Civic engagement & ypar
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This is a report of a media-rich Youth Participatory Action Research Project. High school students from new immigrant communities worked with university people to explore how to influence public policy related to policing in the Denver area. They succeeded in making recommendations that the city has incorporated into training about implicit bias.
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Civic engagement & ypar
- 1. C O M P A R A T I V E P E R S P E C T I V E S O N M E D I A T R A I N I N G & C I V I C E N G A G E M E N T I N A T - R I S K C O M M U N I T I E S A YPAR DIGITAL MEDIA EFFORT Critical Youth and Media Studies: Bringing Youth Voice into Post-Ferguson Law Enforcement Training Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D. Professor & Chair
- 2. RESEARCH QUESTION • How might a media-rich youth participatory action research project serve as an avenue for including youth voice in local policy?
- 3. INTRODUCTION “Using media to make a difference in our communities” 1. Project’s beginnings 4. YPAR method 2. Stakeholders 5. Theoretical framework 3. Questioning theory 6. The project 7. Conclusion: participating in a media-rich YPAR research enables the performance of citizenship
- 5. DIGITAL MEDIA CLUB “Using media to make a difference in our communities”
- 6. STAKEHOLDERS • South High School • City of Denver’s Office of the Independent Monitor • University of Denver (service learning class(es) • U of Denver faculty Critical PAR Group
- 7. QUESTIONING THEORIES • How might a media-rich youth participatory action research project serve as an avenue for including youth voice in local policy?
- 8. YPAR METHOD • Critical youth studies (Cammarota & Fine 2008; Maira, Soep & Lipsitz 2005) & critical race theory (Crenshaw 1995) • Akom, Cammarota, & Ginwright (2008): YPAR as method in which youth study their own social contexts to understand how to improve conditions and bring about greater equity (Powers & Allaman 2012) • Participatory, collaborative, focused on race/racism and other axes of social difference
- 9. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK • All humans have the right to speak and be heard on issues that affect their lives, and neoliberal mainstream media too often fail to provide the means for this (Couldry 2010) • Grassroots media production in the form of citizens’ media can provide a venue for members of marginalized communities to voice alternatives (Rodriguez 2011) • Youth media programs have a history of developing youth voice in ways that bring together critical media literacy and production (Mihailidis 2014, Fiskerkeller 2010).
- 11. OFFICE OF THE INDEPENDENT MONITOR
- 12. THE PROJECT • 22 students from 13 countries • August 2014-May 2015 • Using media in 3 different ways: • Used the Internet to: • research and analyze media coverage of interactions between police and persons of color • Research and review programs on police and youth training elsewhere in the U.S. • Use of digital video recorders to record students’ experiences throughout the year as they learned and developed their own thoughts about these relationships • Preparation of media materials for curating
- 19. • Image of white board • Photo of research brief • Photo of authors
- 21. DISCUSSION • “The audience problem in digital media and civic education,” by Peter Levine (2008) • Youth media programs are effective in teaching youth voice; the problem is in assembling the right audience.
- 22. DISCUSSION • “The audience problem in digital media and civic education,” by Peter Levine (2008) • Youth media programs are effective in teaching youth voice; the problem is in assembling the right audience. 1. Reconceptualize media materials as evidence that comprises part of a larger argument for social change. 2. Marshall that evidence in relation to already-defined efforts that seek to address a social problem.
- 23. DISCUSSION • Rodriguez (2011) argues that we need to understand citizens’ media as performance rather than as persuasion or transmission of information.
- 24. CONCLUSION • Rodriguez (2011) argues that we need to understand citizens’ media as performance rather than as persuasion or transmission of information • Participating in media-rich YPAR research can be viewed as performance of citizenship that, by reframing the centrality of media in relation to data- sharing, can be persuasive and can enable the sharing of insights with those making decisions about the policies affecting today’s young people. Thank you! Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D.
Editor's Notes
- Can this effort provide a new model for critical youth and media studies? Begin with intro to how I got to this project,
- Didn’t start out in media lit or civic engagement, but in ethnography of media use among teen young people & their families.
- Focus on parenting. Did some interviews w/young people from the school whose backgrounds were very different from others in my sample. Some: little parental support or familial challenges. Very different contexts than what journalists wanted to interview me about (use of apps by parents for parental surveillance). Knew I could learn more & wanted to address my abiding interest in youth voice and youth experiences w/media through more engaged research paradigm.
- 4 yrs ago. Added benefit of starting the club, from the perspective of an ethnographer who’s also a faculty member: it gave me a field site that expected me to show up every week. I’ll discuss the negotiation of ethnographer and volunteer mentor and then co-researcher in a paper I’m delivering on digital ethics on Sunday. For this paper, I want to focus on the project itself. DMC: Partnership w/Goodwill leader at SHS who recruits students & coleads. Meet weekly, about 1 ½ hrs. voluntary. 21 students altogether; usually 8-10/wk. Fall – spring. What’s unique in the design:
- In addition to 1 ½ hrs/wk w/students, also sev hrs/month w/City, and sev coordinating visits from DU students thru classes & indep studies. Later in this yr, crit PAR group to explore expanding YPAR/CPAR work to other schools in DPS. Will describe YPAR & CPAR in a moment, but first, here is the question that framed my study overall:
- Wanting to think through participatory politics ideas that started w/fandom or common language of media, then moved to interest-driven media use, and then to civic action. E.g. of Harry Potter Alliance in Jenkins’ Convergence Culture & then broadened in the MacArthur-supported education and civics work of Mimi Ito, Joseph Kahne, Lissa Soep, and others. I wondered: what if you started instead with youth and the social challenges they identified and sought to address, and then brought in media as resources for developing and implementing research? How might those of us interested in social change explore the intersection of youth agency, media, and politics from a different direction? So, rather than starting from context of fandom and media use, starting from the whole social context, which is consistent with YPAR:
- CYS: opposed to studying youth in the framework of pathologies or problems,.CRT: framework for thinking of race as a social construction that, as an ideological system, reproduces social injustices and inequalities for students of color and preserves white privilege. YPAR: begins with the idea that youth have the ability to analyze their own social context, to collectively engage in critical research, and to engage in resistance to repressive institutions as a way of enacting their own resiliency. Also, great resources within media studies, esp in relation to development comm:
- So, what I think is unique in this study: the need to design a YPAR project that foregrounds the role that media-rich research can play in informing policy and decision-making. Media entered the project at several points. Describe the project
- August, 2014: Michael Brown, unarmed teen, shot and killed by officer Darren Wilson. Protests erupted in streets. Became the second-longest protest in US history after the Montgomery bus boycotts. Students wanted a way to address this. I had thought we might continue to work on what we’d done the year before, which had focused on the ending what’s been called the school-to-prison pipeline. So I’d been in touch w/local comm org’s who were already working on students’ rights in schools. One put me in touch with OIM.
- OIM had received a pilot grant to explore how to develop a program that would lower rates of incarceration among students of color in Denver. They wanted to develop a training program that included both officers and young people. Gia from OIM pitched, students liked it, decided they’d partner – which also gave them opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise. They knew that what they learned would inform a longer-term curriculum that could change the way young people learned about law enforcement & officers learned about young people esp those from new immigrant communities.
- Interesting shift in the media-rich part of the project: consistent w/visual ethnog approach of trying to understand life and relationships as dynamic processes, & seeking to explore the role of media w/in these. What was diff: they were going to review the video of the events in which they’d participated and see that as “data” that could be shared.
- Although we spent a fair amount of time looking up stories and then using some basics in semiotics to discuss media coverage, Digital video recording quickly became the heart of the project, although it didn’t seem like it at the time. The recording only became significant to students after the fact. We did a lot of interviewing: first one another,
- Then the officer assigned to their school,
- And then local officers we met during a field trip to the Denver Police district station. We met with and interviewed officers twice: once in Feb,
- and again in April, thanks to our partnership with OIM.
- And in between, we also had students from the U of Denver visit twice to engage in videotaped discussions about how student members of each group experienced interactions w/members of law enforcement. Just one story, from Christmas and Esso, two cousins originally from Burma who’d moved to Vietnam and then to U.S. Esso, father in car, stopped in minor car accident. Wouldn’t let her translate. Expressed frustration. Key to need to listen. Also important to our overall discovery: that the video of these stories were recorded not only as a means of telling good stories, but as data that provides evidence for how and why things should change.
- We reviewed the video materials together and talked about what we’d heard from the officers and from us, and began work on a website that will be a place that curates all of the video materials. I recruited 4 DU students who are helping w/this now. In relation to Christmas and Esso’s story: ending the segment with a policy suggestion that police be expected to report when they encounter someone for whom ESL, and discuss how they negotiated this. From all of our review and consideration of the video materials that were now data, the South students and co-leaders also came up with a list of findings
- Findings that we shared and developed over several weeks. Then I drafted a research brief to be shared with the Office of the Independent Monitor that included all of their names as co-authors. OIM is now taking that brief and working with several local org’s incl law enf to develop its first forum that will bring together law enforcement members and students of color, which takes place next month. The most central finding of our research brief is that many students of color don’t feel heard or understood by police. They experience being talked to and not listened to. They believe that feeling heard would improve relations, as would getting to know officers as human beings. And, they learned that some police want to develop better relations and they appreciated the interest on the part of young people to do this.
- Several south students will serve as co-facilitators at that first event and will continue to share their impressions, which in turn will inform the ongoing efforts. And members of the DU CPAR group will interview facilitators as well. We’re now exploring several possibilities for co-learning between youth and law enforcement, including regular opps for students to visit and present at district offices, adding student presentations to the trainings for officers placed in schools, and curating the videos they produced in a way that can be shared more broadly as a model for other areas. Wrap up now.
- This is a problem with the participatory politics model: It can bring together fans, but there is still a gap from policymakers that needs to be closed. Also can be a problem with youth media that starts with asking students to produce what they want and then the audience will be worried about later. Has tended to be a focus on organizing screenings. What I’ suggesting instead:
- This then helps us to connect with some existing work in citizens/ media, as I mentioned earlier:
- And the researcher plays a particular role.
- Essentially, I hope that this has demonstrated a model for how to bring together critical media literacy and youth media production efforts with the contextually rooted problem-solving approach of YPAR in a way that envisions media as a semiotic language to be interpreted, a cultural artifact that may be created through recording and editing technologies, and a means of creating and curating evidence. So students see themselves as producing a product that isn’t a video or documentary as an outcome, but as something that helps them to offer their insights directly into the discussions about the solving of social problems that affect them.