Filmmakers/Educators/Facilitators? Understanding the Role of Adult Intermediaries in Youth Media Production in the UK and the USA

Abstract

The possibilities that making “their own” media might contain for engaging young people in learning has been celebrated in recent years, while the role of adult intermediaries in guiding these projects remains too often obscured. Here, I draw on several years of ethnographic research conducted in the UK and the USA to distinguish among three different types of facilitators: guides who privilege processes over outputs; collaborators who position themselves within an egalitarian team; and mentors, who draw on specialist knowledge to encourage young people to make “high quality” films. I assess the impact of these different modes on the central claims made for youth media as a means of developing skills, critical media literac(ies), and encouraging youth “voice.” Although youth media organizations struggling with sustainability often conflate these practices, these approaches lend themselves to achieving diverse aims and thus differences could be better delineated by facilitators and by funders in order to realize the ambitions proposed by youth media projects.

Keywords::

• youth media
• production
• voice
• media literacy
• critical literacy
• learning
• facilitation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. This list is produced in part through my research and in part via a discussion in 2014 that I initiated on the National Association of Media and Arts and Culture “Youth Media” listserv. I queried the practitioners and researchers on the list about the possibilities for professional development and training within their organizations, and if they were aware of other training opportunities.

^2. At the time of my fieldwork. Both major UK government funding sources specifically targeted at resourcing youth media were eventually discontinued by the Conservative government under David Cameron. The downward trajectory of government spending explicitly on “youth media” versus the meteoric rise of funding for the “computing curriculum” and related “digital literacy” initiatives outside of school is beyond the scope of this article but is something I hope to explore in future research.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) [grant number ES/J006572/1] and by the Rausing Scholarship and Graduate Studentship in Anthropology at Linacre College, University of Oxford.

Notes on contributors

Alicia Blum-Ross

Dr Alicia Blum-Ross is a Research Officer in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently working on the “Preparing for a Digital Future” research project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation's Connected Learning Research Network. She has a doctorate and masters in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and also works as a consultant and facilitator for digital media and cultural learning organizations. E-mail: [email protected]