"What Story Are You Telling?" Youth Voice, Media, and Projects in Humanization

• In Event: Reimagining Literacy Education & Research within the Context of Youth Epistemologies
  In Working Group Roundtable: Reimagining Literacy Education and Research Within the Context of Youth Epistemologies

Abstract

Who is permitted to tell what kind of stories? What and whose stories matter to the academy or in “English” classrooms? In contexts of social-science research and secondary “English” classrooms, narratives collected are often traumatic stories about youth of color experiencing savage inequalities, reeling from a culture of poverty, or being left behind. Tuck and Yang (2014) confront and refuse the “fixation social science research has exhibited in eliciting pain stories from communities that are not White, not wealthy, and not straight” (p. 227). Youth media production, on the other hand, demonstrates the promise and complexities of centering self-determined youth voice, specifically as a space where youth engage “storytelling to reveal specific ways in which society structures their lives to shape the kinds of people they can or will be” (Jocson, 2017).

This paper is an exercise in air-shifting (Author, 2011), an invitation to learn from and with the literacy practices of youth media producers as a way to move education researchers toward envisioning alternative theoretical and methodological approaches involving youth literacies and cultural practices, as well as to reframe school literacy learning as dialogic experience. An otherwise possibility (Crawley, 2016) or imaginative alternative (Greene, 1995) to fetishizing pain narratives might be found in what Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) call “storying” or “co-construct[ing] our shared truths and realities in the space between the telling and hearing of stories” (San Pedro, Carlos, & Mburu, 2016). This kind of “storying/storytelling/authoring” or critical listening between and among researchers and (youth) participants is what they refer to as “Projects in Humanization (PiH).”

For this exploration, data were analyzed from multi-year ethnographic case studies of two youth radio groups: 1) Youth Voices, a southern-based youth radio collective facilitated by a Southeastern community-based organization with an international reputation for documenting and promoting the historical role of the South, particularly its Black radical tradition; and 2) and Radio Lab, a youth media training initiative in New England designed to teach the tools of radio production and sound engineering for purposes of storytelling through commentary, feature stories, and short audio projects highlighting teenage experiences in and out of high school.

Preliminary findings suggest that while both youth radio contexts provide useful insight for working with young people of color in and out of schools, key differences emerged between/among the ways youth-led and youth-serving organizations frame and position marginalized and minoritized youth, thereby influencing the extent to which youth experience and voice is re-presented in humanizing ways. In the context of Youth Voices, youth literacies and cultures are centered, celebrated, and consulted as media is used to amplify their voices and develop a civic identity toward engaging in the public sphere. In contrast, Radio Lab raises important questions about the type of stories produced and privileged in spaces where adults solicit particular youth narratives. Learning from these spaces has implications for teaching and learning in schools, and for reenvisioning approaches to designing, enacting, and storying educational research with youth and community collaborators.

Author

• Keisha L. Green, University of Massachusetts - Amherst