Toward a Transformative Education within Youth Media Production

In our contemporary society, a young person may enter the education system already competent in digital literacies and influenced by the problematic world of social media. Korina M. Jocson, however, through a “connective analysis” (3), presents the case for understanding how young people are using new digital technologies to affect and transform their educations. Youth Media Matters: Participatory Cultures and Literacies in Education examines how young people are creating, sharing, and distributing their stories and why those stories are critical to all of society. Jocson’s inquiry begins with the following question: “How do youth media shape culture, and vice versa” (4)? Over the course of her book, she answers that, by participating, learning, and educating within youth media, young people produce knowledge that has the potential for a transformative education. She offers multiple perspectives on how the work “foregrounds social difference and confronts uneven relations of power” (42), which illuminates the intersection between young people’s interests and technological competencies and informs her argument that the educational potential of youth media lies in understanding it “as assemblage, as critical solidarity, as place-making, and as pedagogy . . .” (8).

The structure of Youth Media Matters combines case studies and examples of artistic productions, linked together critically within her theory, method, and analysis of understanding the significance of new media literacies in youth culture and education. Jocson defines new media literacies as “emergent thinking” and “emergent concepts” (9) in three different areas: new media, new literacies, and media literacies. The case studies and artistic examples highlight Jocson’s teaching projects, and involvement with artists working, at the intersection of literary and media arts. Although the case studies focus on the US education system and its related scholarship, Jocson’s discussion of theory and methods and her literature review are transdisciplinary and thus potentially applicable across the humanities and social sciences in most Western-based systems of education. From Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome analogies, to Gruenewald’s pedagogy of place, to recent discourses on technology literacy in the classroom, this book should find an audience not only with educators and researchers working with youth but students as well, as she provides meticulous citations for every theory and method she synthesizes. Her bibliography alone is an excellent resource for critical theory, both historically in the humanities and social sciences and in current educational scholarship in media literacies and pedagogies.

Jocson introduces the book, and each chapter, with a story and a question. The stories and questions go to the heart of her research as she presents young people of high school and college age creating new media productions and asks: “[W]hat types of media texts are produced and distributed by youth, and . . . what do media texts suggest about youth culture in the digital age” (47)? She offers readers several keywords that connect and define the polyvalent world of youth media: assemblage, critical solidarity, place-making, and pedagogy. Along with her conceptions of youth media, she suggests that as young people harness their stories within new media literacies, they become more competent and contribute to “an ethos of collaboration, participation, and distributed expertise . . .” (14). This last element is important as throughout the book Jocson circles back within each chapter to how youth media production contributes to the pedagogy of media technology in the classroom and to participatory cultures in the larger communities where young people dwell.

Jocson’s use of a keyword at the start of each chapter thematically locates that chapter’s case study within her overall argument. Chapter 1, for instance, uses the term assemblage, with a gesture towards Levi-Strauss’s bricolage, to discuss do-it-yourself and do-it-together productions where students were challenged to offer their stories of identity and self-representation in multimodal platforms. Using everyday objects and oral histories, students created short one-to-three-minute films about how their families came to California. Telling the often-untold stories of the students in an ethnically diverse...