Author: Kendra Hurley

“In the U.S. alone, there are over three dozen youth radio groups who are picking up mics and asking questions of their communities, their families and themselves,” writes Johanna Franzel on MediaRights.org. Generation PRX, a project of the Public Radio Exchange, supports this movement by providing an online space for youth radio producers to share their work, review other youth-made radio spots, and get licensed (and broadcast) by stations across the country. “There is a growing demand for youth radio producers; as their voices reach the airwaves, they are changing the face of conventional media,” writes Franzel.

A political cartoon that used the “n-word” in a Florida student newspaper sparked rallies against the paper and demands for an apology. The editor countered that good cartoons get people talking and thinking. “I would run it again tomorrow,” he told Inside Higher Ed.

The relaunched Youth Media Reporter is six months old, and we’d like to hear your thoughts on how it’s working so far. How have you used it? What articles have you found most helpful or relevant? Have you referred anyone to the site?
Please take a few minutes to look over the site, especially the departments page, where all YMR articles are archived. Then fill out the following brief survey. Your feedback will help shape YMR to better serve you and others interested in youth-made media.
Take the Youth Media Reporter survey.

The following is part of a series of articles exploring the new phase of introspection in the youth media field, in which educators have begun placing a premium on reflecting on their work and thinking and planning on a macro level.
As those in the field know, youth media programs can often engage students unable to learn well in traditional school settings. Just how youth media does this was one of the many topics considered at the Scholarship in the Digital Age conference, hosted by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy last year. At the conference, educators and researchers from around the world spent a day discussing their work and what makes learning engaging to teens who struggle in school. (Details about this and other topics discussed at the conference appear on the institute’s website.)
How does youth media pedagogy differ from that of more traditional education? What makes it effective? Educators at the Digital Age conference, as well as those interviewed last year by Youth Media Reporter, pointed to the following factors:

The Audience

Writing and producing for a specific audience is one of the most obvious qualities separating youth media from traditional schoolwork. Knowing their work will be received by actual people lets teens know that what they say is not only valuable, but has the potential to affect the wider community. It motivates teens to learn, to gather knowledge and present it clearly, and to work through multiple revisions before their message feels satisfying.

(Nearly) Immediate Gratification

Getting young people working on media fast is one practice commonly used to engage students, motivate them, and maintain their interest in learning. Participants at Youth Radio in the San Francisco Bay Area are on the air during their first week at the organization. At Appalshop, a community arts center in Whitesburg, Kentucky, educator Laura Doggett’s students use media equipment on their first day. Represent magazine’s summer workshop for foster youth lets teens brainstorm story ideas on day one.

Positive Peer Pressure

Research has proven that peer learning among young people works, and youth media programs regularly incorporate it. At Manhattan Neighborhood Network, veteran teen filmmakers train newcomers. Youth Communication, where I work, aims to get its stories widely distributed in schools, since hard-to-reach readers often respond enthusiastically to writing by their peers.

A Personal Touch

Much youth media involves young people telling their own stories in their own words, and that personal connection acts as a motivating force. By helping “hard-to-reach” teens address the pressing situations with which they live, it motivates them to learn the skills needed to tell their stories clearly. It may also eventually free them emotionally to focus on issues that seem less urgent to them, like school, math, or science.

Connecting with the Wide World

Ultimately, many youth media educators aim for students to gradually understand how their personal story connects to a larger issue—such as race, class, gender, or politics. As students become comfortable working in a particular mode of media, they are often encouraged to use their personal connection with a subject to explore its larger context. A young woman whose mother is in an abusive relationship might move from considering a personal story about living with domestic violence to a reported piece profiling women at a battered women’s shelter. Moving from a personal angle to a broader one can help young media makers in difficult situations feel less alone, become aware of their unique place in the world, and see how others who have grappled with similar situations managed. Sometimes it empowers them to become activists.

Authority Issues

At Youth Communication, editors have long noted that teens’ best learning often happens during meetings when the teacher becomes nearly invisible and the teens’ own enthusiasm and curiosity take a leading role in shaping discussion. This style of learning, which departs significantly from traditional classroom methods, is typical of the field.

Keeping It Real

A young person will likely learn a lot through the process of creating a piece of media. But unlike most school projects, learning is not the only objective in making youth media. Other intents might be to entertain, persuade, or inform an audience, or to motivate young or low-skilled students.
Usually youth media organizations themselves have specific goals, which, to varying degrees, affect the content of the media created by young participants. Their mission might be to encourage youth to view themselves as artists or agents of change, or to discover the power of their own voices.
Participants at the Scholarship in a Digital Age conference observed that many youth media groups in the United States have an objective of promoting social change.

Challenging the System

One common objective of youth media is to democratize and “challenge the dominant media,” observed British researcher David Buckingham, at Scholarship in a Digital Age. To that end, and with varying degrees of consciousness about it, many educators weave media literacy—the ability to read, analyze, critique, and produce communication in a variety of media forms—into their curriculum.
At Appalshop, Doggett has her students critique media representations of people from their rural community, the Appalachian mountains. Doggett found this creates a reaction among her students, motivating them to tell the story of where they’re from in their own words.
Teaching this type of critical thinking is “vastly powerful,” said founder of Street-Level Youth Media and current director of the YouthLearn Initiative at Education Development Center Tony Streit. “In my mind, no young person can fully participate in society today unless they are media literate. It’s not only a question of whether they have access to media-making equipment, but if they have the skills to be consumers of literacy. Most people don’t.”

Adding It Up

These common youth media practices add up to an immeasurably effective whole, said Streit, who is researching how youth media programs evaluate their impact. Unlike other after-school programs where teens might learn to trust and collaborate with adults, such as sports, said Streit, youth media adds to the repertoire “the blending of broader learning objectives with art-making and the creative process, and the building of critical thinking and analytical skills and the importance of teamwork and finding your voice.” A critical side benefit, he adds, “is the sometimes intentional and sometimes accidental addressing of the social and emotional needs of young people in a very powerful way that allows them to achieve in other aspects of their life.”
Above left: While making media, teens at Radio Rookies often learn on the sly.

Continue reading Too Cool for School

“Wherever a pint-size comedian riffs for his peers, there is usually a long-suffering teacher attempting to keep him (or her) from disrupting the class,” reports Edutopia, in reference to You Can Handle Them All, an online resource for dealing with classroom “misbehaviors.” What to do about the class clown? “Go with your gut: laugh.”

September 11. The tsunami in Asia. Now Hurricane Katrina. “With the Internet and 24-hour TV, you just see all these problems,” said one college freshman in the New York Times (subscription required). “They’re everywhere.” According to the Times, a surge of social activism among young people has resulted from the combination of global tragedy, its high visibility, and—if those are insufficient catalysts—the desire to impress college gatekeepers.

Last June, the Neighborhood Story Project published five books by teenagers documenting life before Hurricane Katrina in inner-city New Orleans, including the Ninth and Sixth Wards. The books feature interviews and photographs of the writers’ families and neighbors, as well as personal stories, such as how residents in a public housing complex became one young writer’s surrogate family once her mother, who struggled with drugs, passed away.
The books were an instant local hit last summer, selling 2,000 copies at New Orleans bookstores, corner stores, and block parties. A print run of 4,000 more copies was scheduled when Katrina struck, and all existing books-for-sale disappeared in the storm and ensuing flood.
Soft Skull Press, a Brooklyn-based independent book publisher, quickly got involved, agreeing to help raise money for another print run. Via an email interview, Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash talked with Youth Media Reporter about his collaboration with the project and how the books can help contribute to New Orleans’s reconstruction.

Why did Soft Skull decide to get involved with the Neighborhood Story Project after Hurricane Katrina?

In effect, those books show you who was flooded.
In the reporting being done about the hurricane, people mostly hear either about the collapse of civic order (whomever you might blame—federal government or local, or poverty, or what have you). Or they hear about the physical devastation of Katrina. But a crucial and too often overlooked element, especially when thinking about what is to come is: What are the social networks of people in the Sixth and Ninth Wards? How do you rebuild using the knowledge of the people who actually live there?
The Neighborhood Story Project books are ethnographies of the blocks. They tell you about the people. And when thinking about reconstructing the city there’s a danger both from laissez-faire conservatives (who say, “give them tax credits and school vouchers”) and from liberal urbanists (who say, “here’s a massive plan for fixing the whole shebang”) that the people will be ignored in the process. These books are documents of the people.

The neighborhood books have sold well in New Orleans. Do you think residents outside of the city will be interested in them?

People want to learn about the world in which they live. This is especially the case when it’s a world that is insufficiently documented. That’s why they’ve sold in NOLA.
In the rest of the country, it will be much harder. The books in and of themselves are valuable—a couple of them are awfully strong—but there would ordinarily be a perception that these books speak only to New Orleans, and under ordinary circumstances it would have been rather difficult for a publisher to overcome that perception, given how reliant any publisher is on booksellers and the media to get the word out to consumers.
(A publisher is just one little part of things, and we operate at the mercy of other sectors, and we talk, talk, ’til we’re blue in the face about how important the content of books might be, but if folks don’t believe us, that’s that.)
But because of what happened in NOLA, we believe interest will be higher, and that’s what gives these books a shot at a national audience. Perversely.
But really, fundamentally, no one in publishing knows why some books are hits and others aren’t. Sometimes a connection is made, and we have explanations ex post facto, but really we’re just blind people grasping elephants.

The neighborhood books appear on Soft Skull’s homepage. How are sales going so far?

No idea. Way too early to tell!

Is this the first youth media project Soft Skull has gotten involved in?

A whole chunk of our books overlap in some fashion with youth media. You look at the totality of our list, and there are a gazillion different actual and potential overlaps: Bomb the Suburbs, No More Prisons, Hey Kidz, Buy This Book, Please Feed Me, Life and Limb, Zine Yearbook, How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office, That’s Revolting, Get Your War On, Classified, You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive, all books that we’ve published or are about to publish.

What is your arrangement with the project?

This is being done as a benefit, so we are structuring the deal whereby the neighborhood project is getting an enormous proportion of the revenues from the sales, a proportion that would ordinarily be impossible for Soft Skull to survive on, but morally that’s what is necessary under the circumstances.
The Neighborhood Story Project plans to use proceeds to help refugee high school students document the stories of life in the Astrodome.

How did you hear about the neighborhood project?

Well there’s a long a complicated back-story to that. Abram Himelstein, one of the neighborhood project’s two founding schoolteachers, was known in the indie publishing world because of his popular, self-published book Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing. Plus two of our staff knew him even better. Plus one of those two folks had actually moved down to NOLA and was working for Soft Skull from a home office.

How has the experience of working with them been so far? Any future plans with the organization?

Oh I love them, I’m really proud to have the opportunity to help. I hope I can keep doing so.

What’s the best way for youth media groups to approach independent publishers?

Email the publisher. That’s where you can start.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Given the questions you’re asking, probably what’s necessary is a conference. We know that the Right—both Christian and secular—has been networking and conferencing, logrolling, quite frankly for 30 years, and progressives should start doing that. Think tanks, policy institutes, grassroots organizations, web and print media, publishers, should all be meeting, ideally with funding from the kinds of organizations who are throwing money at Democratic Party candidates, since a tiny percentage of that money could do wonders for developing more robust approaches to progressive ideas in the coming decade and beyond.
Above left: Palmyra Street, by Jana Dennis, published by the Neighborhood Story Project, 2005.

Continue reading Eyes of the Hurricane

Because of the secretive nature of illicit drug use, there is usually a lag between the appearance of a new drug trend and public information about it. After studying 26 different European magazines for youth, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) recently concluded that media read by youth “constitutes a useful and low-cost source of information for monitoring and understanding drug trends among defined readerships by reflecting lifestyles that reveal much about young people’s drug behaviour and attitudes that official statistics do not reveal.”
Furthermore, the study found, “Youth magazines studied were more likely than mainstream magazines to cover both the risks and benefits of cannabis and ecstasy use. In contrast, they adopted more proscriptive approaches to heroin and crack.”

In Bakersfield, California, three student editors are suing their school’s superintendent for pulling the plug on an issue of their newspaper that explored the topic of gay teenagers, reported the Monterey Herald. As more student journalists express interest in writing about gay and lesbian topics, censorship in school newspapers appears to be on the rise, said Mark Goodman of the Student Press Law Center. It’s striking that such censorship is occurring in California, one of only six states granting student journalists the same freedom of speech as professional journalists. “Without a question, it’s fair to say the students are more comfortable with the topic than administrators,” said Goodman.

Excerpting Jonathan Kozol’s new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, a Harper’s Magazine September cover story (here via Mindfully.org) makes the case that segregation is thriving in American urban public schools, and not by accident.
Kozol also lays bare the economic disparity of money spent on kids and their teachers in suburban schools compared to those in inner cities. Explaining how she and her classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhood and schools, one Harlem teenager told the author, “It’s as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don’t have room for something but aren’t sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don’t need to think of it again.”
Kozol’s findings are all the more poignant in light of debates over where to school the 372,000 displaced children of Hurricane Katrina. Supported by the Bush administration, a number of states want to teach them in shelters, despite a landmark federal law banning the educational segregation of homeless children, reports theWall Street Journal.