The following is one in a series of three "white papers" commissioned by OSI for a March 2004 convening on youth media. The papers offer a snapshot of the field from the perspective of different media, serving as overviews of the trends, challenges, and opportunities in youth media.

Introduction

This paper will discuss some of the trends, challenges and opportunities that our organizations face as the youth media field comes of age. We hope that this brief exploration, written by founders of two New York City-based youth media organizations, will help foster a productive dialogue at this OSI convening about what our field needs in order to grow, gain wider recognition and provide us with a supportive network. The audiences we address here are the various stakeholders in youth media—practitioners, administrative staff, funders, festival organizers, distributors and other allies. Hence, this is not a Youth Media primer that seeks to define youth media and argue its merits. Rather, it continues the threads of the many conversations we’ve had over the years at conferences, film festivals and community screenings about building both our individual and collective capacities.

The first section of this paper locates youth media in an historical context, and looks at global trends affecting the field while the second and third sections deal with issues facing the field from the perspective of our organizations. In the second, we use G.A.P. as a lens to explore the meaning of organizational growth and how curriculum development can be linked to staff development as well as play a role in developing the youth media field. In the third and final section, we focus on the professionalization of the field by offering a particular example, the Educational Video Center’s Study Group, and suggesting that its peer to peer model could be adapted field-wide in order to benefit from each other's lessons learned and new expertise. This section also summarizes successful field building activities undertaken to date, and takes a brief look at other capacity-building models. Ultimately, this paper argues that while our organizations represent a diverse assemblage of models, our challenge is to articulate the shared principles and best practices that bring us together as a field. It also argues that the development of regional professional development institutes, conferences, publications, and the increased communication and networking that will follow will benefit each of our organizations. Since we cannot possibly be comprehensive nor do justice to these important topics in a few pages, we instead offer a sketch that needs to be filled out by all who consider ourselves part of the youth media field. If anything, we hope it provides food for thought and we look forward to your critical responses.

Context of Youth Media

Our Roots: While it is only in the past five years or so that some of us speak of a "youth media field," young people have been making media for almost forty years—since the mid-1960s, when portable, lightweight video and film cameras became available in the U.S. and in other parts of the world. These advances in technology coincided with the emergence of youth political agency as a powerful force, manifested through a multiplicity of progressive social movements. Indeed, the youth media field stands on the shoulders of, and has been supported, influenced and fueled by many artistic, social, political, cultural and educational movements. In addition to the anti-systemic struggles of the 1960s, other influences include public access and community television, the media arts field, popular education in the U.S. and Latin America, media education, cultural studies, community organizing and the youth development field. Indeed, each of our organizations has spun our own unique blend drawing from many of these areas.

Current Contexts and Trends: Our field is affected by various globalizing forces and trends. Especially over the past decade, new media technologies have enabled our organizations, along with many other grassroots organizations, to produce broadcast-quality media, find and communicate with new audiences, and exhibit and distribute our work over the web, at rates much more affordable than in the past. The clarity of digital video and sophistication of non-linear editing programs have given young people the chance to produce polished work, enabling them to reach even broader audiences. Given the number of youth media programs, festivals, websites, cable programs, zines and other media outlets that actively seek out youth-produced media, there is probably more good youth media being produced now than at any other time. Yet, the obstacles before us remain considerable. Corporate global media consolidation is at record heights, which makes the goal of a democratic, pluralistic media even more difficult to realize. And young people, still largely disenfranchised from political participation and often the object of damaging stereotypes, continue to confront structural inequities that perpetuate racism, sexism, homophobia, high rates of incarceration, and unequal education. In the face of these trends, the role that we play—opening spaces for young people to articulate their concerns, represent themselves in the media, build community through collective endeavors—is essential. We can further amplify youth voice and maximize the impact of their media by working together within and across fields using strategies of community engagement.

Fostering Organizational Growth

Building Capacity: Many of our programs have been able to grow thanks to the support of foundations that recognize the value of media as a tool for youth leadership, artistic expression, education and organizing, civic participation and social change. The growth of our organizations presents new opportunities as well as new challenges. This section briefly highlights two current areas that Global Action Project is thinking about strategically—the meaning of growth, and developing our curriculum for internal and external use. We have chosen these particular topics because in both cases, we believe that field-wide dialogue could greatly inform and strengthen each of our organizations’ advances in these areas.

G.A.P. has been fortunate to grow steadily each year since its inception. We have added staff (from four to thirteen in five years), developed new programs, moved to a larger facility and built a fairly well equipped media center. As a result of our increased capacity, we have been able to document our curriculum, improve our assessment practices, and increase training and support for the media artists and youth producers that work with us. This is all wonderful, yet, for G.A.P, a key issue we face is growth itself, namely, how to go about it without sacrificing our rich organizational culture—which is process-oriented, democratic, collective, grounded in the desire for social change, and committed to genuine youth empowerment. This concern was raised at a recent Staff and Board retreat during an exercise in which we wrote about our greatest hopes and fears for G.A.P. The idea of growth—what it means, how it is defined, and how it might affect our organizational culture, was revealed as something that produces as much anxiety as excitement. In processing the exercise, we identified differences in what people mean by growth. While some defined it according to scale (increasing the number of youth served, number of programs, staff, etc.), the majority believed we should privilege depth, by providing more support to the current level of youth through stipends, internships and helping them with the transition from high school to college and work, as well as creating more full-time positions with benefits for artistic staff. It was argued that one of the principal reasons our organizations become so central in the lives of young people is because of the quality of relationships they develop in our programs through one-on-one mentoring and working in small groups. Our experience, however, is that explaining this kind of growth to funders can be difficult at best—especially when an increase in numbers served is often how they define growth. An important question to consider is how can the youth media field effectively make the case for the kind of intensive programs we provide young people?

Curriculum Development: One of the most important and complex tasks G.A.P. has undertaken has been documenting and developing its curricula. Our goals are twofold: 1) to articulate our philosophy, approach, and methodologies to staff, and 2) to share our pedagogy with and train other groups. When we began this process, we thought that these two goals could be addressed by creating one Curriculum Manual, but have come to realize that ongoing, effective staff development necessitates the creation of a “living” document that reflects the conversations, newly created workshops and challenges that arise on an ongoing basis. Also, as we develop new programs, we need to articulate what makes each unique, while still being grounded in G.A.P.'s approach. For example, we have video and multimedia programs geared towards older high school students, middle school students, refugee youth, and new immigrant youth. Some of these programs change their focus from year to year, while others are framed over a period of several years by specific themes such as gender/sexuality, human rights and community health. We see program and curriculum development as a highly creative process, not something that can be simply lifted from a manual. For this reason we seek a balance between emphasizing our approach, and giving staff the space to be creative program developers. Engaging our artistic staff in dialogue, and asking for their feedback, guidance and ideas, has been an important part of this process. This generative work is set in motion through weekly meetings, written documentation of each workshop, and periodic self-assessment.

As G.A.P. embarks on readying its Curriculum Manual for publication many questions arise, from which audiences to target, questions of “branding” and authorship, and whether or not to self-distribute. Producing and distributing videos is one of our areas of expertise, but publishing a curriculum manual is something new for us. This is certainly an area in which field-wide conversations and sharing our various approaches would benefit each of our organizations. We receive calls regularly from groups across the globe hungry for curricula. Yet, despite the number of groups engaged in this work, there is still far too much “reinventing the wheel,” and our field still lacks a substantial body of case studies and curricula. Recently, two national organizations received large grants to implement youth media programs, yet neither has extensive experience in this area. How can they learn from all our years of doing this work? This is an opportunity for us to share what we know. The following section makes the case for a national professional development network, built by and for youth media practitioners, to address these and other issues of importance to us.

Professionalization of the Field

The Study Group Approach:

Rebecca, the Co-Director of the EVC Documentary Workshop, cues up the tape, explains to the staff that she will show them a ten-minute segment of her class brainstorming social issues to research for their documentary, and presses "play."

"Get into your group and brainstorm ideas for your documentary," Rebecca says on tape.

Aureliano leans forward and says, "I think homelessness is definitely a problem for teenagers." Then he adds, "But a lot of times they’re homeless because they don’t want to work."

Shinnel responds, "But mostly they get caught up in a system where their family is thrown out of housing and there’s nothing they can do about it. We need to find out about groups that help build more housing. Like Habitat for Humanity. Maybe we can volunteer for them."

Rebecca stops the tape and asks the EVC staff seated around the monitor to share their observations of where they saw the teaching of inquiry in the class activity they just watched.

These are some of the staff comments:

"I noticed they were making connections between their own ideas and other organizations that relate to them."

"I think what happened would have been totally different if they weren’t in a group but were sitting by themselves." "Getting the students to go to a deeper level of questioning, to researching and reading is a real challenge."

"So, how do we get them to really research their issues? To get in the habit of asking questions and pursuing them further—even when there isn’t any one clear answer? Students don’t like ambiguity. They don’t learn this in school…."

This is the Educational Video Center (EVC) Study Group where every two weeks the staff of the EVC spends a morning together over coffee and bagels to reflect on the challenges of their practice. This is one of an ongoing series of meetings where the staff collectively grapples with the question of how to better teach their students to be critically thinking students and citizens.

This forum for professional development is based on the belief that practitioners can most effectively improve their teaching when they have regular opportunities to learn from each other’s knowledge and expertise. By engaging the staff in ongoing discussions about the theory and practice of their craft, they develop a questioning, self-critical sensibility. The EVC Study Group builds and sustains a culture of a "learning organization"; a place where learning is collaborative, public, non-threatening, and is integral to the daily experience of both students and staff alike.

Why is this necessary? One answer is that there are virtually no colleges where one can earn a degree or certificate to be a media educator. Youth media is an emerging field that has not in that sense been professionalized. Perhaps the most common way that media educators learn their craft is through trial and error and they largely do so in isolation. This is also the case for youth media administrators. This problem is compounded—for both the staff members and the youth media organizations that employ them—by comparatively low salaries, a lack of a secure career path, and high rates of turnover.

To add to the challenge of professionalizing youth media is the fact that the field encompasses such a broad range of organizational models and affiliations, as well as different forms of media. Some programs operate as part of larger community media arts institutions, youth organizing projects, or after-school centers; others are stand-alone organizations operating independently. The underlying goals and mission of these programs also vary. Some aim to build youth skills in preparation for college and a career in journalism; some focus on media literacy; others teach media education; some are arts-based; some are recreational; some use video as a therapeutic tool to help teenagers build their self-esteem and resilience; and still others are driven by goals of civic engagement and social change.

Learning Opportunities: While we have yet to agree on common standards for teaching, producing, and distributing youth media, important progress has been made recently towards finding common ground. These include the Urban Visionaries Festival in New York City; the NAMAC A Closer Look case study series and On-Line Salon; the Listen-Up! PSA network; MNN Youth Channel’s network; Media Rights.Org’s youth media distribution project; and the NEA sponsored Youth Media Working Group, to name a few. These activities have served to more broadly disseminate youth media and create forums for discussion and debate.

However, the field does not exploit to the fullest potential the creative ideas and energy produced by these and other such initiatives. We need to establish an effective network—on the local, regional and national levels—that will move the field beyond simply information and resource sharing to collective knowledge building; a network where administrators and practitioners at the grassroots can help each other to make sense of, and to apply new knowledge coming out of the field and in turn, to contribute back to the field the new lessons they have learned. Study groups are one example of structures for peer-to-peer learning and inquiry within an organization. They can be adapted and brought to scale enabling youth participants, teaching staff and administrative staff across organizations to have regular opportunities to talk with and learn from one another and grapple with the critical issues they face.

In addition to professional development, such networks can address a range of capacity building issues including distribution, curriculum development and fundraising. We would attract larger grants from private and federal funding agencies as a national network than as individual organizations. One can imagine that, with support from funders who specifically encourage a culture of cooperation and not competition, a range of cross-organizational (and across video, radio, print and web media forms) initiatives would emerge including: summer institutes that include inter-visitation of each other’s programs; practitioners conducting case studies of their own projects; a collaborative publication containing essays from the field on the theory and practice of youth media; a traveling youth media festival.

The point is for us to create meaningful ways for us to share each of our organizations’ accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience, and constantly build upon the new information and lessons learned. It will give us a chance to question our assumptions and honestly confront some of the toughest problems that keep us up at night. However, we first need to develop a working, trusting relationship across the field through regular conversations over time. Then a base of shared language, practices, and goals will emerge. Each youth media organization will then become not only a producing and teaching organization, but perhaps more importantly—a learning organization.

Field-Building Considerations

We can look to the successes of other fields as models for capacity building from the ground up in cases such as the National Writing Project within the field of literacy reform; the Coalition of Essential Schools and Foxfire within education reform; and the Beacons within the after-school youth development field. Internationally, the Canadian Association for Media Literacy and the Australian Teachers of Media provide useful models for field building through teacher networks. To grow as a field, the youth media field must also build:

• Ongoing Peer-to-Peer Professional Development Opportunities for Practitioners and Leaders Such as Seminars and Summer Institutes
• Conferences, Websites, Clearing Houses and Practitioner-Written Publications for Resource Sharing
• University Collaborations
• Internal and Peer-to-Peer Systems of Accountability

These systems and structures will enable us to more effectively:

• Document and Share Knowledge and Experience
• Codify Standards of Practice and Accountability
• Integrate Research-Based Theory and Practice
• Scale Up the Number of Youth Media Organizations and Scale Down the Focus to Ensure the Depth and Rigor of Each Program

As important as it is for us to mine the knowledge that exists within the field, it is also critical for us to continue building strategic alliances outside the field. We have a great deal to learn from those whose work intersects with ours such as in school reform, community literacy, prison reform, youth organizing, public access, service learning and youth development. Such cross-field collaborations will also scale up the reach of our work, increase our influence with public policy makers, and increase our opportunities for federal earmark funding. Long-term and large-scale government support and university collaborations have proven key to creating greater stability within the education and literacy fields.

As a field, it is therefore necessary for us to simultaneously scale up and scale down: to grow both in depth and breadth. We need to make a convincing argument to public and private funders of the value and need for us to develop our capacity in both directions so they will provide long-term support for such field building. The rigor and self-reflective sensibility produced through cross-organizational learning networks will improve our pedagogy, increase the impact we have on each individual youth we teach, scale down our focus and give us depth. The greater numbers of youth producers and public audiences we reach through cross-field collaborations will scale up the reach of our work, and give us breadth.

The Open Society Institute has generously supported our growth over the years and is now giving us this historic opportunity to reach across our differences and forge a common vision for the field. Let’s engage in vigorous debate with each other, raise the most difficult questions, harness the power of the collective wisdom in the room and take unified action to meet the challenges before us.