Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

9.24.10 | “Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories,” a new book by Oakland’s Youth Radio senior producer Elisabeth Soep, and San Francisco State University health education professor Vivian Chavez, is sure to become an important resource on youth media production, consumption, and participatory learning.

You may know Youth Radio from the powerful pieces it produces for NPR. In addition to a youth production company, the program also provides afterschool media training to Bay Area young people, 85 percent of whom are low-income or youth of color.

The book offers hands-on resources and behind-the-scenes accounts of youth media production. This includes case studies, like the story of working with an 18-year-old to create a radio piece about discovering his mom is HIV positive. But it also includes helpful discussion of youth media theory and the role of adults as mentors and collaborators in this work. How can adults help create an environment where young people can stay true to the stories they want to tell?

The book includes a curriculum resource, “Teach Youth Radio,” some of which is online. The curriculum uses youth-produced narratives to help students “build critical thinking skills, experiment with digital technologies, and express important ideas about the most pressing social and cultural issues we face today.”

The organization is a recent recipient of a Learning Lab Award in the 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition for its App Lab project, where young people will develop five online/mobile apps that serve pressing needs in their own communities.

Soep and Belia Mayeno Saavedra, Youth Radio’s program coordinator, were interviewed earlier this month on KQED Radio in San Francisco. They talked about the importance of engaging young people in not only creating content about their own communities, but also in building the technological tools to circulate that content.

“They [young people] need to be able to build new ways for people to engage with information and that happens more and more through mobile devices,” Soep said. “And we know from the research that young people, …rely on mobile devices as their primary means of access to getting online. And so it’s a huge opportunity where young people are not only creating the stories, but they’re also building the tools.”

You can learn more about their plans for App Lab in the video below:

Related: For more on how youth of color are using mobile devices, read Josh Karp’s “To be Young, Digital, and Black” at Spotlight.