Learning from Each Other: Collective Practices in Making Independent Youth Media

Abstract

Purpose – This paper explores how the interactive dynamics of peer education models within independent youth media outlets facilitate and impede youth engagement in media activism and social change work, more broadly defined.Design/methodological approach – Ethnographic and participatory action research methods are used with the youth media hub, Youth Media Action (YMA), to examine the possibilities and challenges that peer media educators confront in cultivating a noncommercial space for the collective production of oppositional media. YMA specifically seeks to involve youth from marginalized communities.Findings – The results suggest that peer-to-peer education models do act as vehicles for political engagement as youth experience shared ownership, cultivate solidarity, and acquire community organizing skills through the collective production of oppositional media. At the same time, challenges can surface when peer educators juggle multiple roles and participating community youth groups espouse differing organizational values and pedagogical sensibilities.Research limitations/implications – This study offers a potential pathway for further research on how peer education and collective media making models influence youth citizenship and social change work.Originality/value – The focus on the organizational and social dynamics of peer education models is useful in understanding youth citizenship and digital access as a collective experience for youth living in disenfranchised communities that seek out these spaces for not only media making but also community building.

Citation

Kulick, R. (2013), "Learning from Each Other: Collective Practices in Making Independent Youth Media", Kawecka Nenga, S. and Taft, J.K. (Ed.) Youth Engagement: The Civic-Political Lives of Children and Youth (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 16), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 227-251. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-4661(2013)0000016014