EDITORIAL

McGill Journal of Education, Fall 2006 by Hoechsmann, Michael, Sefton-Green, Julian

LISTEN UP: YOUNG PEOPLEAND MEDIA PRODUCTION

This special edition of the McGill Journal of Education sets out to consider the political, social, cultural, and educational significance of youth media production. Changes in access to technology have facilitated new conditions for young people to shoot, cut, and mix multimodal texts, and the emergence of the Internet as "home theatre" for a global audience has enabled youth to communicate across borders and across the street. These new conditions have allowed for an outpouring of youth expression, a channelling of latent youth voice, now redoubled with the potential of making a difference, changing someone's mind, making a mark on society. From an educational point of view, this suggests that we should now be directly interested in the content of what young people have to say and engage with it fully. There is less a sense that entry into new literacies is framed in respect to a deferred future; rather, there is an interest in lived experience in the here and now. And yet, despite the reach of young people into the public domain, there has been scant theorizing of output made by young people and little connection with literacy education programs within the formal education system. Although changing theories of literacy, especially the multiliteracies movement, have acknowledged the changing politics of these regimes of writing and communication, there has been very little empirical connection with the specifics of this repertoire.

Through the analysis of a number of case studies, this special issue seeks to interrogate the struggle over meaning which emerges in contexts where youth are mentored and coached by adult practitioners and educators. How authentic can youth voice be when it emerges from an intergenerational dynamic, however direct or distant that may be? Are there shades of difference across production contexts, be they long-term organizational structures or short-term projects? And to what extent do the powerful ideational influences in the lives of young people expressed in the mass media predetermine or at least influence what is articulated by these emergent authors/auteurs?

We were motivated to pull together a focus on these issues at this point in time because of the intersection of two developing trends across the world. We know about the ways in which young people are often invited and/or motivated to "write" or make video, author songs, and other forms of artistic expression for themselves and for other peer audiences in a number of arenas in and beyond the school. Studies like those undertaken by Buckingham et al (1994, 1995) or Goodman (2003) have mapped out some of the broad questions relating to teaching and learning (both within the school curriculum and in non-formal settings) in respect to forms of media production. To a great extent, work in this tradition connects with longstanding interest in the development of individual voice and how access to new forms of communication affects the capacity for self-expression. These kinds of cultural activities have been galvanised and, to an extent, transformed by the advent of digital technologies and the distribution medium of the web. Although there is a tendency to over state the case and imagine that young people didn't do any writing before the advent of blogging or podcasting, it is no doubt true that access to the means of production and, even more importantly, to control of distribution, and the fracturing of the mass audience into niche markets, has created an intense period of media-making and communication by hitherto excluded and marginalised young people. On one level, then, it is reasonable to characterize the current era as one of extraordinary creativity and production. As has been noted by a number of commentators of both the political economy of culture and the media, the alliance between technology producers and the role of media technologies in opening up the youth markets has transformed this domain.

At the same time, and clearly as both cause and symptom of this "production culture," the status and meaning of young people themselves in relation to the body politic and to civic participation is changing. It is no longer possible for education systems around the world to proceed without in some way making young people the subjects as opposed to the objects of intervention. This emerging political position is clearly related to the fact that young people now have voice and opportunity to speak for themselves and communicate and mobilize with others. While educational institutions - ministries of education, university faculties of education, school boards and schools - scramble to make sense of the new literacies in these new times, youth media organizations and informal media projects stand out as innovatory sites of the new cultures of youth media production (Sefton-Green, 2006). Mobile, community-situated, and unburdened by educational tradition, these organizations and projects are able to apply new measures and methods flexibly to the youth they serve. This is not to say that exciting and groundbreaking work is not taking place in schools and educational institutions, but we have found that for the most part innovation in the formal educational sector is hampered by the need to find school-wide, board-wide, and province (or state)-wide solutions. The best work taking place in schools, we find, is often the result of a few inspired and experienced teachers, or an extracurricular project undertaken by the students themselves. This is changing over time, as more and more school jurisdictions integrate media literacy and new literacy into the curriculum, but the seeds of change are slower to take root in institutional contexts.