street-level-youth-media



Review by Angela Carter and David Cooper Moore
 * Street Level Youth Media -- Chicago, IL **

//Description//:

Street Level Youth Media teaches basic audio and video production to a diverse range of urban youth from various cultural and educational backgrounds ages 8-22. Workshops are offered year-round, free of cost. Specific production skills are taught in individual workshops. Examples include digital graphic design, music composition and production, and video production. The mission is to engage youth in media production and use "art as a medium for expression." SLYM allows students to choose topics of interest they would like to explore in the workshop format, and encourages them to express themselves creatively. Projects address social issues of concern to youth, but also focus on individual expression, particularly in the areas of poetry and songwriting.

//Sample productions://

1. [|"Animal Testing,"] by students at Mark Sheridan Math and Science Academy.

Elementary school age students examined issues surrounding animal testing by corporations for consumer products, including Windex and Cover Girl cosmetics. Students combine a mix of genre satire (commercial parodies), re-enactment of animal testing, and archival documentary footage of animal testing to create an advocacy message against animal testing. A mixture of styles suggest some engagement with media literacy via genre analysis and construction of a persuasive argument.

2. [|Audio Projects] by ACT Charter High School.

High school students learned the basics of songwriting via computer software to record original songs, beats, and lyrics. They also incorporated poetry and spoken word into productions. They distributed their work online.

//Instructional methods://

The instructional methods are not explicitly stated, but according to the mission of SLYM, students had the opportunity to choose their production topics and were then instructed by Chicago video and audio artists to master specific production skills. Though there is mention of a media literacy component (gaining the ability to "process what is around them" in mass media), most emphasis is on competency in technical skills in writing, recording, and editing amateur video and audio pieces.

//Values and priorities://

SLYM's primary goal is in engaging urban youth in high-end video and audio production to engage existing interest in creating media. SLYM is artist-focused and emphasizes technical proficiency in artistic expression. Several programs are explicitly geared toward professionalization in various media industries.

//Financial support and staff://

SLYM is a non-profit organization supported by corporate, non-profit, governmental, and individual contributions and received roughly $700,000 in 2009 to run several workshops. The staff of SLYM consists mostly of permanent and freelance artist-instructors whose experience comes from various fields of media production.

//Critique and Reflection://

In //Teaching Youth Media//, Steve Goodman explains that "students were engaged by the immediacy of the personal and social isues that they explored, but it was the closeness of the subject matter that could also push them away" (Goodman, 2003, pg. 97). In SLYM, youth are engaged by the "closeness" of subject matter, but it seems that most productions investigate creative and uncontroversial issues. The "Animal Testing" video appears to be an exception, but generally, SLYM seems very conscious of not wanting to push its students away from the production process. As a result, many projects rely on intuitive knowledge and innate creativity and do not seem to encourage research and other more challenging media literacy skills.

Our sense from investigating SLYM's literature is that the amount of funding from diverse sources (many mainstream and corporate) may prohibit more challenging social action-oriented media production and instruction, despite the group's stated mission of creating socially-conscious material. SLYM focuses intently on technical prowess but does not seem to exhibit explicit interest in broader critical inquiry and investigation. The actual products are at a semi-professional quality level, but it is difficult to assess the media literacy learning objectives. For instance, we saw no evidence of discussion or reflection in the footage or online about media literacy's core questions. It seems as though SLYM was somewhat disingenuously promoting the school as a media literacy center. In one possibly telling example, a [|digital graphic design product] [PDF] defined "media literacy" as a measurement of success and personal achievement in media fields.

Though clearly opportunities arose for critical inquiry, such as in the genre parodies in the "Animal Testing," there is no evidence in SLYM's literature that such deconstructions and analysis were built in to the program's curriculum. Instead, the program seems to encourage high production value while downplaying the role of critical thinking and media literacy in teaching high-end production skills.