Youth Media Production: The State of “The Art”

Erica Halverson · Korina Jocson

Wed., June 10, 5:00–7:00, Great Hall (4th floor, Central)

In this poster, we will review the current state of youth media arts production as a field of research and practice. A growing body of research has demonstrated that participation in media production activities requires sophisticated new media literacy skills (Gee, 2003; Ito, in press), facilitates positive identity development (Willett, Burn, & Buckingham, 2005), and prepares youth to effectively employ 21st Century skills (Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robison, 2007). One common thread across this research is the important role that production plays when youth engage with digital media, highlighting a growing understanding that literacy is a fundamentally productive enterprise. While the research is powerful, however, it remains siloed. Research that examines youth media production in formalized instructional settings is a distant cousin to work describing how youth engage in digital media production in their lives outside of these spaces. We propose to strengthen the research base by examining two basic questions across the diverse researchers who study youth media arts production:

• What do we know about youth media production across the diverse set of spaces in which it is studied?
• What methods for data collection and analysis have we developed to enable the robust study of digital media production?

To answer the first question, we review the literature on youth media production across three sets of spaces:

• Schools: We discuss key findings from work on digital media production in schools including the use of digital media to draw on students’ sociocultural resources as a bridge into more traditional language arts content (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2005)
• Youth media arts organizations: Work in this area has focused on the processes and products of digital media production across media including radio (Soep, 2006), digital poetry (Jocson, 2008), digital story (Nelson, Hull, & Roche-Smith, 2008), and video (Halverson, in press)
• Non-instructional settings: Project New Media Literacies, the Digital Youth Research project, and others have contributed to our understanding of how youth engage in digital media production independently of (and sometimes in spite of) formalized learning settings

Research on youth media arts production pushes methodological boundaries in terms of how to study both the process of creating digital media and the products that youth create. Researchers have made great strides in developing methods for analyzing the multimodal products that result from digital production processes (Burn & Parker, 2003; Halverson, in press; Hull & Nelson, 2005; Jocson, in press). All of these studies take seriously the idea that youth producers make meaning both within and across the various modes of digital media production and have built analytic tools to represent multimodal meaning.

We conclude our presentation with reflections on where the field can go to advance our understanding of how the pedagogy of schooling and after-school programs affords or constrains youth production processes, as well as the role of digital media production in identity development and in 21st century skill development.

References

Burn, A., & Parker, D. (2003). Analysing media texts. London: Continuum.

Duncan-Andrade, J. M., & Morrell, E. (2005). Turn up that radio, teacher: Popular cultural pedagogy in new century urban schools. Journal of School Leadership, 15, 284–309.

Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Halverson, E. R. (in press). Film as identity exploration: A multimodal analysis of youth-produced films. Teachers College Record, 112(9).

Hull, G., A., & Nelson, M. A. (in press). Literacy, media, and morality: Making the case for an aesthetic turn. In M. Prinsloo & M. Baynham (Eds.), The future of literacy studies. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Ito, M. (in press). Mobilizing the imagination in everyday play: The case of Japanese media mixes. In S. Livingstone & K. Drotner (Eds.), International handbook of children, media and culture. London: Sage, Ltd.

Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Clinton, K., Weigel, M., & Robison, A. (2007). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Building the field of digital media and learning. Retrieved July 29, 2007, from MacArthur Foundation: http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org.

Nelson, M. E., Hull, G., & Roche-Smith, J. (2008). Challenges of multimedia self-presentation: Taking, and mistaking, the show on the road. Written Communication, 25(4), 415–440.

Soep, E. (2006). Critique: Assessment and the production of learning. Teachers College Record, 108(4), 748–777.

Willett, R., Burn, A., & Buckingham, D. (2005). New media, production practices, learning spaces. Education, Communication, and Information, 5(1), 1–3.