Dissertation
When I first started researching media literacy scholarship, I was surprised to find that the field had shifted away from media critique, which, I realize now, had been what I was teaching. Media production is a whole new way of seeing the world. With media production, the focus lies on what the youth create using media rather than youth analyzing and responding to media that is already produced. To understand the difference, think of kids creating a video mashup using scenes from the Harry Potter movies rather than writing an essay analyzing the gender dynamics in the books.
I had to shift my thinking, and in doing so, I was lucky enough to find a research group that is studying using the new way of understanding media and digital literacies — the Games + Learning + Society research group.
As part of a larger research team funded by the MacArthur Foundation and headed by Dr. Erica Halverson, I studied media literacy in youth media organizations that serve marginalized youth across the United States: Native American youth in the Midwest; poor, white youth in Appalachia; and urban youth in large cities in the Midwest and Northeast. With each site, we collected a variety of data: fieldnotes on observations of programs; interviews with youth, facilitators, directors, and parents; curriculum guides, both published and unpublished; written work produced by youth; organizational websites; and unedited and edited youth video productions. What we have found in this project is that how identity is expressed in youth videos differs among organizations depending on whether fostering an individual or a collective identity is the goal (Halverson, Lowenhaupt, Gibbons, & Bass, 2009). We also found that there are key pedagogical moments across the youth media arts organizations (YMAOs): application, shooting script, pitch, editing, and public screening (Halverson & Gibbons, 2010). These are the moments when youth signify their identities through artifacts, such as a written application essay, a verbal pitch, or a DVD of their videos for public screening. We found that we could trace youths’ understandings of how to express their identities through the affordances of filmmaking at different moments within the process through these artifacts.
In my dissertation that stems from this larger study, I am concerned with the ethics behind new media and youth, in particular in youth video production in marginalized populations. In a nutshell, using New Literacy Studies, sociohistoric theories, and social semiotics, I explore how media literacy is taught, the media youth produce, and how much agency youth have in media production.
