Welcome to the Estlow Center!  

Young people become involved in media-making for a variety of reasons. They may want to develop their own writing skills or share an extracurricular activity with friends, or they may wish to see their names in print or hear their names on the radio or on YouTube. But what do they get out of these kinds of efforts, and how do these efforts relate to changing notions of citizenship today?

For high school journalists, once they're involved, they become socialized into an understanding of the role of journalism within their immediate school setting and, to some extent, they are socialized into an understanding of journalism's role in society at large. Based on in-depth interviews with young people actively engaged in high school journalism, this project has learned that young people from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds benefit not only by getting practice in using certain skills that are associated with contemporary citizenship; they also gain an appreciation of what it means to be part of a public.  In other words, through the process of developing media for an audience that includes and extends beyond one's peers, high school journalism seems to help young people to develop a sense of collective identity.  This is especially important, since U.S. society tends to emphasize individualistic values, and we need opportunities for young people to see themselves as people who can work for commonly-defined goals and for the public good. We've interviewed young people and advisors in high school journalism programs, and now we're also interviewing parents to see what kind of encouragement they offer, both for involvement in media-making and specifically for work that reflects a sense of collective identity and meaning. 

Regina Marchi http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/directory/rmarchi/index.html , Assistant Professor in Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, is a faculty collaborator on this project. She is looking at young peoples' involvement in community radio programs in the Boston and New York City areas.  We think that perhaps these programs provide the same kind of context for learning about collective identity, and one's role in relation to a public that extends beyond one's peers, that high school journalism does. She's currently looking into these processes to see how these programs work, the role that parental encouragement plays in these programs, and how these programs might be of benefit to young people and to the communities in which they serve.

In 2009, we are also launching an initiative that will introduce media-making processes into relatively disadvantaged communities in Denver through religious youth groups. The aim of this initiative is to explore how engaging young people in processes of media-making might shape concepts of collective identity in these populations, where other definitions of collective identity may already be in place.

Rod Buxton, faculty member in film and television analysis at DU, is currently working on an analysis of how young media-makers are portrayed in reality tv and in fictional television.

Research from this project has been presented at the International Communication Association ('07 and '08), at the University of Copenhagen ('09), and at two International Conferences on Media, Religion, and Culture ('06 and '08). Two articles are currently being revised for publication.   

Rachel Monserrate (M.A.'08), Alexis Lynn (M.A. '09) and Art Bamford (M.A. '10), students at the University of Denver, are this project's primary Research Associates.

University of Denver undergraduate student Emma Lynch ('11) served as a Research Associate as part of a Summer Research Apprentice program.

We are also looking forward to partnering with Working Group members in the MacArthur Foundation Digital Learning Initiative who are similarly working on and studying young media-making projects.  

Helping to frame this study is current and previous research work by Sonia Livingstone, Elizabeth Bird, Vicki Mayer, Jack Dvorak, Lance Bennett, Ellen Seiter, Mike McDevitt, Amy Jordan, Amy Nathanson,  Diane Alters, and several other scholars.