Exploring Youth Media Arts Organizations: Unpacking the Processes and Products of Youth Participation in Digital Video Production as Literacy

Erica Halverson · Michelle Bass · Damiana Gibbons · Rebecca Lowenhaupt

Wed., June 10, 2:00–3:00, Old Madison (3rd floor, East/Southeast)

Artistic processes where youth represent the stories of their lives are powerful mechanisms for identity development and engagement with sophisticated literacy practices. While the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies means that more and more youth have independent access to digital media, youth media arts organizations (YMAO) provide structured opportunities for participants to engage in complex, productive, and literate enterprises. It is through these educational enterprises that youth engage in identity work by telling, adapting, and performing the stories that most define them, using various methods of expression to explore conceptions of self. Youth created digital videos provide strong evidence for the connection between artistic production, identity development, and literacy practices. Willett, Burn, and Buckingham (2005), for example, argue that “identity” features prominently in multimodal composition: “New media production is as much about producing identities and social spaces as it is about creating media…Through different media forms young people are described as performing, defining, and exploring their identities” (p. 2). YMAOs help to ensure that all youth have access to these avenues for identity expression and media literacy. Most are designed explicitly for youth whose educational and developmental needs are not being met or available in school. Therefore, for marginalized youth who do not see legitimate opportunities to address complex issues of identity in mainstream organizations, access to designed storytelling and performance processes can provide a vital space for positive development (Halverson, 2007).

In this presentation we discuss our initial findings from our case study work with four YMAOs across the United States. At each of these field sites, we traced at least one video production cycle, from the first time youth met with the organization’s staff to the public presentation of their final products. First, we will describe the key pedagogical moments that characterize successful practice in these organizations. We highlight both the ways in which these key moments are universal across organizations while discussing the idiosyncrasies of individual practice. It is in these key moments that youth reveal their understanding of identity and how that identity may be represented using the tools of digital video. Second, using the concept of “pedagogical content knowledge” (Ball, 2000) we explore the role of the teaching artists across our four organizations. Third, we address the question of quality across the youth–produced videos. This question is crucial given that the evaluation of learning in performance–based environments often relies on the products created in those environments. We find that films that rely on a balance between the uniqueness of their narratives and the credibility of filmic conventions are the most successful and representative of the organizations’ missions. Finally, we continue our analysis of youth–produced videos by analyzing the power dynamics inherent in these works. Informed by postpositivist realism (Mohanty, 2000; Moya, 2000), this sociocultural analysis sheds light on often unexplored questions of agency, identity, and expression by focusing on how these historically marginalized youth find space for themselves by asserting their own “borderland discourses” (Gee, 2008) using the new affordances of digital media.