persistent, searchable environment while balancing new tensions between what constitutes public and private.
YMR: Share with us some highlights from what you learned about American teen culture through your ethnographic research with teens.
boyd: The concept of ‘teenager’ is a social construction. The term was devised in the 1940s to address a marketable demographic. In contemporary American society, teens are primarily living at home and are functionally dependent. Teens make up an important part of American society, but they are also, in many ways, excluded from adult society and always have been. One prevailing attitude toward teens persists in this decade and is clearly reflected in the law: teens are perceived as vulnerable and therefore protected from interactions with adults, are perceived as dangerous and therefore kept out of the public sphere through curfew laws and penal laws. Teens are taught to be wary of adults that they don’t know. And while we want them to be politically engaged, we don’t invite them to be part of adult society in any meaningful way.
While most adults see formalized education as the ‘job’ of teenagers, most teenagers are focused on figuring out how the social world works. They want to understand how people relate to one another while making sense of social hierarchies. They’re trying to figure out their sexuality and their social standing at the same time. This sets the stage for their Internet engagement. For most teenagers, the Internet provides an opportunity for them to socialize with their peers in light of their limited mobility and access to public spaces. The Internet is to today’s teens what the mall was to my generation. It’s a place for flirting, gossiping, and hanging out.
YMR: If you found that teens are using social networking mostly to engage with people they know offline, what are the implications for youth media practitioners?
danah: The Internet used to be primarily about engaging with strangers who shared your interests. Public online spaces were “interest driven.” Today, they’re “friendship driven.” Teens turn to social network sites to engage with the people that they already know rather than meeting people online. As I explained in a talk I gave at State College in April 2009:
I use the term”social network site” instead of “social networking site.” This is intentional. While you might be off using Facebook and MySpace to network with business colleagues, high school mates, and the attractive individual that you think you might want to date, most teens are not. They’re focused on their friends. They use these sites to connect to people that they already know from school, church, activities, summer camp, etc.
Teens’ engagement with social network sites reflects all of the challenging social dynamics that exist in everyday life. This is why it’s complicated to overlay other relationships on top of the pre-existing networks. For example, many teachers want to use social network sites for classroom purposes, but kids who are working on a project together at school aren’t necessarily friends and forcing kids to collapse their social worlds and their school worlds can have serious social consequences. Educators need to identify exclusionary dynamics in the room and keep in mind that these will probably play out online.
It’s one thing to be networked personally and another to show all of your social connections to all of your friends. This may have particular implications for programs aimed at bridging young people from very different backgrounds. For example, I’ve examined strategies to bring individuals from separate and conflicting gangs together. I’ve seen that in spite of the affordances of technology, creating bonds between individuals from groups as different as these relies on the kind of time and social interaction that has always been necessary for building trust between strangers. Teenagers are particularly sensitive about what they reveal to their social world, and this is as true in digital spaces as it is in the real world.
Youth media practitioners might want to consider allowing participants to create alternate Facebook accounts help ease this tension. Once there are signs of acceptance, the two accounts might become fused into one. The key to creating thriving online communities that support youth media endeavors is allowing time and space for trust formation, and creating an audience in ways that feel natural to teens.
Some great examples include the use of social network sites to maintain connections made through extended social/academic activities, including the Model UN and summer camps and church youth groups. Social network sites function as an infrastructure for young people to continue ties with one another.
YMR: In your research, you identified discrepancies between adults’ expectations of what teens know about new media technologies and what teens actually know about these technologies. Can you talk about these findings and their implications for educators?
boyd: In order to address the gap between what “digital natives” supposedly know and what they really know, I believe that the best approach is bringing a dialogue about new media technologies into the classroom. While young people use new media technologies every day, they do not have a comprehensive understanding of how the information is negotiated, produced and reproduced.
Wikipedia is a fantastic example of a new media technology learning tool through which we can directly address some of these discrepancies. Young people know three things about Wikipedia: 1) it’s mostly accurate; 2) it’s easy to get to and covers most relevant topics; 3) it’s banned by all teachers. Given this, students use Wikipedia heavily while trying to obscure the fact that they’re using it so as to not upset their teachers. Students don’t have the critical skills to understand how to analyze Wikipedia; and, teachers all too often black and white understanding of the site does not help.
Wikipedia is a phenomenal source of information, precisely because it’s open. While all publications have their biases, Wikipedia’s are publicly exposed. As such, it’s possible to actually understand how the information was constructed, by whom, and with what biases. The particularly instructive parts of Wikipedia are not the content pages, but rather the history and discussion pages. Through looking at these pages, young people can develop a better understanding of how knowledge is produced. Bringing Wikipedia into the classroom can serve as an entrée into a conversation about the production of knowledge, the introduction of bias and control for bias, and the reproduction of information through new media technologies.
Additionally, there is space for conversation about authorship and intellectual property—a concept that has quite different meanings “on-the-ground” among young people and in law. For example, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, a PhD student at MIT Media Lab, has found that young kids often emphasize who shared content over who produced it. It’s not that young people do not recognize or value artists, but that they also value the individuals that they know who shared information with them and they want to give them credit too. This finding has broad implications for teaching not only media and news literacy, but also for bringing young people into the fold with respect to regulations around plagiarism in high schools and colleges.
Interview: Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (USC). He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending the past decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of thirteen books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. He is currently co-authoring a book on “spreadable media” with Sam Ford and Joshua Green.
Jenkins is the principal investigator for Project New Media Literacies (NML), a group that originated as part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Jenkins wrote a white paper on learning in a participatory culture that has become the springboard for the group’s efforts to develop and test educational materials focused on preparing students for engagement with the new media landscape. He also continues to be actively involved with the Convergence Culture Consortium, a faculty network that seeks to build bridges between academic researchers and the media industry in order to help inform the rethinking of consumer relations in an age of participatory culture. And he is working at USC to develop a new research project focused on young people, participatory culture, and public engagement.
Jenkins actively blogs at Confessions of an Aca-Fan.
This interview was conducted by Christine Newkirk, the Managing Editor of Youth Media Reporter at the Academy for Educational Development. Christine has worked for several years in the youth media field as a scholar, practitioner, social science researcher and evaluator in New York, Costa Rica and Brazil. She is currently completing her Master’s thesis in International Affairs at the New School University in New York City. Newkirk’s research interests include youth activism, new media technologies, and grassroots social and economic development.
YMR: How can educators best leverage new media tools in the classroom and in after-school settings to help young people A) investigate popular culture, and B) to ultimately tell unique stories and create bridges with like-minded young people around these stories?
Jenkins: Participatory culture has more to do with cultural practices than technologies and tools. Technologies are changing at a rapid pace and we will have to continually learn new tools. But all the more important that we learn how to navigate through social networks, that we learn how to pool knowledge with others who have diverse expertise, that we learn how to remix the contents of our culture to express new ideas, that we learn how to recognize and respond to diverse cultural norms, and that we learn how to evaluate information from many different sources. These skills are fundamentals that will impact how we interface with each other across an expanding array of platforms.
Young people have historically been early adapters and adopters of new media platforms of all kinds—in the 19th century, they created a national circuit for sharing what we would now call zines, newsletters printed by hand-setting type of toy printing press; in the early 20th century, schools and scout troops were among the core hubs for amateur radio production; they were among the first to use amateur movie and video cameras to produce fiction films (even if these films remained “home movies” because there was no means of public distribution and exhibition); and they have been key players since the dawn of the digital age. They are looking for places where they can associate with friends without adult supervision and they are looking for modes of expression, which are not tightly edited by adult supervisors.
YMR: How are new media technologies providing spaces for marginalized groups to engage in the re-negotiation of popular culture (including popular culture around gender roles, race, and politics) in the United States? What does participatory culture mean for the potential of young people to reframe cultural and political debates in the 21st Century?
Jenkins: Grassroots media makers have much more powerful ways of sharing what they make with each other now than at any other moment in human history and on a scale previously imagined. Yes, we live in a world where the concentration of media ownership means that corporate media exerts a very strong influence on our lives, but we also live in a world where grassroots media makers can produce and share media with each other across a broad range of different platforms. As this happens, those media makers who can connect their work to a larger community, which shares their interests and passions, have a real advantage in terms of breaking out of the clutter and finding a recurring base of support for their work.
The challenge, then, is to get messages out from one’s own community to reach a more diverse viewership. Here, the porousness of the digital environment helps in this process. YouTube represents a shared space—a borderlands or no man’s land—between many different forms of participatory culture. What we have to do is open our eyes and open our minds.
YMR: What are some of the greatest examples you have come across in your research of young people using new media technologies to find their unique voices, speak out, mobilize groups and/or challenge the status quo?
Jenkins: I am heading a team of graduate students in the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication at University of Southern California who are trying to explore ways that fandom and other forms of participatory culture is opening up a space for activism and enagement with public policy issues, ranging from copyright and intellectual property to racially biased casting in Hollywood to human rights issues around the world. Using existing material provides young people scaffoldings as they develop different aspects of storytelling to explore different aspects of themselves and the world around them. And displacing these issues onto fictional characters often allows them to dig deeper without fearing exposure. For example, one of the groups my team is currently studying is the Harry Potter Alliance, a group which now has 100,000 members world-wide who are committing to working to support human rights.
Working in relation to the existing infrastructure of the fan community is helping those who may never have thought of themselves as political before transition into greater political participation.
The group is equally open in its use of media tools and platforms, cobbling together a network of expressive capacities. They use Ning and Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, Flickr and Skype, Live Journal and podcasting, depending on their goals and the kind of interface they want to create with their various publics. The group has tackled genocide in Darfur, worker’s rights and equal marriage in the United States, and disaster relief in Haiti, among a range of other concerns.
Part of what allows them to do this is that they recognize the emotional underpinnings needed to support activism, embedding it within peoples friendship and interest networks, and making it part of their playful engagement with popular culture. They adopt new metaphors, which make politics come alive for their mostly young participants, many of whom find the policy wonk rhetoric of traditional activism confusing or off-putting. The Harry Potter Alliance is simply one of many such groups we are exploring which fuse culture and politics, new media technology and community organizing, in powerful new ways.
Another example is the group Racebender, which has been researched by my graduate student, Lori Kido Lopez. This group was started by fans of the American animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, who had been drawn to the program in part because of its representation of a multiracial/multicultural society. Young fans were disappointed when they learned that the characters who they had always seen as coming from many different races were all cast by Caucasian actors for the live action big screen version and so they began organizing, initially to protest and try to reverse the casting decisions, then to educate the public about what was going on and to urge the boycott of the film upon its release.
As a result, they collectively educated themselves about the history of race-based casting in the Hollywood system, identifying many previous examples where characters of color in fictions or real life stories were recast as white when made into movies, as well as an even more offensive history of blackface and yellowface performances where white actors performed often cartoonish versions of people of color. Like the Harry Potter Alliance, the group used a range of platforms—from live protests to online videos—to get their ideas across to the larger community. And in the process, they used social networks to make their struggle a global one, partnering with young supporters in many different countries to try to slow down the box office success of this big budget movie.
They did not get the film recast and the film has still made significant amount of money in the theaters. But they scored a huge success by largely shaping the conversations which occured around the film and educating many journalists (as well as the public) about the core issues it embodied. Almost every review of Last Airbender I read mentioned the protests and the filmmakers ere forced again and again to respond to the criticisms about their casting decisions. Moreover, the press began to apply what they learned from the Racebender protest to talk about other recent films—Prince of Persia—for example which also cast characters of color with white actors. And the group already is trying to gear up to protest another forthcoming film based on the Marvel comic book series, Runaways, which may also be about to cast a Asian-American character with a white actor.
We can read the Racebender campaign as symptomatic of the growing number of debates about race in America, which have come to characterize the Obama era—including ongoing discussion of racialized images in political discourse. But we can also see it as part of the growing number of youth led activist groups, which are reaching a global scope and are impacting public discussions around important issues, especially in the space of cultural politics. Many of these movements have their roots in participatory culture. As young people learn to express their ideas and exchange the media they produce with others, they feel more connected and more empowered.
They are able to tap into these new collectivities and connectivities to exert a collective, public voice, across a range of media platforms, and in doing so, they are helping to reframe how the media covers and how the public thinks about issues of concern to these populations.
YMR: What new media technologies do you see that are not yet fully utilized by educators in the classroom and the youth media field? How might these technologies be more accessible or bridged with those in traditional education settings?
Jenkins: Ultimately, it is not about the tools. We need to learn to communicate across a broad range of different platforms, to recognize the affordances and limitations of each, to know how to navigate different social networks and get our ideas in front of many different publics in ways that they will find meaningful and engaging. I believe these practices can be taught in any classroom.
At the end of the day, new technology does not advance your work if you stick to the same old top-down models of knowledge transmission in the classroom, if you are grading the podcast as if it were just another kind of book report, rather than creating a context which is open to collaboration, the active production and sharing of knowledge towards mutual problem solving.
Right now, most of those skills are being acquired outside the classroom through a range of informal learning contexts, yet there’s a profound break in the learning ecology where for all too many kids, their best ways of learning are prohibited at school as they are striped of the technologies and communities which enhance their learning beyond the school house gate.
I am particularly concerned about those youth who have little or no access to technologies outside of school and yet find that the school has banned Wikipedia and Facebook, has blocked access to YouTube and blogging technologies. Schools have an obligation to help these young people learn to become effective communicators and navigate these spaces. The schools have an obligation to help young people learn how to be creative, safe, ethical and socially responsible users of these tools. Some time ago, danah boyd and I published an online conversation which focused on the risks and challenges of integrating these new technologies into the classroom here: www.danah.org/papers/MySpaceDOPA.html. So, rather than thinking about whether schools should use Skype or Location-Aware mobile applications, let’s just say that schools need to embrace participatory learning through embracing whatever tools are accessible and appropriate to the needs of their communities.
Participatory culture is a frame of mind, more than a toolkit. From my perspective, I see young media makers moving from platform to platform, adopting new tools, while the core community continues. It is about taking whatever technologies are available at a particular moment and exploiting their affordances to serve your community’s ongoing needs and interests.
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FULL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
YMR: What have you learned about the production of culture through your study of participatory culture? Can you describe particpatory culture and its role in reframing the relationship between commercial media and the audience?
My interest in participatory culture began more than 25 years ago when I first sought ways to describe to the academic world what I was observing in my involvement with media fandom. At the time, much of the writing on media consumption emphasized the passive absorption of meaning, and I was spending time in a community which was regularly involved in passionate discussions of the media that mattered to them. They were in effect taking existing media content as raw materials or as my mentor John Fiske would call it, a resource for their own cultural productions. They were writing stories and novels about the characters from television shows; they were composing and performing and recording and exchanging music; they were editing videos which mixes popular songs with video images; they were creating their own costumes. And they did so within networks which supported their creative development and enabled the circulation of what they made to larger communities. So I coined the term participatory culture to describe the differences in the ways they related to media from media spectatorship as it was currently understood in media studies. It is part of the title of my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.
Over the past two decades, these fan practices have moved from the fringe to the mainstream. Many people are now remixing sounds and images and circulating them in every larger social networks. What these guys were doing editing with two vcrs and patch cords can now be done using powerful and low cost digital editing tools. They exchange of remix videos under the table at fan conventions is now conducted very publicly via YouTube, where a video may get several million views.
I argue in my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, that as these fan practices become more visible, they are exerting a much greater influence on how the mainstream media conceptualizes its relationship to its audiences and publics. And in my current book project, Spreadable Media, we are making the argument that even on the level of circulation, these participatory communities are reshaping how media operations. The choices each of us made to pass along meaningful bits of content to our friends is resulting in new trends in commercial media production and helping to build a support base for niche, independent, and global media makers.
As I describe this emerging culture, I am often ask if what is being produced is bad. Yes, much of it is bad, and that’s a very good thing for the revitalization of our culture. Beginning media makers need spaces where they can make bad art, get feedback from an accepting yet critically engaged community, and get better. They need to see bad art so that they don’t feel so bad about their own fledgling efforts. Educators talk about meaningful peripheral participation—that is, the need for times and spaces where newbies can lurk and observe, can take their first steps, and gradually become integrated into the production community. In the old mass media model, cultural productions that did not reach a certain level of technical polish were hidden from view. There was an enormous gap between the professional and the amateur.
On YouTube, though, you can see media productions of all qualities and degrees of personal/professional development; you can share what you make at every step in your journey and you can see what people working at the next stage are producing. Often, you can reach out to them for advice and mentorship; minimally you can learn by observing what they are doing as the processes of cultural production become more transparent. These are all aspects of what I am calling participatory culture.
YMR: How are new media technologies providing spaces for marginalized groups to engage in the re-negotiation of popular culture (including popular culture around gender roles, race, and politics) in the United States? What does participatory culture mean for the potential of young people to reframe cultural and political debates in the 21st Century?
Let’s start with the obvious. Grassroots media makers have much more powerful ways of sharing what they make with each other now than at any other moment in human history and on a scale previously imagined. Yes, we live in a world where the concentration of media ownership means that corporate media exerts a very strong influence on our lives, but we also live in a world where grassroots media makers can produce and share media with each other across a broad range of different platforms. As this happens, those media makers who can connect their work to a larger community which shares their interests and passions have a real advantage in terms of breaking out of the clutter and finding an recurring base of support for their work.
So, to take a minority group as an example, far more Asian-Americans reach the top levels of visibility on YouTube than on network television; the same has proven to be true in terms of the production and circulation of popular music; Asian-American comics artists are using the web to form a community of support around their work and using comics to call attention to the concerns of their community; and all of the above gets discussed and promoted through powerful Asian-American blogs. Asian-American groups are using social networks to rally audiences for films by Asian-American artists and to get activists to protest against the “white casting” of Asian parts in contemporary films—as has occurred most recently around the Last Airbender production (see below).
The challenge, however, is to get these messages out from their own ethnic community to reach a more diverse viewership. Here, the porousness of the digital environment helps in this process. While it is possible to ignore content online which does not seem to speak to your interests (and it is much harder to ignore network television or Hollywood blockbusters) but it is also possible, even likely, that you will stumble onto media produced by people outside your own core community. YouTube represents a shared space—a borderlands or no man’s land—between many different forms of participatory culture. What we have to do is open our eyes and open our minds.
Young people certainly benefit from this lower of the barriers to media production and circulation. Young people have historically been early adapaters and adopters of new media platforms of all kinds—in the 19th century, they created a national circuit for sharing what we would now call zines, newsletters printed by hand-setting type of toy printing press; in the early 20th century, schools and scout troops were among the core hubs for amateur radio production; they were among the first to use amateur movie and video cameras to produce fiction films (even if these films remained “home movies” because there was no means of public distribution and exhibition); and they have been key players since the dawn of the digital age. They are looking for places where they can associate with friends without adult supervision and they are looking for modes of expression which are not tightly edited by adult supervisors. Everything I said above about Asian-American media production holds for youth media production as well.
YMR: How can educators best leverage new media tools in the classroom and in after-school settings to help young people A) investigate popular culture, and B) to ultimately tell unique stories and create bridges with like-minded young people around these stories?
Let me first make it clear that for me, participatory culture has more to do with cultural practices than technologies and tools. In my discussion of youth media above, we see young media makers moving from platform to platform, adopting new tools, while the core community continues. It is about taking whatever technologies are available at a particular moment and exploiting their affordances to serve your community’s ongoing needs and interests. Participatory culture is thus a frame of mind, more than a toolkit. So, yes, it’s great if schools can bring in new digital tools to enhance their teaching, but it is even more important that they bring in a participatory learning models to shape the dynamics of their teaching practices.
I’ve been doing work for the past five years with the New Media Literacies Project to develop resources for teaching the skills needed to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape. We’ve developed resources which tap into the full range of new media technologies and which encourage teachers to engage with popular culture materials through their classes. But, we stress this as a set of conceptual skills and competencies, more than pure technological skills. Technologies are changing at a rapid pace and we will have to continually learn new tools. But all the more important that we learn how to navigate through social networks, that we learn how to pool knowledge with others who have diverse expertise, that we learn how to remix the contents of our culture to express new ideas, that we learn how to recognize and respond to diverse cultural norms, and that we learn how to evaluate information from many different sources. These skills are fundamentals which will impact how we interface with each other across an expanding array of platforms. You can learn more about these ideas by checking out my whitepaper, written for the MacArthur Foundation, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, and following along our blog about the New Media Literacies Project.
In Convergence Culture, I describe one way that young people are developing their voice and sharing stories with each other—through the creation of fan fiction and fan vids. A platform like Fan Fiction Alley in the Harry Potter fan world provides an enormous amount of support to new writers through what is known as beta-reading. Basically, each new writer gets assigned a more experienced mentor. I put it in those terms, because experience is not presumed based on age. There may be 14-year-olds giving advice to people their mothers age, as long as the 14-year-old has demonstrated the capacity to write a compelling story. This process allows the writers to grow. The fact that they are starting with borrowed materials means that they have a larger readership for what they write, a readership which has a shared background and mutual interests which encourages the exchange of insights. They can learn by breaking apart the work of J.K. Rowling and putting it back together again to create a new story. The existing material provides them scafoldings as they develop different aspects of storytelling. Despite or perhaps because of their use of shared materials, distinctive voices and perspectives emerge. People use their stories to explore many different aspects of themselves and the world around them. And displacing these issues onto fictional characters often allows them to dig deeper without fearing exposure—after all, it is Harry Potter who is speculating about whether or not he may be having queer feelings for his same sex classmates and not the author. This is why I keep coming back to fandom as a powerful model for thinking about how participatory culture works to support youth expression.
YMR: What are some of the greatest examples you have come across in your research of young people using new media technologies to find their unique voices, speak out, mobilize groups and/or challenge the status quo?
Lately, my interest in participatory culture has pulled me towards a greater attention to public participation and civic engagement. I am heading a team of graduate students in the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication at University of Southern California who are trying to explore ways that fandom and other forms of participatory culture is opening up a space for activism and enagement with public policy issues, ranging from copyright and intellectual property to racially biased casting in Hollywood to human rights issues around the world.
To continue with the Harry Potter theme which I started in the last question, one of the groups we are studying is the Harry Potter Alliance, a group which now has 100,000 members world-wide who are committing to working to support human rights. The group starts from the model of “Dumbledore’s Army” in the Rowling novels: an underground group of youth activists who challenges evil in their society and works together to change the world. What, the Harry Potter Alliance asks, if we had a Dumbledore’s Army for our world? What evils would it battle and how would we fight them? The group has tackled genocide in Darfer, worker’s rights and equal marriage in the United States, and disaster relief in Haiti, among a range of other concerns.
There’s so much I admire about this group. For one thing, they are working in relation to the existing infrastructure of the fan community to help people who may never have thought of themselves as political before transition into greater political participation. They are working with fan blogs and podcasts; they are partnering with “wizard rock” performers who share their music via mp3 files in social networks; and they are also partnering with more traditional activist groups and charities to insure that their work reaches a public beyond the Harry Potter fan community.
For another, they have adopted a decentralized structure while local chapters identify issues they want to work on and reach out to other organization members for support. Sometimes, this is purely collaborative, while other times, they use the concept of “house competitions” to see which group can get the most voters to the polls to vote on the gay marriage proposition in Maine, for example. While the group has a loose shared agenda, they are not a single issue organization and so there’s space for many different agendas working side by side, pooling resources as needed, working separately otherwise. And the group is equally open in its use of media tools and platforms, cobbling together a network of expressive capacities. They use Ning and Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, Flickr and Skype, Live Journal and podcasting, depending on their goals and the kind of interface they want to create with their various publics.
The group has been extraordinarily effective, recently winning a competition for online mobilization run by Chase Manhattan Bank, and delivering now four cargo planes full of supplies to Haiti. Part of what allows them to do this is that they recognize the emotional underpinnings needed to support activism, embedding it within peoples friendship and interest networks, and making it part of their playful engagement with popular culture. They adopt new metaphors which make politics come alive for their mostly young participants, many of whom find the policy wonk rhetoric of traditional activism confusing or off-putting. The Harry Potter Alliance is simply one of many such groups we are exploring which fuse culture and politics, new media technology and community organizing, in powerful new ways. You can learn more about this research at http://sites.google.com/site/participatorydemocracyproject/.
YMR: What new media technologies do you see that are not yet fully utilized by educators in the classroom and the youth media field? How might these technologies be more accessible or bridged with those in traditional education settings?
Again, for me, ultimately, it is not about the tools. We need to learn to communicate across a broad range of different platforms, to recognize the affordances and limitations of each, to know how to navigate different social networks and get our ideas in front of many different publics in ways that they will find meaningful and engaging. I believe these practices can be taught in a classroom which has no laptop per child and in classrooms that have one laptop per child.
So, yes, I can point towards many promising areas where new technologies are supporting new forms of learning (the use of augmented reality practices through mobile telephones, for example), but at the end of the day, none of these work if you stick to the same old top-down models of knowledge transmission in the classroom, if you are grading the podcast as if it were just another kind of book report, rather than creating a context which is open to collaboration, the active production and sharing of knowledge towards mutual problem solving.
Right now, most of those skills are being acquired outside the classroom through a range of informal learning contexts, yet there’s a profound break in the learning ecology where for all too many kids, their best ways of learning are prohibited at school as they are striped of the technologies and communities which enhance their learning beyond the school house gate. I am particularly concerned about those youth who have little or no access to technologies outside of school and yet find that the school has banned Wikipedia and Facebook, has blocked access to YouTube and blogging technologies. Schools have an obligation to help these young people learn to become effective communicators and navigate these spaces. The schools have an obligation to help young people learn how to be creative, safe, ethical and socially responsible users of these tools. So, rather than thinking about whether schools should use Skype or Location-Aware mobile applications, let’s just say that schools need to embrace participatory learning through embracing whatever tools are accessible and appropriate to the needs of their communities.
YMR: What are some of the greatest examples you have come across with respect to the positive contributions of young people in cultural or political debates facilitated by media convergence and participatory culture? Do you feel that these events have helped elevate the status of young people in global society?
I’ve already told the story of the Harry Potter Alliance, so let me focus on another group, Racebender, which has been researched by my graduate student, Lori Kido Lopez. This group was started by fans of the American animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, who had been drawn to the program in part because of its representation of a multiracial/multicultural society. They were disappointed when they learned that the characters who they had always seen as coming from many different races were all cast by Caucasian actors for the live action big screen version and so they began organizing, initially to protest and try to reverse the casting decisions, then to educate the public about what was going on and to urge the boycott of the film upon its release.
As they did so, they collectively educated themselves about the history of race-based casting in the Hollywood system, identifying many previous examples where characters of color in fictions or real life stories were recast as white when made into movies, as well as an even more offensive history of blackface and yellowface performances where white actors performed often cartoonish versions of people of color. Like the Harry Potter Alliance, the group used a range of platforms—from live protests to online videos—to get their ideas across to the larger community. And in the process, they used social networks to make their struggle a global one, partnering with young supporters in many different countries to try to slow down the box office success of this big budget movie.
So, by some standards, the effort failed. They did not get the film recast and the film has still made significant amount of money in the theaters. By other standards, they scored a huge success, largely shaping the conversations which occurred around the film and educating many journalists (as well as the public) about the core issues it embodied. Almost every review of Last Airbender I read mentioned the protests and the filmmakers ere forced again and again to respond to the criticisms about their casting decisions. Moreover, the press began to apply what they learned from the Racebender protest to talk about other recent films —Prince of Persia—for example which also cast characters of color with white actors. And the group already is trying to gear up to protest another forthcoming film based on the Marvel comic book series, Runaways, which may also be about to cast a Asian-American character with a white actor.
We can read the Racebender campaign as symptomatic of the growing number of debates about race in America which have come to characterize the Obama era—including ongoing discussion of racialized images in political discourse. But we can also see it as part of the growing number of youth led activist groups which are reaching a global scope and are impacting public discussions around important issues, especially in the space of cultural politics. Many of these movements have their roots in participatory culture. As young people learn to express their ideas and exchange the media they produce with others, they feel more connected and more empowered. They are able to tap into these new collectivities and connectivities to exert a collective, public voice, across a range of media platforms, and in doing so, they are helping to reframe how the media covers and how the public thinks about issues of concern to these populations.