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.
Category: 2010
Global Kids uCreate Project: Extending Collaborative Learning to Incarcerated Youth in Two Cities
What can young people learn from reflecting on their own learning experiences, from becoming equipped with the power to not just share what they know but how they came to know it? Why are these skills particularly relevant in our emerging digital age where knowing how to tap collective knowledge can be as important as spending time learning on one’s own?
Global Kids (New York, NY), a strength-based youth development organization with over two decades of experience working with young people and technology, constantly seeks new ways to explore and answer these questions with diverse groups of youth. This article describes a pilot project that linked youth detention centers with community libraries in two cities, to work specifically with incarcerated youth and new learning technologies. This pilot project demonstrates that collaboration within and among youth at two youth jails can create a participatory learning culture even when digital media and learning run up against existing cultural practices and norms.
Global Kids jumped at the chance to work with the libraries and jails in the uCreate project for several reasons: first, it would follow a previous collaboration between Global Kids and Charlotte Mecklenberg Library in North Carolina; second, Global Kids would have the opportunity to continue their work around nontraditional youth populations. Incarcerated youth are arguably the most disenfranchised population of young people in the United States. Although the Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees all young people the right to access new forms of technology, education, and assembly, these rights are often denied incarcerated young people irrespective of their crime. Incarcerated youth need positive youth engagement so that they can successfully transition out of the system and re-enter society, which sometimes takes unlikely collaborations.
About the Edge Project and uCreate
In 2009, Global Kids launched The Edge Project with the support of the MacArthur Foundation to expand the capacity of civic and cultural institutions to use new media as innovative educational platforms. More specifically, the Edge Project is interested in civic and cultural institutions bringing cutting edge digital media into their youth educational programs. It is equally interested in where this type of programming—adue to technology, its pedagogical implications or both—is a disruptive force challenging the educators and/or the institutional cultural to work on the edge of their comfort level. uCreate, the first of the short-term educational projects outlined by the Edge Project, was a 6-week long educational project that brought together Jail North with Charlotte Mecklenburg Library in Charlotte, NC, and Dane County Jail with the Madison Public Library in Madison, WI. The community libraries were brought in because of their experience implementing new technologies for community education programs, and because they had existing relationships with the youth detention centers in their regions.
As the project began, there were seven youth ages 18 and 19 in the uCreate program at Jail North. At the end of the six weeks, that number dropped to three (some due to losing interest in the program, taking a work study class that conflicted with the time of uCreate, or being sent to another jail during the program). At the Dane County Jail, there were three young people ages 16 and 18 and all three stayed the length of the program.
In order to afford youth interaction with one another, the project utilized a private social-network, plus the mentorship of trained adults from each of the libraries, to facilitate the participants’ explorations through their own and their peers’ learning ecology maps. The participants met three mornings a week for two hours each morning to develop their own web content, and comment on that of their peers.
As a result of the activities, the young male participants gained new media literacy skills while conversing with their peers in a geographically distant detention center. This presented an opportunity for participants to reflect on and consider their experiences through supportive visual and textual dialogue.
Learning Ecology Maps
All Edge Projects begin with the youth learning how to use VoiceThread to create their Learning Ecology Map. VoiceThread is a free, easy to use, online social media tool that affords the ability to link together digital media assets in an online presentation and offer guided text or voice narration. Creating Learning Ecology Maps is a process developed by Global Kids that emerged from the recognition that digital media is challenging what learning looks like, when it happens, where and with whom. The map helps young people visualize their distributed learning network, develop language to talk about it, and increase their ability to intentionally structure and navigate their way around it.
To create the maps, youth are asked to list all of the places in their lives where they learn—similar to Tashawna’s list at the beginning of this article. It is up to participants to determine how to define “places” and “learn.” After an iterative process in which youth share drafts of their list and eventual maps, a final map is produced, such as Tashawna’s below:
The youth participating in the uCreate Project were asked to follow example’s like Tashwana. Once the maps were created, the participants shared their maps with each other. Finally, these maps were designed to be used as the foundation for the program so that at the end of the six weeks they could discuss how they incorporated what, how, and where they learned about digital media into their maps. The maps were also used as reflection tools throughout the six weeks when they focused on critical choices throughout their lives.
One participant, “PJ” in Madison, empathizes with another, “KB” in Charlotte, asking probing questions like: “Your map is very interesting because everything you learn from I have been through, but how has what you learned effected your life?”
Through the very act of presenting one’s map, through teaching another how to view it, participants have a moment of realization that is then encoded into the presentation itself. For example, KB stated: “well I did [not] make that realization until now, that’s another good reason I’m explaining this to you.” The participant is aware that he is “explaining it,” in part, so that he can make “realizations.”
Comments on each other’s projects were not only given by the youth participants but by the facilitators as well. Although participants and staff wanted to continue dialogue—a natural response in a social interaction—the jail could not permit incarcerated youth to enjoy unmoderated, open-ended conversations with people physically outside the system, even designated educators. As such, VoiceThread’s limited comment capabilities forced the youth’s conversation with Global Kids staff to be confined to details about their projects while excluding a lot of open-ended, personal dialogue. However, at the end of the day, the educational forces pushing collaboration successfully used VoiceThread as a communications device that could function within the required strictures of the jail and its need for isolation.
Significance and Challenges
Being able to comment through digital media forced uCreate to work on the edge as the ability to collaborate within a jail environment is severely curtailed, even more so with the outside world or into another jail. For example, talking in the hallways is not allowed in order to minimize any fights that might break out if someone says something that might upset another (for more details, go here). If the guys are in a classroom such as the library, they are not allowed to look out the windows into the hallway where others might be passing by. They need special permission to work on a project together outside of the classroom. This is often difficult because while permission might be granted at one level, it might not reach another level for it to actually happen due to a lapse in communication somewhere along the lines.
As Global Kids learned through this pilot project, the Internet is viewed as a particularly risky space in the eyes of penal institutions whose responsibility is to monitor and regulate the activities of incarcerated youth. However, through years of experience working with young people and new media technologies, Global Kids has developed ways to balance existing institutional needs with the new requirements educational technology often create and work with partners who are comfortable walking that edge. We find that new technologies can be altered to fit specific circumstances and aims without losing their potential for teaching and learning. At the same time, existing cultural and practices can be challenged to progressively adapt to utilize the educational affordances of digital media. Our experiences speak to the potential of teaching and learning via partnerships between county libraries and county prisons.
uCreate was unusual for most if not all of the youth in the program in how it situated digital media production within an educational setting. When it comes to digital media, they usually experienced it, before their incarceration, as largely youth- and interest-driven. They used it because they wanted to use it, not because someone told them they had to.
This is a far cry from their educational experiences, both inside and outside the jail. In a GED class offered within the institution, youth learn to “game the system,” doing the work to meet not their own expectations but those of the teacher and program. They will ask questions like, “how many pages do you want me to write,” and “tell me what I need to know to pass the test.”
So they had to sacrifice the freedom that they were used to working with digital media in order to access it within a controlled and restricted environment; yet, at the same time, claim the opportunities offered for personal expression rarely presented within the formalized expectations experienced in traditional educational programs.
While we had to restrict youth access to the full potential of digital media for education, we also had to empower them to use the resources we were making available. Throughout the design and implementation process, we tried to be very aware of how we would present the information to the participants so that their project was not the result of what they thought we wanted to hear. We attempted to foster a more natural response in using the technology as if they were in an unregulated environment.
The project often challenged the comfort level of the institutions involved by asking, “how can a participatory learning culture be created within an institution where self-expression is discouraged, where the idea of collaborating with adults and fellow incarcerated youth in other jails challenges key assumptions and structural components of the institution’s culture and practices?”
Project Outcomes
From the perspective of Rik Panganiban, the Assistant Director of Global Kids’ Online Leadership Program, the project impaacted the young men in the following ways:
• They were able to see the library as a resource for them to access technology, learn about interesting issues, and create media. This can have dividends both while they are incarcerated and after their release. I.e. they may be more likely to go to their local public library to find out about job opportunities, access the internet, or get college information.
• They were able to reflect on their own life experiences, create various media about choices that they have made, and relate their own experience with others in similar circumstances.
• They were exposed to a variety of user-created media, from digital comic strips to music production software, and get to experiment with creating their own media. When they are released, those forms of expression are still available to them, to pursue as they see fit.
Panganiban suggests that in the future, we prepare for “a very transient population of participants, who might come for only one or two sessions, or might come for a whole series of workshops. Given the realities of jail, there are a variety of factors that can effect their participation—early release, court dates, solitary confinement, etc. Designing and running a digital media program in this environment is extremely challenging for the facilitators.”
Panganiban continues: “I should have anticipated that music creation was going to be a very attractive part of program. In the future, I think an entire program could be built around music creation, incorporating digital media skills, youth voice, cooperation skills, and civic engagement. Many of the young men take their music very seriously, much more than any other media they created.”
Next Steps
We want to better understand how an educational program using new media can afford youth new opportunities to leverage their learning from other spheres. Is there something specific to new media tools, or the pedagogies they engender, that create more flexibility and openness for youth to bring in existing knowledge and practices? How can these forms of participatory learning programs support youth to strategically shape and navigate their learning network? Finally, how can these skills be extended to all populations of young people, and what are the long-term consequences of providing these skills? The uCreate project took a first step toward answering these questions by developing a methodology and curriculum specific to incarcerated youth.
More information about uCreate can be found at EdgeProject.org.
Barry Joseph, Director of Global Kids’ Online Leadership Program, holds a BA from Northwestern University and an MA in American Studies from New York University. Barry came to GK in 1990 through the New Voices Fellowship of the Academy for Educational Development, funded by the Ford Foundation. He has broad experience in human rights work and computer technology. The Global Kids Online Leadership Program works with young people to develop web-based dialogues and socially-conscious games that inspire youth worldwide to learn and take action about global and public affairs. With programs like Playing 4 Keeps, Global Kids is a leader in utilizing online games as a form of youth media, while Newz Crew, a partnership with the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, is an innovative current events dialogue. Barry also leads Global Kids work supporting youth voices on digital media and translating a youth development model to the Global Kids Island in Teen Second Life, both funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
When You Can’t Bring Your Classroom to the World, Bring the World into Your Classroom
Photography by Mohammad Faraj (West Bank)
“There’s nothing like face-to-face interactions,” I am often told. For many technology users, especially those introduced to technology later in life, it doesn’t feel personal; it feels “techy.” But anyone who has used Skype knows that a real, human connection can be created through e-technologies. For educators aiming to teach global perspectives, the paradigm has shifted: when you can’t bring your classroom into the world, bring the world into your classroom.
Internet technology and educational platforms have gotten cheaper and more universally accessible. Wall maps have been replaced by Google maps, and educational technology has finally caught up with the needs of teachers and is reaching into every corner of our now flat world. But technology is only a tool; it allows us to develop dialogue and interaction, but is a means, not an end in and of itself. Tech-based global education has the capacity to improve critical thinking and cultural pluralism but requires far more than just fancy technology; it requires careful, thoughtful curriculum development, and the support of organizations whose goal is to build authentic global communities online.
About the Research Journalism Initiative
The Research Journalism Initiative (RJI) has found that the combination of technological tools, progressive pedagogy and creativity allows teachers to humanize the world and its inhabitants for students. Whereas western journalism has been, for most of its existence, based on the faulty premise that an outsider’s view of a given conflict is more reliable than the experience of those living inside a given conflict, RJI’s work in youth media requires that teachers make a philosophical shift toward honoring the stories individuals can tell.
Self-representation is inherently tied to self-determination, and journalism becomes a more constructive tool when wielded by the people living injustice, becoming part of their search for liberation by allowing them to define themselves to the outside world.
To facilitate such self-representation and journalistic empowerment, and because of the almost complete lack of educational materials addressing marginalized populations, RJI works to create a direct and personal link between U.S. students and their counterparts in Palestine, teaching them to move beyond taboos surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of the hardest global topics to explore in American classrooms. We teach students in the U.S. and the West Bank to use current e-technologies so they can easily craft and share their personal stories, whether through iMovie, blogging, online discussion boards, or some other tech-based means of communication, stressing the importance of individual experience and story. Eventually, RJI hopes to open partner offices in every part of the world where human rights are being violated without a window of communication with the world.
New media platforms provide an ideal place for such self-representation. Students in Palestine have less advanced technology at their fingertips, particularly in refugee camps and small villages, but many young people do have Internet access at home and use social networking sites regularly, particularly in urban areas with universities. In initial asynchronous exchanges, RJI students use the online forums of Taking IT Global (TIGed), a global network of students, teachers, and educational/developmental organizations. Based out of Canada, TIGed is designed to be internationally accessible and highly functional in bad broadband situations, offering virtual classrooms where students can post writing, art, photography and videos, comment on each others’ work, engage in discussions, maintain their own blogs, and even have live video chats. All RJI units end with a synchronous exchange, a video conference hosted at An Najah National University in the West Bank, allowing the students to end their experience with a face-to-face dialogue that participants consistently describe as transformative.
Three Case Studies
Educators can significantly enrich critical thinking and cross-cultural competencies by producing and exploring a wide variety of student media, teaching students to think critically about individual bias and the experiences that form it—including their own. This approach makes students as much the creators of knowledge as the consumers, empowering them to see education as an interactive, life-long process of discovering the world while understanding the role one might play within it. Through e-technologies, new youth media forums and exchanges have created an urge to action which unites students in a common struggle, leading to increased collaborations and solutions-oriented projects that can be deeply transformative for students across the world.
Case Study No 1: Using RJI and TIGed to Start the Dialogue
In the global classroom, RJI’s Poetry of Witness curriculum offers a non-threatening method for getting students comfortable discussing conflict. U.S. students view photographs posted by Palestinian youth and write poems in response to the imagery. They post the poems on TIGed, in written or digital/video form, where the photographer and their peers can comment. Then, students in the U.S. read poetry by Palestinian youth, and post response poems back on TIGed. After this, American students are asked to bear witness to something in their own lives through poetry, photography or digital storytelling, which is also shared online (see http://rji.tiged.org). Units end with a live videoconference with at least one young Palestinian poet, and students on both sides share their work in a poetic dialogue which helps students connect with each other authentically—and more easily than if they were addressing politics directly.
Case Study No 2: Using RJI and TIGed to Transform Perspectives
I used the Poetry of Witness approach for several years as a creative writing teacher and was consistently moved by the insights students gleaned. In one example of many, a 10th grader named Anne Marie Blieszner wrote a poem called “Refuge” in response to a photograph of two school girls in Nablus, West Bank, taken by Mohammad Faraj. In poetry workshop, we asked Anne Marie about her last stanza, about who the “I” was, and she indicated that she started the poem thinking the “I” was the girl in back, the one who can actually smile a little because she’s protected by the girl in front. But Anne Marie said that the “I” quickly became her, too, as she got to know these faces and started wanting to be their refuge personally. This experience indicated not only profound visual and cultural literacy, but that the project had transformed the way Anne Marie saw her self in relation to the world. Due to the connection she made with the Mohammad’s depiction of children, they still maintain a friendship on Facebook two years later.
Case Study No 3: Using RJI and TIGed to Develop Collaborative Media
Currently, an RJI student initiative in Denver is developing a literary and art/photography magazine, which will be managed on TIGed and will showcase new media by students in Palestine and the U.S. This project will be entirely student directed, and will take the shape students want it to, exposing them to myriad new media platforms as they develop their own. The editorial board will be made up of students on both sides of the globe, and a TIGed virtual classroom will provide the forum for collaborative work. This kind of student-directed experiential pedagogy is designed to make students the leaders of their own explorations. In fact, we have found that these approaches simultaneously develop students’ collaborative and leadership skills, turning them into true agents of change for the future. (See www.researchjournalisminitiative.net/resources.htm for sample lesson plans and curricular resources.)
In the United States, RJI resources can be incorporated into a broad range of middle, high school and college curricula, helping students understand the relative nature of “truth” by bringing marginalized voices into the classroom in complement with perspectives more consistently addressed by textbooks and media sources. In doing so, a new kind of youth media is emerging, one led by students and whose goal is not to “share the news,” but to “share our selves” in powerful and meaningful ways.
Next Steps
In partnership with the best technology, western education has the opportunity to build world citizens who are compassionate about the needs and experiences of others, aware of the validity of different perspectives, and comfortable in dialogue with people from different cultures, even about the most uncomfortable of topics.
Using e-technologies to develop self-expression and then connecting students with young people abroad is a use of new media which is easy to recreate in any context or region, not just in Palestine. RJI has found that new youth media forums, paired with comparative and collaborative media techniques, can transform the way students see the world, helping them engage with other young people in meaningful and authentic ways—and with the recognition that true critical thinking means deconstructing and understanding bias, not rejecting it.
Jennifer D. Klein is Director of Educational Development for the Research Journalism Initiative, and Global Partnerships Director for the World Leadership School. She holds a BA from Bard College and an MA from the University of Colorado at Boulder, both in Literature and Creative Writing. She taught college and high school English for 19 years, including five years in Central America and 11 years in all-girls education. She has published a wide array of educational and creative writing, and is currently working on a book on Cuban education. Former Educational Chair for the United Nations Association Board of Directors, Colorado Division, Jennifer is currently President of the Denver Metro Chapter. In 2010, Jennifer left teaching to begin PRINCIPLED Learning Strategies, a global educational consulting business dedicated to developing and enriching global education through curriculum development, professional development, and the use of e-technologies to bring the world into the classroom. She has spoken at a wide array of national conferences, including Islam and the Media (CU Boulder), the People of Color Conference (National Association of Independent Schools) and the International Society for Technology in Education.
A Web 2.0 Toolkit for Educators
It is important for school teachers to learn new technology, even if, typically, a school district’s first line of defense regarding Internet use is to close the school network to much of it. It takes courage for a school to open up communication with the Internet and incorporate social media and Web 2.0 into their curriculum and professional development. When students and faculty are taught how to harness the technology they can mindfully connect with an expanded world.
Until I sat in on several digital tools sessions at a Curriculum 21 conference held mid-July in Saratoga Springs, New York, I had little idea of the recent crop of education friendly digital tools. The gems I picked up blew me away. My mind whirred with the possibilities each resource held and envisioning my students’ enhanced learning experience using new technology. But, like any educator my greatest hurdle is time. In the course of a few hours spread out over several days, I had to catch a quick volley of best practices for social networking and utilizing Web 2.0 tools in the curriculum.
After attending the conference, I found that a couple of places to begin learning how to use new technology resources are Twitter and eduTecher. Check out the #edchat topic on Twitter, and from there you can follow other education and technology related topics or specific Tweeters. eduTecher has video tutorials on using certain Web 2.0 tools and a listing of education and technology conferences. This article provides educators new and free technology tips and sources to improve programs and teaching.
Here’s a quick snapshot of what I found in my search:
Digital Tools
Cool Tools for Schools – (free) teacher-created repertoire of digital tools
Curriculum 21 Clearinghouse – (free) repertoire of digital tools
EasyBib – (free) online citation creator
eduTecher – (free) repertoire of digital tools and related conferences
Facebook group page – (free, registration req’d) social networking site; comments, photos, videos can be collaboratively shared and moderated
Google Docs – (free, registration req’d) share text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents to surveys to quizzes generated and stored online
iMovie – (Mac bundled software; purchase may be req’d) create digital movies on a Mac
Jottit – (free) wiki web page creator
KeepVid – (free) download YouTube videos for educational use
LiveBinders – (free, registration req’d) an online portfolio and resource management tool
MedMyst – (free) online interactive scientific video games
Moodle – (free, registration, req’d) course management site
Neat Chat – (free) real-time multiple-user comments
Ning – (yearly fees range from $20-$200 depending on usage) a social networking site mainly used by professionals
OpenOffice.org – (free, registration req’d) free software for creating text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents
Photo Story – (free) create digital movies on a PC
Poll Everywhere – (free to $50 and up, registration req’d) quick polling via cell phone text messaging
Prezi – (basic level is free though only web-based, registration req’d) a zooming presentation tool
Skype – (free peer-to-peer, registration req’d) video/audio conferencing anywhere in the world
The Way Back Machine – (free) archive of websites
TodaysMeet – (free) real-time multiple-user comments
Twitter – (free, registration req’d) a mass communication tool
Wikispaces for Educators – (free, registration req’d) a collaborative website
WolframAlpha – (free) a computation search engine
Wordle – (free) generate word cloud graphic from written work
WordPress – (free, registration req’d) blog publishing
Xtranormal – (free, registration req’d) web-based text-to-movie editor
Specifically, if you are looking to integrate Web 2.0 tools within after-school programs and youth media projects or in the classroom, you might check out the following technology.
If you don’t have a Mac:
Photo Story for PC is free where students without Macs (iMovie) can reflect their thoughts about the world around them through digital storytelling. The digital stories can be created with scanned and digital photos, video clips, and music and the spoken word.
If you don’t have equipment and need a text to movie generator:
Xtranormal, a web-based text-to-movie generator, offers a choice of avatars for students to animate by typing in directions for movement and speech. Xtranormal movies require no additional resources than an Internet connected PC/Mac, writing skills, and the imagination.
If you want to gauge the audience response:
Practitioners and youth producers can gauge audience response to films or digital stories with Poll Everywhere. And, anyone with a cell phone can send in a Likert-scale type response to any preset question(s).
If you need to illustrate statistics:
Infographics are a novel way to illustrate statistics that are relevant to the youth. Take the idea of the percentage of students that use a social media site such as Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or Plurk and turn it into a graphic with images that looks like a poster. Here’s an infographic of what people are doing online and how many participate by age group from BusinessWeek. Certainly a different way to see quotidian percentages that most gloss over.
A few more general tips:
Avoiding plagarism and improving the information search:
Apathy for plagiarizing work is rising, most recently highlighted in the New York Times article “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age.” Search and citations tools are relevant now as library card catalogs once were to finding good sources and citing them. In “Teaching Zack to Think,” Alan November, an education and technology consultant, explains how to teach students to search smarter and filter out websites created by individuals. Google search modifiers let users search in specific sites such as .edu or .gov to filter out less reliable sources, and AltaVista lets users search within a country code. The Way Back Machine can trace the history of a website or bring up information on a current broken link. Once the student has determined the validity of the source EasyBib takes the url and formats it as an MLA citation.
Making presentations more interesting:
Prezi, an online zooming presentation editing program, helps both youth and educators to create a catchy presentation at conferences, to funders, staff, etc. The software requires users to lay out the main idea and major points and sub-points before adding in images, music, and videos, which as a finished product zooms and skims seamlessly.
Backchanneling:
Think of backchanneling as an alternate information route. The first route is typically between two people while others listen. With backchanneling, all participants can be heard. The teacher books a “room” via a url and the class opens the url and begins typing questions, comments, and responses to an open chat forum such as TodaysMeet or Neat Chat to a live lesson or presentation.
Creating a quick website:
If you need students/youth to create a quick web or wiki site, try Jottit, which is basically a text box that turns the inputted information into a simple website.
Using Facebook:
Teaching students appropriate use of social media sites like Facebook ties in to developing social and emotional learning skills. For example, students should experience what it is like to hear something said in a happy or sad tone with facial expressions versus how it sounds as text devoid of live emotional expression, and how much easier it is to say something off the cuff to a web page than to the person directly.
Working together:
If you use any of these tools and would like to showcase the product, please share your students’ or organizations’ work, and feedback from youths engaging with these tools and social media. Ongoing best practices and curricula for teaching in the Digital Age are best developed collaboratively.
Next Steps
Integrating technology into curriculum is not about the bells and whistles, but to aid developing academic skills and critical thinking. This generation and others following are growing up interfacing through text, audio, and video online. They learn how to use the technology from their peers, including what is considered appropriate and where the boundaries are, which are not well defined. It is on us, classroom teachers, after-school program educators, and education practitioners, to teach through social media and Web 2.0 resources. It is my hope that readers find the web tools captured in this article useful additions to their educator knapsack, whether in the school classroom, in after-school programs, or to improve the visibility of one’s program, organization or cause.
Sara Panag is a coordinator with the NYC Department of Education. Her work involves developing school capacity for social and emotional learning to support instruction and create a healthier learning environment for children and adults. She holds licenses in special education and school building leadership, and she has taught high school English and co-taught high school humanities, math, and science for five years.
Youth Connected: Technology and Journalism Shape World Views
In a sea of information and perspectives, where news sources increasingly come in the form of tweets and friend recommendations, it is often difficult for youth to recognize the issues that matter most. Systemic global crises rarely rise to the top of “most viewed” or “most e-mailed” lists. Yet these are precisely the issues that affect our environment, our health, our security, our economy, and our future.
Given this paradoxical overabundance of information yet lack of quality information rising to the top, as educators, we need to work harder than ever to increase youth’s understanding of these issues as well as their connection to them. Technology has contributed to the challenge, but technology can also help us solve it. The question is, how?
We haven’t found the answer, but we have found some powerful ways to use technology to amplify the global reporting we do at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and to connect youth with the global issues that shape the future. Through Global Gateway, our educational outreach program, we use new media platforms to link students with manifestations of crisis—and hope—in countries they might not have heard of before, as well as in their own communities.
The goal of our educational work is twofold: to provide students with information on global affairs, and to inspire students to join the conversation, transforming passive interest in the world into active participatory engagement.
About the Pulitzer Center and Online Gateways
The Pulitzer Center was founded in 2006 with the primary mission of supporting international reporting that traditional media outlets are increasingly unable to undertake. We focus on systemic global crises that are under-reported, telling stories that otherwise would go untold.
We want to put the Carteret Islands and Guinea-Bissau on the map; to show that floating school boats in Bangladesh are related to droughts in South Africa; to find commonalities between former child soldiers in Liberia and former indentured servant girls in Nepal, and between sick mothers in Southern Mexico and Ethiopia. Above all, we want the American public to see that these stories are relevant to their own lives.
Global Gateway arose as a natural extension of our work; one of journalism’s core functions, after all, is to inform the public. And creating an appetite for quality international news among the next generation is critical to fostering a healthy media landscape in the future. If we do not offer quality global reporting to youth, we cannot expect young people to have an interest in the news nor seek, question or create their own. As adult journalists and allies, when we present underreported stories to youth in the context of the broader media landscape, we hope to inspire them to think critically about both news production and consumption.
A quick video about the Global Gateway program:
Our online Pulitzer Gateways serve as entry points for students to explore multimedia reporting projects from around the world grouped by cross-cutting issues: food insecurity, climate change, fragile states, water access and sanitation issues, women and children in crisis, HIV/AIDS and stigma in the Caribbean, and maternal mortality. The Gateways are available for anyone to use and teachers in a diverse range of settings—teaching across age groups—have found creative ways to take advantage of them: as an introduction to the issues on a semester long exploration in a history class; creating cross-regional comparisons of the topic; exploring which media types are most effective at conveying different types of information; as a platform for showcasing relevant student work.
The Gateways also function as hubs of content-based interaction. After learning about the global issues, students can meet the journalists whose projects they have studied, by watching video clips of the journalists discussing their work, participating in online Q & A forums, Skype videoconferences, and even speaking in person when we take our journalists into classrooms around the country. We have also facilitated interaction with students in subject countries through posted video interviews and Q & A exchanges, giving students a direct window into what life is like in other parts of the globe. For example, youth in St. Louis had the opportunity to connect with youth in Nepal, Iraq, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo, posting questions and receiving questions in turn:
There are a number of organizations around the country doing amazing work around youth media reporting. Our intent is to compliment the work already being done by these groups by acting as a bridge between the fields of youth media and professional journalism. Increasingly, we are partnering with media educators on programs where youth are already producing media in order to introduce our global topics, the journalists that cover them, and offer a platform where students can share local stories on these critical issues.
Our model allows us to act as an intermediary between the journalists we support and youth learning how to tell their own stories, and as an intermediary between global awareness and local investigation. Pulitzer Center journalists and staff members can provide insight into the reporting on a global scale and serve as mentors to youth throughout their own reporting process, including how to amplify their work through social media (a key component of our own outreach on the reporting projects we support).
With the Share Your Story feature on the Gateways, youth can upload their own videos and essays, responding to the reporting they’ve investigated and sharing local implications. Their work is published in the same space as reports we’ve sponsored in outlets like PBS NewsHour and TIME.com, offering a new perspective that makes the professional journalism resonate more and highlights the global nature of these systemic issues. This platform also allows youth to witness the viewpoints and experiences of others their own age, which often differ—and resemble—as much within one city as they do across borders.
Students are already “connected;” we hope to inspire them to take advantage of those connections to educate their peers on issues that deserve greater attention through their own connected world. Our global reporting provides a departure point, technology then helps us connect that journalism to the youth’s own stories and a global conversation.
Insights from Case Studies
In our experience, this combination of technological skills and content-based learning seems to be an effective model for engaging students on the issues. In a DC high school’s video production class, groups of students explored the Gateway topics, researched a global issue that resonated with them, and found a connection to the DC community.
One group looked at our work on water issues, from Peru to China to Kenya, then investigated pollution in DC’s Chesapeake Bay. They visited the offices of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the DC Water and Sewage Authority to interview officials and see firsthand how local water is treated for pollution. Producing video packages from their footage and featuring the finished product on our website allowed students to share the global-local connection that they found on this critical issue with a broader audience.
As one DC student, David, reflected, “One of the things that struck me was how much power we had to control what information was heard and what information was not…It makes you realize how much power the media has on our knowledge base and therefore our point of views and decisions.” By using technology to draw students into the process of producing news media, they emerge with a fuller understanding of how to navigate the world of information.
Similarly, we partnered with Free Spirit Media in Chicago to hold a six-week intensive program, with teams of students producing their own short documentaries on our global stories’ implications in Chicago. Using our food insecurity Gateway as a jumping-off point, one team examined the cost of healthy eating choices in Chicago; another reported on women and children in crisis in their hometown, focusing on the foster care system; and, the third group found that homophobic stigma, which we’ve reported on in Jamaica, affects youth in Chicago as well.
The group exploring homophobia were so touched by the stories from the LGBT youth they encountered that they concluded their video with the statement, “It’s not a lifestyle–it’s their life.” One member of the food insecurity group, DaMari, said he was changing his eating habits as a result of their research, demonstrating how a project like this can move from the global through the local to reach the personal.
In a program that connected St. Louis students to youth in Nepal, one young Nepalese indentured servant asked, “Is there a practice of sending children by their own parents to work as child laborers in your country?” These connections help spark debates on issues we may think of as distant, yet rarely are.
We believe that it is in these kinds of exchanges that we can best see our impact and how technology is contributing to our mission. Of course, measuring impact in education and media is an ongoing challenge. Many funders have, understandably, focused largely on numerical metrics because these provided data that could be easily quantified. And while numerical metrics can show us how many students we reach, the amount of traffic a slideshow receives on our website, or the number of “fans” who “like” an article we post on Facebook, numbers do not tell the whole story. In our view, the most valuable metric is the qualitative responses we have seen from youth who engage in the program, but how do you measure that? This is a question we are exploring and hope to learn more about from our peers in the community. One positive development at least in the larger web metrics landscape, is a movement to focus on the length of time one spends on a site versus the sheer number of hits. If advertisers, with far more resources at their disposal to measure “ROI,” have figured out that depth of engagement is a critical indicator, it should tell us that the quality of the engagement deserves our attention too. Exactly how much and how to measure it, of course, also deserves our attention. But sometimes one anecdotal experience captures the spirit of the work in a way numbers never could.
During one visit in an inner city Chicago school, one of our journalists was discussing his work on civilian casualties in Afghanistan. A connection was sparked and one student said to the journalist “So the soldiers are fighting with their guns, but you, you’re fighting with your camera.” Indeed, technology can be a weapon against ignorance.
Lessons Learned
In a St. Louis school that we visited with our journalists, one fifteen-year-old suggested that news organizations channel reporting through cartoons or video games; not one of those “boring educational” ones, he clarified, but “something like Grand Theft Auto.”
While the Pulitzer Center is probably not bound for the video game market any time soon, he had a point. When students perceive no need to navigate the information surrounding them—and either take what is most readily available or ignore it all—we must find new ways to capture their interest.
When engaging youth with technology it might be easy to get carried away by digital bells and whistles (or, rather widgets and algorithms); but in our work, the most effective use of technology we have found is when it is built around quality content—stories that need to be heard but are too often drowned out by sensational headlines—be it from our professional reporters or participating youth.
New media technologies have a unique ability to crystallize connections between global issues and youth’s own experiences. Students deserve access to quality information on critical global issues and a place to share their distinct vision in that conversation. Using new media to emphasize global-local connections makes issues more relevant and relatable to youth, and can motivate them to take action by seeking—and producing—quality information on their own. And new media allows us to provide youth with a platform to distribute their media, so their stories can become part of an active, informed, and global dialogue, where their voice can shine.
We are eager to collaborate with youth media educators interested in making connections between global and local stories, and with our journalists. We hope we can be a resource that bridges the divide between professional and youth media reporting and in the process enriches all of our understanding of just how connected we are to the global stories we too rarely hear about.
Tatum Taylor is an Educational Consultant who joined the Pulitzer Center team in August 2009. As the educational coordinator she spearheaded the Center’s work in DC schools and helped coordinate programs in St. Louis, New York, and Chicago. A graduate of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, she holds an honors B.A. in English with an emphasis in creative writing, and a minor in French. Prior to the Pulitzer Center, she worked as a marketing intern at Brookings Institution Press in Washington, D.C. She has also served as a writer and editor for The Sundial, Randolph Macon’s campus newspaper, and as a tutor in their Writing Lab. Tatum will continue her work with the Center as an educational consultant while starting a graduate degree in Historical Preservation at Columbia University this fall.
Nathalie Applewhite is the Managing Director at the Pulitzer Center and has worked nationally and internationally on documentaries, educational, political and commercial productions as a producer, director, and editor. She also worked as a consultant for the United Nations and as a project manager and media specialist for the University of Pennsylvania’s Literacy Research Center. She holds a B.A. in Visual Anthropology from Temple University and a Masters degree in International Affairs from Columbia University. Nathalie wears many hats at the Pulitzer Center: as managing director she supports the executive director with overall management, strategic development, and selection and management of reporting projects. She helps oversee their website and outreach work and was the managing producer of the award-winning interactive narrative projects (Heroes of HIV and HOPE). Perhaps her most rewarding role so far though has been overseeing the development of Global Gateway, the Center’s educational outreach initiative.
Letter from the Guest Editor
Letter from the Guest Editor | Youth Media Reporter (Volume 4: Issue 3)
I grew up in a Filipino-American household where my father never called a plumber to fix the sink. He was a “do-it-yourself” kind-of guy who did all the careful studying and planning in order to fix whatever problem arose with the car or the house. I was his understudy—I held the flashlight, emptied the oil pan underneath the car and carried wood when new construction was in order.
By the time I was 12, I was old enough to fix many things around the house on my own. I will never forget the time he caught me trying to hammer in a nail with a wrench. He took me aside and said, “Anak (son), you have to know how to choose your tools wisely. You may think it is easier to just grab anything but it will just make it more difficult for you to accomplish your goal.”
As youth media practitioners, we may not be changing the oil in the car every three months or building a new partition in the house before our relatives arrive for an extended stay, but we are constantly being challenged to develop innovative solutions to many of the problems we face in our communities through the use of technology. In this constantly evolving digital landscape, it has become crucial to identify the most appropriate tools to advance our programs while still focusing on its primary goal—to serve youth and their communities.
As the New Media Manager at the Community Media Workshop at Columbia College Chicago, I develop new media resources and tools for our organization as well as for nonprofits across the region and lecture about media, communications and social web strategies. I stress the importance of thinking strategically and acting tactically when it comes to choosing and utilizing the tools to implement our work.
By now, we have come to understand the impact of new media technology and its reach. Where it has taken television 13 years to reach a target audience of 50 million people, it has taken Facebook only three. Just last month, the online social network announced that it had surpassed the 500 millionth user mark. If it were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. It is important now more then ever to grasp the impact of new media on the world as we begin working with the first “connected” generation where media is no longer passive and static but dynamic, social and viral.
As technology has allowed more of our voices to enter the conversations within the larger social narrative, the role of youth media educators has become even more imperative to the development of the critical consciousness of the current generation—and those that follow—as we witness traditional gatekeepers of quality information become disestablished. Today, the broadcast and distribution of our media has the potential to reach even broader audiences through the Internet and in turn, create greater impact.
In this edition of Youth Media Reporter (YMR), we follow up on the theme of news literacy from the previous issue and investigate new media technology and how it is shaping not only our work in the Youth Media field but also in our world in general. This issue features eleven contributors that cover the field of journalism and new media technology—from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, the Pulitzer Center, Research Journalism Institute, Global Kids, and public schools. We hope these selections of critical approaches in the field help you navigate the new media landscape.
Contributors of this issue provide the following insights:
The social web has shifted the information ecosystem, allowing more voices to access, contribute and participate in the development of news stories. In the article, “Information Quality, Youth, and Media: A Research Update” Urs Gasser, Sandra Cortesi, Momin Malik and Ashley Lee argue that quantitative growth of information also raises concerns over the quality of content and proposes new frameworks for approaches in media literacy and youth. They explain, “As traditional news media outlets are replaced with new models of information dissemination, it will be critically important to the health of democracy for citizens to have the skills necessary to navigate these new spaces.”
Applying critical thinking skills to new media itself should be included in the curriculum, as suggested by both Henry Jenkins of MIT and danah boyd of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “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” says boyd in an interview conducted for this edition of YMR. “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.”
Henry Jenkins’ research on Participatory Cultures also stresses this importance when he states, “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.”
boyd’s research on teens and social media also reveals some of the complexities youth face while interacting and communicating across social networks—useful tidbits youth practitioners should be aware of when choosing popular networks such as Facebook as a platform for engagement.
In both of their interviews, Boyd and Jenkins encourage the use of participatory learning models –an inherent trait of the social web that helps facilitate collaboration, sharing and dialogue.
Choosing the appropriate tools to govern our work can be overwhelming. Many educators (both institutional and community-based) working with youth are finding it difficult to identify appropriate new media tools to help facilitate learning, production and distribution. For example in her article “A Web 2.0 Toolkit for Educators” school teacher Sara Panag offers a list of new media tools and points readers to websites such as Cool Tools for Schools and Curriculum21.com to help get them started.
New media is connecting communities across borders, beyond conflicts and even penetrating through penitentiary walls. This edition of YMR also provides thoughtful case studies of how innovative programming and integrated technology are bringing people together at a global scale in very effective and powerful ways. Today’s communications technology has allowed us to include the most marginalized of voices in conversations helping us collectively to create connections and raise our consciousness about the world around us.
“When you can’t bring your classroom into the world, bring the world into the classroom,” states Jennifer D. Klein. In her article with the same title, she discusses how the Research Journalism Initiative (RJI) “works to create a direct and personal link between U.S. students and their counterparts in Palestine, teaching them to move beyond taboos surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Tatum Taylor and Nathalie Applewhite of the Pulitzer Center share how the Global Gateway education program has been able to cover global stories while creating local impact for youth. They explain that, “by using technology to draw students into the process of producing news media, we find that they emerge with a fuller understanding of how to navigate the world of information.”
Other critical thinking models are explored through what Barry Joseph of Global Kids calls Ecology Maps. He states that, “digital media is challenging what learning looks like, when it happens, where and with whom.” Through the use of online platforms, Joseph outlines a pilot project called uCreate that linked youth detention centers with community libraries in two cities, to work specifically with incarcerated youth and new learning technologies. Ecology Maps are used as a foundation to explore their own learning—mapping out points in which information is collected in their daily routines, shared and then analyzed collectively. The project offers many lessons to Youth Media practitioners and opens a discussion to our readers by asking essential questions about new media and the education of youth, such as: “Is there something specific to new media tools, or the pedagogies they engender, that create more flexibility and openness for youth to bring in existing knowledge and practices?”
We learn best from others in the field when we think critically about their work. YMR editor-in-chief Ingrid Dahl reviews the book Drop that Knowledge written by Vivian Chavez and Elisabeth Soep exploring the work of Youth Radio in Oakland, Ca. The book offers its readers an examination into the field of youth media through case studies, analysis and practical resources. Dahl’s review is not only a synopsis of the book but also an insightful reflection about the field. She states, “Youth media is a strategy that uses media technology to amplify the critical analysis, expression and voice of young people.” It is a reminder to all of us on the importance of our work, our impact on related fields and the need for practitioners to be self-aware of the lessons we have learned.
Creativity
One of the things I believe that makes the field of Youth Media unique and innovative is the common reliance on one of the most important tools we all inherit: our creativity. Creativity is a key asset we have in solving some of our basic problems that reason and technology cannot solve alone. Although technology has provided us a way to produce and deliver our media more effectively to a broader audience, the tradition of self-empowerment through storytelling is what centers our work. In the end, it transforms us internally and influences the world. The choice of tools we use to help tell our stories should always be supportive of this aim. As you read the articles in the New Media/Technology issue of YMR, we hope it will help frame your understanding of the landscape and provide a starting point to begin thinking strategically about new media—as well as begin acting tactically when choosing the tools that will strengthen our programming, refine our produced materials and in general, grow our field. As we do so we must, in my father’s words, choose our tools wisely.
We would like to thank all of our contributors for sharing their valuable time and expertise in this issue, and on behalf of the editorial team at YMR, we thank our contributors and readers for the important and inspiring work you do.
Sincerely,
Demetrio P. Maguigad
Demetrio P. Maguigad is the New Media Manager at the Community Media Workshop, a nonprofit organization of journalists and communications experts helping nonprofit communicators connect with media. Demetrio’s focus is on developing and implementing the organization’s strategic online communications, and managing the development and production of New Media resources and tools. He is also a co-convener of NetTuesday Chicago, a monthly meet-up group bringing together web advocates, technologists, nonprofits and grassroots organizations to bridge the gap between technology and community development. Additionally, he is the on-air host and producer of the Chicago is the World radio program on WHPK 88.5 FM in Chicago, where he features and interviews local artists, musicians and community activists on its international format.
Youth Media Reporter is managed by the Academy for Educational Development
For Immediate Hire: Job Opening with Wide Angle | Program Manager
Wide Angle is looking for a dedicated, energetic, and engaged Program Manager to guide, support, and manage our youth media programs.
The Program Manager will work directly with students and staff and be a leader in the organization. Our core programs serve 100 youth annually and we reach an additional 400 students with presentations and mini-workshop opportunities. Excellent facilitation, leadership, communication, administrative, and youth development skills are necessary. The ideal candidate will be highly organized and passionate about youth-directed media that has the power to change communities. This is a position with room for growth and opportunity. Please visit www.wideanglemedia.org for the full job description and details on how to apply.
Youth Media Project Program and Education Director
Youth Media Project (YMP) Program and Education Director oversees programming, including the Audio Revolution! radio production team and educational programs. Applicant should be proficient in the teaching of: media literacy, interviewing, researching, audio recording, digital and social media skills, and creative writing (experience with narrative radio a plus). Also required is the ability to be flexible and work with diverse partner educators in Northern New Mexico schools, colleges and advocacy groups to adapt YMP program curricula to their specific needs. Program and Education Director must be organized to oversee the various strands of educational and production activities. YMP teaches the craft of digital storytelling for a socially responsible world; students learn how to develop their voices and produce narratives, commentaries, spoken word pieces, radio dramas, and panel discussions for distribution on the radio and internet and for presentations to peers and policy makers.
This is a part-time, contractual position. $25/hr x 20 hours/week, plus GRT.
If you’d like to apply for the position, please go to www.youthmediaproject.org
1. From your exploration the website and any other sources (interested in knowing what they may be) please describe what you believe is the purpose of Youth Media Project (in your own words, not ours) and how YMP fulfills this mission?
2. What are your particular qualifications, skills and experiences you believe will deepen and expand the work of YMP? Please, be specific and we welcome innovation and initiative.
3. What kind of impact would you hope to have on youth, both locally and globally (via the internet)?
Submissions Invited: 14th Annual All Youth Film and Education Day
Get ready for the 14th Annual North American All Youth Film and Education Day that The Tower of Youth has produced over the last 14 years! The unique educational event showcases movies entirely made and juried by high school youth. In addition to showing all the top juried movies, the full day event will feature a “Youth Producers Dialogue,” a top industry leader’s Movie Career Vision Presentation and host the major CA media schools whose representatives attend the 1000 seat Crest Theater event in Sacramento.
DEADLINE FOR RECEIVING ALL ENTRIES IS FRIDAY, JULY 23, 2010.
More information and registration available at www.towerofyouth.org.
Youth Media Project: Job Opening in Media and Education
Youth Media Project is seeking a motivated, self-initiating individual for year-long service to build capacity in organizational operations and development. The Education and Communications Associate will assist in the coordination and instruction of YMP’s educational and media production and broadcasting programs, expand the delivery of youth-produced media content, and work closely with staff and director to further the mission of the organization. The position starts August 30, 2010 and ends August 29, 2011.
This position is available through New Mexico Forum for Youth and Community’s national AmeriCorps*VISTA Cadre program that places service members into nonprofit organizations that serve the needs of underserved youth.
About YMP:
Youth Media Project teaches the craft of digital storytelling for a socially responsible world. At our core are youth development, civic engagement, and amplification of youth voice for positive social change. YMP partners with educators in schools, colleges, advocacy groups, after-school clubs, and performance teams to facilitate program-specific media production training. YMP produces Audio Revolution!, a bi-weekly, hour-long radio broadcast featuring youth-generated content (from our educational partners) and orchestrated by the YMP Production Team.
To learn more and prior to applying GO TO: http://www.youthmediaproject.org
Responsibilities:
Tasks for the Education and Communications Associate position include:
* Refinement and implementation of online communications – newsletters, Audio Revolution! site/blog, podcasting, text messages and broadcast announcements.
* Development and oversight of distribution pipeline, file management, online data, and updating of information
* Development of volunteer program for supporting educational services and events
* Compilation of materials for replication and adaptation of educational programs
* Management and refinement of equipment inventory and organizational systems
* Assistance in organizing materials and programs for development and presentations to potential funders or sponsors
Qualifications:
* Ability to effectively communicate and engage youth, educators, parents, and volunteers in youth media and service-learning pedagogy
* Excellent written, verbal, and editorial skills
* Practical knowledge of computers, computer systems, and familiarity with digital skills including video or audio production, editing software, web design, social networking, and file management
* Willingness to adapt and respond to organizational growth and development
* Experience with non-profits and community organizing a plus
* Experience in communications or public relations a plus
* Bilingual in English/Spanish a plus
Benefits:
·$10,200/year Living Allowance Stipend, paid bi-weekly.
·$5,350 Education Award (for college tuition or loan repayment) or $1,500 cash stipend paid at the successful completion of your year of service.
·Student loan deferment or forbearance on qualified loans.
* Healthcare (catastrophic coverage), prescription drug coverage and childcare allowance.
Eligibility/Restrictions: An AmeriCorps*VISTA candidate must be a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or lawful permanent resident, be team oriented, and be willing to take on a wide range of challenges. You must be at least 17 years old. There is no upper age limit, and many
AmeriCorps*VISTA members bring significant work and life experiences to their assignment. Self-initiative, flexibility and organizational skills are a must. Also, you must be available to serve full-time for one year, (August 30, 2010 – August 29, 2011) and are prohibited from secondary employment or full-time college during your year of service.
CONTACT for Application:
Judy Goldberg: judy@youthmediaproject.org
505.986.1880 or 505.699.9740