Born in Brooklyn, NY, Christine L. Mendoza went to Educational Video Center (EVC) in New York City as a teenager. She returned to EVC after spending two years in Spain where she worked for the Consejeria de Educacion, and taught English using visual media as a facilitation tool. Christine received her Masters from the Comparative Ethnic Conflict Program at Queens University in Belfast and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BA in Media Studies from Hunter College. She has facilitated workshops at an international youth camp in Finland, to Protestant and Catholic youth in Belfast and in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has also interned at ABC News and BBC Northern Ireland. Christine is currently the co-director of the Youth Documentary Workshop and the director of Educational Research and Evaluation at EVC. In this interview, Christine draws connections between her personal experience and her vision of youth media for educators and students she now trains.
YMR: You participated in Educational Video Center (EVC)’s programs as a student, first a high school student then a college student. Now you work for the organization as a full-time staff member. What about your experience there drew you back in as an adult?
Christine L. Mendoza: EVC literally saved my life. When I was 15, I dropped out of high school and was out for a year. I went back to school at City-as-School, an alternative high school program. That’s where I learned about EVC.
EVC made school more relevant, and was exactly what I needed as an independent student who still needed some guidance. EVC provided a program that was part classroom, part workplace. I felt that I was given a lot of responsibility and that I was trusted. So many times before I had been told I was a failure, but the staff at EVC helped me find what I was good at, and supported me so I could succeed. I continued at EVC through the end of high school, and then into college. As a high school student, I participated in the Doc Workshop, and I transitioned into the YO-TV program when I started College. I was exposed to global issues because I was able to travel as an EVC media educator. Looking back, I can see that so many of my choices—from where to go to graduate school to what I want to do for a career—are thanks to my experience at EVC.
When I started at EVC in high school, I was living day by day and school was not one of my top priorities. From there, I became the first in my generation of my family to go to college. I have one older and one younger brother, and their lives have followed a different path which didn’t focus on education.
Because of the skills I developed at EVC and the emphasis they placed on education, I am able to be the person I never imagined I could be—a person that is really contributing to society. For this reason, I have returned to EVC as an educator and researcher—I want to pass on to a new generation of young people the confidence and skills that EVC gave to me.
YMR: What makes the EVC curriculum different from traditional school/educational curricula? Why does this appeal to you as an alumnus and educator?
Mendoza: EVC emphasizes engagement, literacy, and civic journalism. Young people have to be engaged in and like what they’re doing in order to be successful and to make a real difference.
Knowing that, EVC asks young people to create their own research questions and develop their own means for research, helping to support in realizing their vision. At the end of projects, the young people present their research to staff and community members, and their knowledge and insight are appreciated and valued.
I experienced this first hand while I was a student at EVC. The work that I was doing at EVC was project-based, relevant to me and my peers, and it was meaningful. I wasn’t sitting down and memorizing material for class. My learning was connected to something real, and something that would be helpful to the community in the future. I knew that the research I was doing and that the videos we were producing would help other people.
Because of the way EVC’s program worked, it became critical that I was there and that I worked every day. I never missed a day at EVC and I never missed a day of class at school because of EVC. I began to understand why school was relevant to me. When students find this connection for themselves, between a project they’re working on and school, it makes a big difference in the way they feel about school overall.
YMR: Describe a project you worked on that had a big impact on you.
Mendoza: The second video I worked on, through YO TV, was about the juvenile justice system in the United States. We wanted to tell the story of young people who were incarcerated, while showing the broader community issues that led to that moment in their lives. The message of the film was that incarceration doesn’t work because it creates a high level of recidivism and does not, in fact, reduce crime.
The film demonstrated that it’s the lack of resources in a community that lead to crime, and those who do commit crimes need better alternatives to incarceration.
The project had a huge impact on me at the time. We decided that as part of the research for the film, we would go to Rikers Island—New York City’s main jail complex—to better understand the experience of being there. We were given access to inside the Island. There, we interviewed prisoners, saw cells, and saw the church. While we couldn’t film these things, we were able to use the information we gained to create a portrait of that community.
The most notable part of that experience was the time I spent working with formerly incarcerated youth. As part of our reciprocal agreement with New York’s Alternative to Incarceration (ATI) program, we had to go into incarceration programs and teach film classes. My peer filmmakers and myself (all college students) created a curriculum, and did a series of four peer-to-peer workshops. Through the process of these workshops, the young people opened up and told their stories to the EVC students, and we shared stories with them. Not only was I personally impacted by their stories, but I discovered then that I enjoyed teaching and working with young people, and I decided I wanted to be a teacher.
YMR: How did your involvement with EVC impact your educational and career trajectory?
Mendoza: My work with EVC impacted my educational trajectory in a very concrete way. I graduated from undergrad with a major in media and a minor in sociology. I focused on written journalism because I had obtained a very good film education from my work at EVC and other community media outlets in NYC. My interest in sociology was spurred by the research I did for film projects at EVC.
I was exposed to international travel through my work at EVC, and that opened more doors for me after college. I went with EVC to Belfast, Ireland, to work with Catholic and Protestant youth on a project that would build bridges across religious divides through film. While there, I made connections with the University. I went back to those connections later, applied and was accepted to the Master’s program. I graduated with a Master’s in International Politics and Ethnic Conflict Resolution from the School of Politics, International Studies & Philosophy, and wrote my thesis on the education of new immigrants in divided societies. I looked specifically at Belfast and Quebec as case studies. Following that experience, I’ve been able to work with youth in South Africa, and most recently in Spain.
I have to say that staff at EVC was definitely influential in getting me on this path—more so than the curriculum itself. Torrance York, Steve Goodman, and the whole staff created a culture of acceptance and understanding. They were open to what I was going through, and supported me.
YMR: Do you see the potential to expand programs like EVC into the traditional school structure and school day?
Mendoza: Well, right now I am doing research to develop ways in which EVC’s educational model can be replicated in all high schools. I’m finding that there is a big difference between how things work at EVC, and how youth media programs work within high schools. This difference is mainly due to the fact that all students at EVC selected to be here, and the high school students at schools are sometimes brought into the program without the option. However, I’m finding that once the high school students get more involved in the EVC-style work at their high school, they get hooked. They see that they are allowed to work in the building in a way they can’t during the school day. They have ownership of the space and a new kind of authority. They feel more comfortable and this helps them engage.
I am continuing this work, to find out how we can best create an EVC microculture within traditional school spaces. We’re also developing innovative ways to tie EVC curriculum into the high school core curriculum. We have coaches working with history teachers and global studies teachers, but also hoping to partner with math teachers.
YMR: What would you encourage other youth media educators to do for their students, as a result of your life experience and work with EVC? Mendoza: I encourage all of my students to look toward outside opportunities and open their minds to bringing different kinds of people into their lives. I encourage my students to strive to be well-rounded and exposed to lots of different careers and ideas, to find something that they are really good at, and to travel. This could be as simple as getting out of your own borough. Right now, I’m working with a team of youth to do research on the Liberian population in Staten Island—a community of New York City that youth might never see otherwise.
I also encourage my students to be self-reflective about their learning. I see that this helps them get engaged. I ask them to write down their expectations for learning or for the project, and to revise the list every two weeks or so. This practice creates a kind of self-awareness of the learning process. I also encourage them to keep working and keep moving, so that they have no time for self-doubt.
Tag: interview
Youth Media: Invaluable and Life Changing
Chrystian Rodriguez is a youth-producer-turned-media educator who currently works at Global Action Project (G.A.P.) in New York City where he writes curricula, develops community relationships, and works directly with a new generation of filmmakers. Since joining G.A.P. in 2004, Chrystian has facilitated a variety of programs with young people from different communities as well as identity groups. He has also devoted his time to co-organizing youth film festivals, coordinating and facilitating media literacy, production and political education programs locally and nationally; specifically, in conferences such as the Grassroots Media Conference, the Allied Media Conference and the United States Social Forum. Chrystian is also a pop-culture guru and has begun research on the subject in educational environments during his time spent as a fellow of the Youth Media Learning Network. He is also very obsessed with zombies.
With nine years of media education experience behind him, Chrystian reflects on his experience as a youth producer, his youth media genealogy and career trajectory, as well as his future goals to open his own youth media organization one day.
YMR: Your first experience with media production was a call-in TV show hosted by the MNN Youth Channel in New York City. What did you gain from this experience and how did it impact your next steps as a media producer and educator?
Chrystian Rodriguez: I had an early interest in connecting politics with media. It came about during a media class at my high school. It offered me a new way to understand what’s behind the media, its purpose and intentions. Even more than that, I started to think about the connection between filmmakers and what they are producing for an audience—what you want them to take away from the experience, the story, but also what you want your audience to take away about you as a filmmaker [and] your world view. My media class teacher took notice of my interests and recommended that I become a part of the MNN Youth Channel (YC); a youth media program within Manhattan’s public broadcast channel. And so, I began working as a volunteer supporting youth in production while exploring my own cinematic/broadcast interests.
I quickly moved from a volunteer to producer. I co-hosted a call-in TV show that critiqued current films and engaged young people in discussions about movies. Youth Channel staff recognized my ability to work collaboratively with other youth, beyond my technical skills, and so they asked me to become a peer trainer. Soon, I ran both technical and editing workshops for other YC participants. I enjoyed it but I was insanely shy, and so it was difficult for me because it was the first time I was in a leadership role and I needed to be able to facilitate and communicate in new ways.
YMR: Not long after, you transitioned to an executive producer role for “Defense Against Media Nonsense,” a role in which you taught yourself how to facilitate the production process with young people. In what ways did you grow through that experience? How did it change the way you view the world?
Rodriguez: Because the staff at YC was interested in my personal growth, they transitioned me out of the peer trainer position, and at age 18 I became the executive producer of a television show called “D.A.M.N. YC NEWS!?” (Defense Against Media Nonsense).” The experience was trial by fire and learning by doing and showed me that you have to grow into being an educator.
When I became responsible for producing—on my own—a 30-minute piece every two weeks, I quickly realized that the format was not going to appeal to a young audience. So I [led] a planning process with my YC peers. [The] vision and new format would soon be identified as an alternative youth news show. Being the point person was new to me—planning, coordinating committee meetings, and then managing production—and challenged me to bring my creative self to become an educator/media maker. Guiding the YC team [I had] to create a learning process for others. At this point there was no room for shyness.
YMR: Soon after you moved into an educator position at Global Action Project (G.A.P.). What were your first few years like? Did you find things that surprised, inspired, or intimidated you?
Rodriguez: I got exposed to NYC’s youth media landscape through the Urban Visionaries Youth Film Festival, which helped me build relationships with many organizations and learn from their different approaches and missions. That is how I got to the Global Action Project (G.A.P.), a youth media organization that works with young people most affected by injustice in order to build the knowledge, tools and relationships needed to create media for community power, cultural expression, and political change.
During the first few years working as an educator there, I developed a new perspective on youth media. I began to see that it wasn’t simply about the production process, but also about exploring identity and helping young people understand for themselves the ways in which they are affected or oppressed by media messages. Most importantly, I began to understand how media could be used as a tool for young people to think critically about the conditions that affect their communities and discover themselves politically.
The kinds of things that encouraged me at G.A.P. included stepping into a co-facilitator model, working in collaboration with another educator to bring our strengths and interests into the curriculum and our programs. A fundamental difference between co-facilitation and working alone is that, as a co-facilitator, you are in constant dialogue with another educator, negotiating facilitation style, communication, curriculum ideas, and hopefully, building best practices together. It also helps us become more accessible to the youth in the program because there are two adults to connect with. When it works, there is a stronger dynamic and peer analysis between facilitators about what young people need, what youth are bringing into the educational space, and how their experiences and knowledge can be incorporated into the media process. That also speaks to the popular education approach that G.A.P. uses.
There are two other things that I’ve been part of that have helped to shape my approach to this practice. First is that I play a key role in constantly revising and applying G.A.P.’s curriculum (http://curriculum.global-action.org), which means that I’ve taken on both staff development support for other media educators across the field through trainings and workshops. Most recently, I worked with folk to revise the structure of G.A.P.’s core framework. Specifically, we worked to make sure that we communicate through our curriculum both the oppressive and libratory potential of media. It’s the idea of praxis—that whenever there is oppression, there will also be people working for justice by identifying the challenge, taking action, assessing the outcomes, and following up on what’s next that can lead to a victory. For us, the key component is the media’s role in this process, for better or worse.
Personally, I have also worked to develop a way to include popular culture in an educational space. I’ve done this for two reasons:
1) Pop culture is a powerful force in shaping the way we think; and,
2) It is crucial to young people’s daily experience—they are immersed in it—so educators must unpack pop culture with youth in the work we do.
I believe that as educators, we need to support young people in deconstructing pop culture without taking the joy out of consuming it. I had the chance to explore this idea through my time as a Youth Media Learning Network fellow by developing a workshop called “reframing pop culture.” The workshop was designed to challenge the universal concept of the “every man” hero reflected in mainstream media. By repurposing characters from movies such as X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Matrix, unrepresented communities like immigrant youth experimented with rewriting and structuring narratives to include their own stories and histories.
As an educator, I am continually learning. For each young person, what he or she takes away from the media production process is unique. There’s no one approach, and no single outcome. I want to give young people some of what I gained through my experience learning media production and analysis at a young age.
YMR: Sometimes G.A.P. requires young people to have challenging or uncomfortable conversations in order to arrive at a new understanding of a social issue. Can you name one project that stands out to you as both trying and fruitful? What did you learn?
Rodriguez: G.A.P. does a lot of political education with youth in the process of making media and supports young people to think about media as a kind of political entity. This means that the workshops sometimes lead people into challenging conversations, as they understand the existing ideological and political components of media. In the beginning, there is often a lot of push back from the young people, particularly if they’ve never had these kinds of conversations before, as they start to see that the conditions they face are not random, but have histories and systems in place to sustain them. Everything is not always peachy. This is about critical thinking.
And while some conversations are difficult, they’re also invaluable. And as an educator/facilitator it’s important that you shape the space for these conversations to be productive and positive for the development of young people as individuals and as a working group.
For example, a few years back I co-facilitated a group that wanted to make a video examining the relationship between beauty standards and race. It invited a conversation about privilege among certain social groups and the lasting impact of colonialism on concepts of beauty closely related to Eurocentric standards. This was a challenging conversation to facilitate in a racially diverse group of youth who rarely get to talk to each other across race and identity about this kind of issue, especially for mixed race youth identifying as white.
The reason it was hard is not simply about “difference,” but exploring identity through history, and supporting youth to critically reflect on who they are. The result was Beauty and the Box, a sci-fi narrative that critiques media’s role in shaping beauty standards. And while the final piece is not explicitly about race and beauty to the extent our conversations were, the process was essential to informing the piece—who they cast as the hero, and the contrasting worlds they created. Their relationships and conversations went way beyond the video and advanced the critical thinking in their daily lives.
YMR: What would you say to a funder that asks why youth media programs are important for urban youth?
Rodriguez: By “urban youth,” do you mean youth of color who come from oppressed communities? If we’re talking about youth media in general, then it’s about providing tools for youth to represent themselves and their communities for the simple purpose of telling a story that is not often heard. It’s a way for youth to explore and “put their voice out there,” but that’s not all it can be. Not all youth media organizations are the same.
For example, at the Youth Channel I learned how to effectively develop and manage production for broadcast in a way that was youth-generated, and at G.A.P. we have a very specific social justice framework. So for a funder, these kinds of programs create ownership tied to youth history, experiences, and identities. And the reason why that’s important is because, as youth are immersed in mainstream media it affects their thinking and provides a space to question and build their analysis of the world. Ideally, it gives youth a way to align themselves with advocacy campaigns through the production of messages used for social justice.
YMR: What three things would you like every young person to walk away with after going through a youth media program?
Rodriguez: I would like young people to leave G.A.P. with the tools, resources and the knowledge to use media practices for their own use—whether or not ideologically motivated—to have access to a supported process of identity exploration. I’d like young people to understand that knowing themselves is a large part of the media production process and leave with the understanding that media is a large part of our culture and society shapes we do. I would like them to have a better state of mind about how to read the media that we’re fed every day, what we’re apt to understand as our reality, and be able to reflect, and question, and to have a critical distance from it.
[As educators, we must help youth] to understand a non-hierarchical model for media production—working collectively [as a] team to identify with and produce something that they can all connect with. When you build on an understanding about how work can happen in a non-hierarchical space, this can also directly be translated into our daily experiences in communication and working with other in our community.
YMR: What is your dream for the next ten years of your work in the youth media field?
Rodriguez: My dream for the next ten years? This is actually a question I asked myself not to long ago. I really want to be in a place where I will be working on my own media projects specifically connected to my ideological beliefs. I also want to extend my experience and knowledge as an educator, providing professional development workshops and/or presenting in lectures available for other educators. [One day, I’ll] create and manage my own youth media organization—a dream I aspire [to fulfill].
Interview: Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (USC). He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending the past decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of thirteen books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. He is currently co-authoring a book on “spreadable media” with Sam Ford and Joshua Green.
Jenkins is the principal investigator for Project New Media Literacies (NML), a group that originated as part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Jenkins wrote a white paper on learning in a participatory culture that has become the springboard for the group’s efforts to develop and test educational materials focused on preparing students for engagement with the new media landscape. He also continues to be actively involved with the Convergence Culture Consortium, a faculty network that seeks to build bridges between academic researchers and the media industry in order to help inform the rethinking of consumer relations in an age of participatory culture. And he is working at USC to develop a new research project focused on young people, participatory culture, and public engagement.
Jenkins actively blogs at Confessions of an Aca-Fan.
This interview was conducted by Christine Newkirk, the Managing Editor of Youth Media Reporter at the Academy for Educational Development. Christine has worked for several years in the youth media field as a scholar, practitioner, social science researcher and evaluator in New York, Costa Rica and Brazil. She is currently completing her Master’s thesis in International Affairs at the New School University in New York City. Newkirk’s research interests include youth activism, new media technologies, and grassroots social and economic development.
YMR: How can educators best leverage new media tools in the classroom and in after-school settings to help young people A) investigate popular culture, and B) to ultimately tell unique stories and create bridges with like-minded young people around these stories?
Jenkins: Participatory culture has more to do with cultural practices than technologies and tools. Technologies are changing at a rapid pace and we will have to continually learn new tools. But all the more important that we learn how to navigate through social networks, that we learn how to pool knowledge with others who have diverse expertise, that we learn how to remix the contents of our culture to express new ideas, that we learn how to recognize and respond to diverse cultural norms, and that we learn how to evaluate information from many different sources. These skills are fundamentals that will impact how we interface with each other across an expanding array of platforms.
Young people have historically been early adapters and adopters of new media platforms of all kinds—in the 19th century, they created a national circuit for sharing what we would now call zines, newsletters printed by hand-setting type of toy printing press; in the early 20th century, schools and scout troops were among the core hubs for amateur radio production; they were among the first to use amateur movie and video cameras to produce fiction films (even if these films remained “home movies” because there was no means of public distribution and exhibition); and they have been key players since the dawn of the digital age. They are looking for places where they can associate with friends without adult supervision and they are looking for modes of expression, which are not tightly edited by adult supervisors.
YMR: How are new media technologies providing spaces for marginalized groups to engage in the re-negotiation of popular culture (including popular culture around gender roles, race, and politics) in the United States? What does participatory culture mean for the potential of young people to reframe cultural and political debates in the 21st Century?
Jenkins: Grassroots media makers have much more powerful ways of sharing what they make with each other now than at any other moment in human history and on a scale previously imagined. Yes, we live in a world where the concentration of media ownership means that corporate media exerts a very strong influence on our lives, but we also live in a world where grassroots media makers can produce and share media with each other across a broad range of different platforms. As this happens, those media makers who can connect their work to a larger community, which shares their interests and passions, have a real advantage in terms of breaking out of the clutter and finding a recurring base of support for their work.
The challenge, then, is to get messages out from one’s own community to reach a more diverse viewership. Here, the porousness of the digital environment helps in this process. YouTube represents a shared space—a borderlands or no man’s land—between many different forms of participatory culture. What we have to do is open our eyes and open our minds.
YMR: What are some of the greatest examples you have come across in your research of young people using new media technologies to find their unique voices, speak out, mobilize groups and/or challenge the status quo?
Jenkins: I am heading a team of graduate students in the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication at University of Southern California who are trying to explore ways that fandom and other forms of participatory culture is opening up a space for activism and enagement with public policy issues, ranging from copyright and intellectual property to racially biased casting in Hollywood to human rights issues around the world. Using existing material provides young people scaffoldings as they develop different aspects of storytelling to explore different aspects of themselves and the world around them. And displacing these issues onto fictional characters often allows them to dig deeper without fearing exposure. For example, one of the groups my team is currently studying is the Harry Potter Alliance, a group which now has 100,000 members world-wide who are committing to working to support human rights.
Working in relation to the existing infrastructure of the fan community is helping those who may never have thought of themselves as political before transition into greater political participation.
The group is equally open in its use of media tools and platforms, cobbling together a network of expressive capacities. They use Ning and Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, Flickr and Skype, Live Journal and podcasting, depending on their goals and the kind of interface they want to create with their various publics. The group has tackled genocide in Darfur, worker’s rights and equal marriage in the United States, and disaster relief in Haiti, among a range of other concerns.
Part of what allows them to do this is that they recognize the emotional underpinnings needed to support activism, embedding it within peoples friendship and interest networks, and making it part of their playful engagement with popular culture. They adopt new metaphors, which make politics come alive for their mostly young participants, many of whom find the policy wonk rhetoric of traditional activism confusing or off-putting. The Harry Potter Alliance is simply one of many such groups we are exploring which fuse culture and politics, new media technology and community organizing, in powerful new ways.
Another example is the group Racebender, which has been researched by my graduate student, Lori Kido Lopez. This group was started by fans of the American animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, who had been drawn to the program in part because of its representation of a multiracial/multicultural society. Young fans were disappointed when they learned that the characters who they had always seen as coming from many different races were all cast by Caucasian actors for the live action big screen version and so they began organizing, initially to protest and try to reverse the casting decisions, then to educate the public about what was going on and to urge the boycott of the film upon its release.
As a result, they collectively educated themselves about the history of race-based casting in the Hollywood system, identifying many previous examples where characters of color in fictions or real life stories were recast as white when made into movies, as well as an even more offensive history of blackface and yellowface performances where white actors performed often cartoonish versions of people of color. Like the Harry Potter Alliance, the group used a range of platforms—from live protests to online videos—to get their ideas across to the larger community. And in the process, they used social networks to make their struggle a global one, partnering with young supporters in many different countries to try to slow down the box office success of this big budget movie.
They did not get the film recast and the film has still made significant amount of money in the theaters. But they scored a huge success by largely shaping the conversations which occured around the film and educating many journalists (as well as the public) about the core issues it embodied. Almost every review of Last Airbender I read mentioned the protests and the filmmakers ere forced again and again to respond to the criticisms about their casting decisions. Moreover, the press began to apply what they learned from the Racebender protest to talk about other recent films—Prince of Persia—for example which also cast characters of color with white actors. And the group already is trying to gear up to protest another forthcoming film based on the Marvel comic book series, Runaways, which may also be about to cast a Asian-American character with a white actor.
We can read the Racebender campaign as symptomatic of the growing number of debates about race in America, which have come to characterize the Obama era—including ongoing discussion of racialized images in political discourse. But we can also see it as part of the growing number of youth led activist groups, which are reaching a global scope and are impacting public discussions around important issues, especially in the space of cultural politics. Many of these movements have their roots in participatory culture. As young people learn to express their ideas and exchange the media they produce with others, they feel more connected and more empowered.
They are able to tap into these new collectivities and connectivities to exert a collective, public voice, across a range of media platforms, and in doing so, they are helping to reframe how the media covers and how the public thinks about issues of concern to these populations.
YMR: What new media technologies do you see that are not yet fully utilized by educators in the classroom and the youth media field? How might these technologies be more accessible or bridged with those in traditional education settings?
Jenkins: Ultimately, it is not about the tools. We need to learn to communicate across a broad range of different platforms, to recognize the affordances and limitations of each, to know how to navigate different social networks and get our ideas in front of many different publics in ways that they will find meaningful and engaging. I believe these practices can be taught in any classroom.
At the end of the day, new technology does not advance your work if you stick to the same old top-down models of knowledge transmission in the classroom, if you are grading the podcast as if it were just another kind of book report, rather than creating a context which is open to collaboration, the active production and sharing of knowledge towards mutual problem solving.
Right now, most of those skills are being acquired outside the classroom through a range of informal learning contexts, yet there’s a profound break in the learning ecology where for all too many kids, their best ways of learning are prohibited at school as they are striped of the technologies and communities which enhance their learning beyond the school house gate.
I am particularly concerned about those youth who have little or no access to technologies outside of school and yet find that the school has banned Wikipedia and Facebook, has blocked access to YouTube and blogging technologies. Schools have an obligation to help these young people learn to become effective communicators and navigate these spaces. The schools have an obligation to help young people learn how to be creative, safe, ethical and socially responsible users of these tools. Some time ago, danah boyd and I published an online conversation which focused on the risks and challenges of integrating these new technologies into the classroom here: www.danah.org/papers/MySpaceDOPA.html. So, rather than thinking about whether schools should use Skype or Location-Aware mobile applications, let’s just say that schools need to embrace participatory learning through embracing whatever tools are accessible and appropriate to the needs of their communities.
Participatory culture is a frame of mind, more than a toolkit. From my perspective, I see young media makers moving from platform to platform, adopting new tools, while the core community continues. It is about taking whatever technologies are available at a particular moment and exploiting their affordances to serve your community’s ongoing needs and interests.
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FULL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
YMR: What have you learned about the production of culture through your study of participatory culture? Can you describe particpatory culture and its role in reframing the relationship between commercial media and the audience?
My interest in participatory culture began more than 25 years ago when I first sought ways to describe to the academic world what I was observing in my involvement with media fandom. At the time, much of the writing on media consumption emphasized the passive absorption of meaning, and I was spending time in a community which was regularly involved in passionate discussions of the media that mattered to them. They were in effect taking existing media content as raw materials or as my mentor John Fiske would call it, a resource for their own cultural productions. They were writing stories and novels about the characters from television shows; they were composing and performing and recording and exchanging music; they were editing videos which mixes popular songs with video images; they were creating their own costumes. And they did so within networks which supported their creative development and enabled the circulation of what they made to larger communities. So I coined the term participatory culture to describe the differences in the ways they related to media from media spectatorship as it was currently understood in media studies. It is part of the title of my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.
Over the past two decades, these fan practices have moved from the fringe to the mainstream. Many people are now remixing sounds and images and circulating them in every larger social networks. What these guys were doing editing with two vcrs and patch cords can now be done using powerful and low cost digital editing tools. They exchange of remix videos under the table at fan conventions is now conducted very publicly via YouTube, where a video may get several million views.
I argue in my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, that as these fan practices become more visible, they are exerting a much greater influence on how the mainstream media conceptualizes its relationship to its audiences and publics. And in my current book project, Spreadable Media, we are making the argument that even on the level of circulation, these participatory communities are reshaping how media operations. The choices each of us made to pass along meaningful bits of content to our friends is resulting in new trends in commercial media production and helping to build a support base for niche, independent, and global media makers.
As I describe this emerging culture, I am often ask if what is being produced is bad. Yes, much of it is bad, and that’s a very good thing for the revitalization of our culture. Beginning media makers need spaces where they can make bad art, get feedback from an accepting yet critically engaged community, and get better. They need to see bad art so that they don’t feel so bad about their own fledgling efforts. Educators talk about meaningful peripheral participation—that is, the need for times and spaces where newbies can lurk and observe, can take their first steps, and gradually become integrated into the production community. In the old mass media model, cultural productions that did not reach a certain level of technical polish were hidden from view. There was an enormous gap between the professional and the amateur.
On YouTube, though, you can see media productions of all qualities and degrees of personal/professional development; you can share what you make at every step in your journey and you can see what people working at the next stage are producing. Often, you can reach out to them for advice and mentorship; minimally you can learn by observing what they are doing as the processes of cultural production become more transparent. These are all aspects of what I am calling participatory culture.
YMR: How are new media technologies providing spaces for marginalized groups to engage in the re-negotiation of popular culture (including popular culture around gender roles, race, and politics) in the United States? What does participatory culture mean for the potential of young people to reframe cultural and political debates in the 21st Century?
Let’s start with the obvious. Grassroots media makers have much more powerful ways of sharing what they make with each other now than at any other moment in human history and on a scale previously imagined. Yes, we live in a world where the concentration of media ownership means that corporate media exerts a very strong influence on our lives, but we also live in a world where grassroots media makers can produce and share media with each other across a broad range of different platforms. As this happens, those media makers who can connect their work to a larger community which shares their interests and passions have a real advantage in terms of breaking out of the clutter and finding an recurring base of support for their work.
So, to take a minority group as an example, far more Asian-Americans reach the top levels of visibility on YouTube than on network television; the same has proven to be true in terms of the production and circulation of popular music; Asian-American comics artists are using the web to form a community of support around their work and using comics to call attention to the concerns of their community; and all of the above gets discussed and promoted through powerful Asian-American blogs. Asian-American groups are using social networks to rally audiences for films by Asian-American artists and to get activists to protest against the “white casting” of Asian parts in contemporary films—as has occurred most recently around the Last Airbender production (see below).
The challenge, however, is to get these messages out from their own ethnic community to reach a more diverse viewership. Here, the porousness of the digital environment helps in this process. While it is possible to ignore content online which does not seem to speak to your interests (and it is much harder to ignore network television or Hollywood blockbusters) but it is also possible, even likely, that you will stumble onto media produced by people outside your own core community. YouTube represents a shared space—a borderlands or no man’s land—between many different forms of participatory culture. What we have to do is open our eyes and open our minds.
Young people certainly benefit from this lower of the barriers to media production and circulation. Young people have historically been early adapaters and adopters of new media platforms of all kinds—in the 19th century, they created a national circuit for sharing what we would now call zines, newsletters printed by hand-setting type of toy printing press; in the early 20th century, schools and scout troops were among the core hubs for amateur radio production; they were among the first to use amateur movie and video cameras to produce fiction films (even if these films remained “home movies” because there was no means of public distribution and exhibition); and they have been key players since the dawn of the digital age. They are looking for places where they can associate with friends without adult supervision and they are looking for modes of expression which are not tightly edited by adult supervisors. Everything I said above about Asian-American media production holds for youth media production as well.
YMR: How can educators best leverage new media tools in the classroom and in after-school settings to help young people A) investigate popular culture, and B) to ultimately tell unique stories and create bridges with like-minded young people around these stories?
Let me first make it clear that for me, participatory culture has more to do with cultural practices than technologies and tools. In my discussion of youth media above, we see young media makers moving from platform to platform, adopting new tools, while the core community continues. It is about taking whatever technologies are available at a particular moment and exploiting their affordances to serve your community’s ongoing needs and interests. Participatory culture is thus a frame of mind, more than a toolkit. So, yes, it’s great if schools can bring in new digital tools to enhance their teaching, but it is even more important that they bring in a participatory learning models to shape the dynamics of their teaching practices.
I’ve been doing work for the past five years with the New Media Literacies Project to develop resources for teaching the skills needed to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape. We’ve developed resources which tap into the full range of new media technologies and which encourage teachers to engage with popular culture materials through their classes. But, we stress this as a set of conceptual skills and competencies, more than pure technological skills. Technologies are changing at a rapid pace and we will have to continually learn new tools. But all the more important that we learn how to navigate through social networks, that we learn how to pool knowledge with others who have diverse expertise, that we learn how to remix the contents of our culture to express new ideas, that we learn how to recognize and respond to diverse cultural norms, and that we learn how to evaluate information from many different sources. These skills are fundamentals which will impact how we interface with each other across an expanding array of platforms. You can learn more about these ideas by checking out my whitepaper, written for the MacArthur Foundation, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, and following along our blog about the New Media Literacies Project.
In Convergence Culture, I describe one way that young people are developing their voice and sharing stories with each other—through the creation of fan fiction and fan vids. A platform like Fan Fiction Alley in the Harry Potter fan world provides an enormous amount of support to new writers through what is known as beta-reading. Basically, each new writer gets assigned a more experienced mentor. I put it in those terms, because experience is not presumed based on age. There may be 14-year-olds giving advice to people their mothers age, as long as the 14-year-old has demonstrated the capacity to write a compelling story. This process allows the writers to grow. The fact that they are starting with borrowed materials means that they have a larger readership for what they write, a readership which has a shared background and mutual interests which encourages the exchange of insights. They can learn by breaking apart the work of J.K. Rowling and putting it back together again to create a new story. The existing material provides them scafoldings as they develop different aspects of storytelling. Despite or perhaps because of their use of shared materials, distinctive voices and perspectives emerge. People use their stories to explore many different aspects of themselves and the world around them. And displacing these issues onto fictional characters often allows them to dig deeper without fearing exposure—after all, it is Harry Potter who is speculating about whether or not he may be having queer feelings for his same sex classmates and not the author. This is why I keep coming back to fandom as a powerful model for thinking about how participatory culture works to support youth expression.
YMR: What are some of the greatest examples you have come across in your research of young people using new media technologies to find their unique voices, speak out, mobilize groups and/or challenge the status quo?
Lately, my interest in participatory culture has pulled me towards a greater attention to public participation and civic engagement. I am heading a team of graduate students in the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication at University of Southern California who are trying to explore ways that fandom and other forms of participatory culture is opening up a space for activism and enagement with public policy issues, ranging from copyright and intellectual property to racially biased casting in Hollywood to human rights issues around the world.
To continue with the Harry Potter theme which I started in the last question, one of the groups we are studying is the Harry Potter Alliance, a group which now has 100,000 members world-wide who are committing to working to support human rights. The group starts from the model of “Dumbledore’s Army” in the Rowling novels: an underground group of youth activists who challenges evil in their society and works together to change the world. What, the Harry Potter Alliance asks, if we had a Dumbledore’s Army for our world? What evils would it battle and how would we fight them? The group has tackled genocide in Darfer, worker’s rights and equal marriage in the United States, and disaster relief in Haiti, among a range of other concerns.
There’s so much I admire about this group. For one thing, they are working in relation to the existing infrastructure of the fan community to help people who may never have thought of themselves as political before transition into greater political participation. They are working with fan blogs and podcasts; they are partnering with “wizard rock” performers who share their music via mp3 files in social networks; and they are also partnering with more traditional activist groups and charities to insure that their work reaches a public beyond the Harry Potter fan community.
For another, they have adopted a decentralized structure while local chapters identify issues they want to work on and reach out to other organization members for support. Sometimes, this is purely collaborative, while other times, they use the concept of “house competitions” to see which group can get the most voters to the polls to vote on the gay marriage proposition in Maine, for example. While the group has a loose shared agenda, they are not a single issue organization and so there’s space for many different agendas working side by side, pooling resources as needed, working separately otherwise. And the group is equally open in its use of media tools and platforms, cobbling together a network of expressive capacities. They use Ning and Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, Flickr and Skype, Live Journal and podcasting, depending on their goals and the kind of interface they want to create with their various publics.
The group has been extraordinarily effective, recently winning a competition for online mobilization run by Chase Manhattan Bank, and delivering now four cargo planes full of supplies to Haiti. Part of what allows them to do this is that they recognize the emotional underpinnings needed to support activism, embedding it within peoples friendship and interest networks, and making it part of their playful engagement with popular culture. They adopt new metaphors which make politics come alive for their mostly young participants, many of whom find the policy wonk rhetoric of traditional activism confusing or off-putting. The Harry Potter Alliance is simply one of many such groups we are exploring which fuse culture and politics, new media technology and community organizing, in powerful new ways. You can learn more about this research at http://sites.google.com/site/participatorydemocracyproject/.
YMR: What new media technologies do you see that are not yet fully utilized by educators in the classroom and the youth media field? How might these technologies be more accessible or bridged with those in traditional education settings?
Again, for me, ultimately, it is not about the tools. We need to learn to communicate across a broad range of different platforms, to recognize the affordances and limitations of each, to know how to navigate different social networks and get our ideas in front of many different publics in ways that they will find meaningful and engaging. I believe these practices can be taught in a classroom which has no laptop per child and in classrooms that have one laptop per child.
So, yes, I can point towards many promising areas where new technologies are supporting new forms of learning (the use of augmented reality practices through mobile telephones, for example), but at the end of the day, none of these work if you stick to the same old top-down models of knowledge transmission in the classroom, if you are grading the podcast as if it were just another kind of book report, rather than creating a context which is open to collaboration, the active production and sharing of knowledge towards mutual problem solving.
Right now, most of those skills are being acquired outside the classroom through a range of informal learning contexts, yet there’s a profound break in the learning ecology where for all too many kids, their best ways of learning are prohibited at school as they are striped of the technologies and communities which enhance their learning beyond the school house gate. I am particularly concerned about those youth who have little or no access to technologies outside of school and yet find that the school has banned Wikipedia and Facebook, has blocked access to YouTube and blogging technologies. Schools have an obligation to help these young people learn to become effective communicators and navigate these spaces. The schools have an obligation to help young people learn how to be creative, safe, ethical and socially responsible users of these tools. So, rather than thinking about whether schools should use Skype or Location-Aware mobile applications, let’s just say that schools need to embrace participatory learning through embracing whatever tools are accessible and appropriate to the needs of their communities.
YMR: What are some of the greatest examples you have come across with respect to the positive contributions of young people in cultural or political debates facilitated by media convergence and participatory culture? Do you feel that these events have helped elevate the status of young people in global society?
I’ve already told the story of the Harry Potter Alliance, so let me focus on another group, Racebender, which has been researched by my graduate student, Lori Kido Lopez. This group was started by fans of the American animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, who had been drawn to the program in part because of its representation of a multiracial/multicultural society. They were disappointed when they learned that the characters who they had always seen as coming from many different races were all cast by Caucasian actors for the live action big screen version and so they began organizing, initially to protest and try to reverse the casting decisions, then to educate the public about what was going on and to urge the boycott of the film upon its release.
As they did so, they collectively educated themselves about the history of race-based casting in the Hollywood system, identifying many previous examples where characters of color in fictions or real life stories were recast as white when made into movies, as well as an even more offensive history of blackface and yellowface performances where white actors performed often cartoonish versions of people of color. Like the Harry Potter Alliance, the group used a range of platforms—from live protests to online videos—to get their ideas across to the larger community. And in the process, they used social networks to make their struggle a global one, partnering with young supporters in many different countries to try to slow down the box office success of this big budget movie.
So, by some standards, the effort failed. They did not get the film recast and the film has still made significant amount of money in the theaters. By other standards, they scored a huge success, largely shaping the conversations which occurred around the film and educating many journalists (as well as the public) about the core issues it embodied. Almost every review of Last Airbender I read mentioned the protests and the filmmakers ere forced again and again to respond to the criticisms about their casting decisions. Moreover, the press began to apply what they learned from the Racebender protest to talk about other recent films —Prince of Persia—for example which also cast characters of color with white actors. And the group already is trying to gear up to protest another forthcoming film based on the Marvel comic book series, Runaways, which may also be about to cast a Asian-American character with a white actor.
We can read the Racebender campaign as symptomatic of the growing number of debates about race in America which have come to characterize the Obama era—including ongoing discussion of racialized images in political discourse. But we can also see it as part of the growing number of youth led activist groups which are reaching a global scope and are impacting public discussions around important issues, especially in the space of cultural politics. Many of these movements have their roots in participatory culture. As young people learn to express their ideas and exchange the media they produce with others, they feel more connected and more empowered. They are able to tap into these new collectivities and connectivities to exert a collective, public voice, across a range of media platforms, and in doing so, they are helping to reframe how the media covers and how the public thinks about issues of concern to these populations.
Interview: Beth Balliro
Beth Balliro is an artist and educator that has worked with urban youth for over 15 years. In addition to being a founding faculty member at the Boston Arts Academy, she serves on the RYMAEC advisory board, the youth media educator network in Boston, MA. She looks forward to joining the Art Education faculty at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in the Fall of 2010.
YMR: Tell us about your background, and your current position at the arts high school.
Beth Balliro: I entered the field of arts education because of my interest in art therapy. I began my formal training as an art therapist in the early 1990s in the South Bronx. At the time, I was an undergraduate student. I found the therapeutic setting fascinating, but I also began to feel that all art education was, in some form, art therapy. I decided to transition to work in school settings.
I returned to Boston after college, and in 1998 became a founding faculty member at the Boston Arts Academy, the city’s only public arts high school. In addition to teaching studio arts for the last twelve years, I have developed Boston Arts Academy’s CapstoneProject. To complete the Capstone Project, all seniors prepare a grant proposal to fund a community-based arts project of their design.
My interest in media education has expanded as a result of my involvement with the Capstone Project. So many of my students, in developing their Capstone Projects, have incorporated innovative new media into both their proposed projects and their final presentations. Essentially, my students have driven a demand for more new media in the classroom. Having observed this trend, I became involved in RYMAEC, the youth media network in Boston, to help other educators build their capacity to support media integration into school curricula.
YMR: Describe your role in RYMAEC.
Balliro: I have served as an Advisory Board member with RYMAEC since its inception. As a teacher of traditional media with an eye to trends in high school curricula and youth media, I feel I have helped to bridge the teachings of media educators with more traditional public school teachers who may be intimidated by technology but understand its potential for helping students succeed.
YMR: Describe the RYMAEC activities that are most exciting to you. How do you see these activities making an impact in your school district?
Balliro: I have been particularly excited about RYMAEC’s web2.open mic events. At these events, educators from a wide range of expertise share the ways that technology enhances their teaching as a means to achieve deeper student understanding. From our few innovator-gurus to the novice intern drawing from a great dedication to providing access to content to her students, educators have a forum to share their growth, struggles and innovations in a democratic and celebratory forum. It has been fantastic to be a part of this collaborative effort.
YMR: In your years of teaching, what have you noticed is most important for young people to learn and achieve as they are transitioning out of high school?
Balliro: A few years ago I presented on a panel regarding helping students gain “21st Century Skills.” This forced me to consider what specific attributes students must acquire for success in today’s world. In essence, students need to be able to navigate through information and cultural diversity with curiosity, follow-through, versatility, and confidence.
Breadth of knowledge is not important—it is the ability to ask questions and search for answers that will propel students toward healthy and fulfilling development. I have seen the sad reality of extraordinarily gifted artists enter the “scene” heralded with great promise—only to stop short because they lacked follow-through. Conversely, I have known young artists that weren’t the most innately skillful propel into amazing careers due to their ability to work hard and learn what they don’t know.
YMR: From your experience, where does media education fit in arts—and more traditional—education?
Balliro: My colleagues and I have identified a recurring type of student that traditional education has failed to serve—the student that lives most fully in a digital world. We began to see a pattern of young women and men, just two or three each year, that were technologically savvy and had “checked out” of school on its more three-dimensional terms. We struggled with ways to captivate these types of students, helping help them build the credentials to lead their peers and teachers into a new technological milieu. It has been frustrating and inspiring to see these young people forge ahead like a new techie avant-garde and it is our hope to lead them toward leadership and not eccentric isolation.
The experiences of these few tech savvy students, in particular, have shown me that an arts and media education, particularly one that emphasizes cross-disciplinary exploration, problem-solving, cultural contact and rigor, can reach the students that traditional education cannot. Moreover, as I’ve observed the impact of this kind of education on the outcomes of students’ Capstone Projects, I have become more and more convinced that media education, in addition to arts education, helps students develop the skills that will really help them as they transition out of high school into work or higher education.
Wrestling with problems and seeking innovative solutions has long been the work of artists, and it is what students need to practice in order to prepare for the complex world they will inherit. In addition, the critical skills of wondering and building joy among others are often overlooked, but may just be the most meaningful of all. Both media and arts education foster these skills in young people, and I am proud to work with both the Boston Arts Academy and RYMAEC to continue to move this work forward.
Interview: Maya Stiles-Royall
Maya Stiles-Royall is a Media Lab Coordinator for HOME, Inc. in Jamaica Plain, MA, and currently teaches media literacy and production classes at two middle schools in Somerville. Maya’s adventures in media began at Yale University when she took up the Film Studies major and began making films in the New Haven elementary and high schools where she worked. They have since taken her to a Johannesburg, South Africa with an NYU study abroad program, and across the United States on a vegetable oil-powered bus with a sustainability education non-profit called BioTour. Maya is looking forward to beginning her Ed.M this fall with the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
YMR: What background experiences inspired your passion for youth media and how did you come to work in the field?
Stiles-Royall: Like many youth media educators, I was drawn into the field by my own experiences as a young artist and filmmaker. As a high school student, I lived in the darkroom, scribbled poetry incessantly, and dreamed of becoming a photojournalist. I hadn’t considered filmmaking until an internship with documentary filmmaker, Katrina Browne, the summer after my freshman year at Yale. Shadowing Katrina during the post-production of her PBS/POV documentary, Traces of the Trade, I began to understand the transformative power of film media—the way it can activate change within the viewer, the producer, and even society. The internship sparked something within me, and I threw myself into the Film Studies major as soon as I returned to school in New Haven.
I also began working as a classroom assistant for a kindergarten class at Dwight Elementary School. So, when a production class gave me the opportunity to shoot my first film, I took the camera with me into Ms. Lubanda’s classroom. I had admittedly fallen in love with the gregarious students, and I wanted to show the Yale community that the youth of New Haven were capable of much more than riding in the “bicycle gangs” that we heard about so often in the Yale Daily News. Then, filming at Family Literacy Night, I had one of those transformative experiences: a fourth grade student stole my camera. When he took the camera, I realized that maybe it should have been in his hands all along. How could I be the one to deconstruct their representation? Wasn’t that something that the students should be able to do for themselves? This moment pushed me to confront the complex inequities that exist in media production, and inspired me to work towards the democratization of media through education.
The following year, I traveled to Johannesburg South Africa with an NYU study abroad program focused on documentary video production. I lived there for seven months, and worked closely with the youth at a community art and feeding center in Kliptown, Soweto to produce two films about the township community. When I returned to Yale, I worked with three students at New Haven’s Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School to produce a documentary about the tense and complicated relationship between Yale students and the New Haven youth. While they showed me their New Haven, I showed them mine.
Through the reciprocal act of filming one another we were able to begin to cross the socio-cultural divide. Towards the end of the project, I asked one of the students to explain what the project meant to him. He answered, “We’re understanding each other. It’s not ‘a study on the species of urban youth’, you know, it’s a documentary on…let’s get to understand these kids, so they can get to understand me. I think that’s what makes it different.”
I graduated from college in 2008, and spent the following year working for BioTour—an environmental education non-profit that travels the country aboard vegetable oil and solar powered school busses. As the Media Coordinator and Documentarian for BioTour, I helped lead over 30 educational events, and produced a series of short educational videos about sustainability, the youth climate movement, and our journey on the bus.
My time with BioTour was a sort filmmaking boot camp, and when it was time for me to step off the bus, I couldn’t wait to work more directly towards ensuring that all youth have access to the same opportunities as I have had to explore the art of media production. I found my way to HOME Inc. and am so grateful for the chance to fully immerse myself in the hands-on practice of media education.
YMR: Describe the context in Somerville that supports youth media and youth media organizations like Home, Inc. Talk a little bit about the district-wide mandate to put media education in all schools. If you know a bit about the history of this mandate, please tell us.
Stiles-Royall: The district mandate that has established media education in every Somerville elementary school grew out of the success of HOME Inc.’s work at Somerville High School with Media Lab Coordinator Craig Leach. Craig teaches a TV and Media Production elective class, and collaborates extensively with classroom teachers to integrate media projects into their curriculums.
Inspired by the enthusiasm and achievement of Craig’s students, and bolstered by a grant from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the school district designed a new initiative for every 7th and 8th grader in the system to receive media literacy and production training. The program requires each student to work in a small production team to complete an interdisciplinary media project on a topic of their choosing. To support the first year of this initiative, the school system contracted three additional HOME Inc. Media Lab Coordinators (myself included) to coordinate the program and provide technological training and assistance to all students and teachers. The HOME Inc. staff has also been responsible for developing and implementing a yearlong curriculum to guide the development of the students’ media projects.
This initiative marks an enormous commitment to media education on behalf of an urban school district whose students have little exposure to technology tools at home and in the community. By requiring every middle school student to participate, the district is insuring that every student in Somerville has the basic skills to navigate the world of media. Hopefully, some students will develop identities as “media-makers”, and choose to continue cultivating their voice in Craig’s high-school program. Somerville should certainly be commended for introducing students to the power and possibilities of media, and for taking action to ensure that every single student is armed with the technology skills that are essential for success in higher education and the future workforce.
YMR: Describe your position at Home, Inc., including the relationship between Home, Inc. and the Somerville school district, the where & when of the classes you teach, and the key actors involved in making it all happen.
Stiles-Royall: My official title at HOME Inc. is “Media Lab Coordinator.” It is a stipended service-year position. The Somerville school system contracted me through HOME Inc. to teach media literacy and production classes to the 7th and 8th grade students at the JFK and Healey elementary schools.
I teach three separate sections of class a day (twelve a week) between JFK and Healey. Each class is 40 minutes long. My position is supported by the Library and Media department, and so I teach each section of students during their weekly specialist period with the librarian. (Basically, I see each of my 200 students for 40 minutes a week.) I also teach small after-school programs once a week at both schools, as well as a weekly elective class at Healey.
There are three other HOME Inc. Media Lab Coordinators with identical positions in each of the five middle schools in Somerville.
In terms of “key actors”…
There’s Alan Michel, my boss at HOME Inc. He is responsible for all the networking and organizing that made my placement in the Somerville school system possible. I meet with him and the other media lab coordinators at least once a week to collaborate on lesson plans, discuss best practices, and trouble-shoot challenges.
Then there’s Charlie LaFauci, who is the Supervisor of Library Media Services in the Somerville schools. He is our primary point of contact within the school system, and it is through his department that we were able to get the funding and equipment to work within the school.
There is also Vince McKay, the Assistant Superintendent of Schools in Somerville. He is responsible for pushing through the district-wide mandate to deliver student-driven, hands-on media literacy and technology instruction to every 7th and 8th grade student in the district.
And of course, there are the librarians. The librarians are our most constant collaborators, and we work closely with them each day to teach class. They have been eager to learn how to integrate more media literacy and production skills into their lessons. Since the school system cannot necessarily afford to keep the HOME Inc. Media Lab Coordinators on site forever, it is important that we provide the librarians with the skills and resources they will need in order to continue running a successful and exciting media education program.
YMR: What are some of the challenges you have experienced as a media educator and/or what challenges face other young media educators like yourself?
Stiles-Royall: I was only out of college for one year when I started working as a full time media educator. Before my position with HOME Inc., I approached media production as a student—curious, experimental, and admittedly disorganized. Learning how to communicate about media as an educator has been like learning a new language. Like a typical film student, I developed most of my technical production skills by “playing around” and spending ridiculous 18-hour days experimenting with equipment and editing software until I had it figured out.
Since middle school students obviously don’t have the time or resources to do this, new media educators like myself must adapt everything that we’ve learned by “just playing around” into streamlined lessons and workflows. This is certainly a challenge. Articulating the nuances of shooting and editing can be clumsy and frustrating, and when you’re pressed for time (which, of course, happens way too frequently!), it is tempting to grab the mouse from the student to speed through the more complicated technical tasks.
As young media educators, we come into the field with big ideas and genuine passion, and though this exuberance is perhaps our biggest asset, learning how to balance our natural idealism with necessary pragmatism can be an enormous challenge.
We face many of the same challenges that every new teacher faces their first year. In fact, the biggest challenges I have experienced this year are specifically rooted in the public school setting of the program. I’ve found that I have too many students and too little time to give each the attention they need and deserve. Behavior and discipline issues have pushed me to tears, and this isn’t something I ever anticipated. The enormity of the task in front of me quickly became overwhelming. Most significantly, understanding the culture and operating procedure of the schools has been confusing, and communicating with teachers and administrators is difficult and stressful.
Most teachers and school principals have established routines and are already overwhelmed by crowded curriculums. They view the HOME Inc. staff as outsiders, and perceive the program as yet another responsibility that is being pushed onto their already way-too-full plates. Understandably, they get defensive about protecting their time. Though some teachers express enthusiasm for the project, few prove to be flexible and open to our ideas and methods.
I think this problem is ultimately rooted in the school system’s failure to include the teachers in enough of the planning of the initiative. The teachers have ended up feeling “out of the loop”, and were never really given the chance to fully get onboard. Though the intention behind Somerville’s bold efforts to integrate media education across the school system is admirable, a lot of the details of the program were underdeveloped. Roles and responsibilities were never completely delineated, and the district administrators failed to create meaningful opportunities for the HOME Inc. staff and current teachers to form true partnerships and work together.
YMR: Likewise, what are some of the successes?
Stiles-Royall: I try not to define success by the degree of my students’ technical skills. Success must go deeper than that—to the students’ ability to think critically about the media they are consuming and creating, and to work collaboratively to craft and communicate a message that is meaningful to them. Middle school is a time of such self-consciousness, and so my personal goal is for my students to develop a confidence in their voice, their story, and their creative choices. If I can help my students accomplish this, I will consider my work a success.
Whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed and frustrated with the challenges of my work (which I’ve found is bound to happen in this field!), I remind myself of the successes that I experience with individual students every day: a shy 7th grader overcoming their fear and hesitance of being in front of the camera; a production group taking the initiative to write a five-page script over the weekend; a frustrated student emerging from the fog and chaos of brainstorming with a clear idea that they are proud of. These small moments are often enough to keep me energized and renew my passion and commitment to my work.
YMR: What is your advice to the field with respect to facilitating the transition of youth producers into young media educators, and cultivating the passion and enthusiasm of young media educators in general?
Stiles-Royall: Despite the challenges, being able to test my passion and ideals against the realities of the classroom has been an amazing learning opportunity. The youth media field can help young media educators meet these challenges, and take full advantage of this opportunity, by providing us easy and centralized access to successful lesson plans, curricula, worksheets, exercises, project assignments, examples, and best practices. There is no need for any of us to reinvent the wheel, and being able to follow in the footsteps of successful media educators will facilitate our fluency in this new language.
We need (free!) professional development opportunities. Not just for technical skills or media project planning, but also for handling behavior issues, communicating and connecting with teachers, and navigating school bureaucracies. HOME Inc. introduced me to the Regional Youth Media Arts Education Consortium in Boston, and it has been an amazing resource for me in my first year as a media educator. We need to build and strengthen these networks, and create more “ins” for new educators like myself. Perhaps communities like RYMAEC could even establish young media educator mentoring programs, where new educators like myself could spend time shadowing and processing our work with more experienced media education professionals.