Teaching Youth Media

This book explores the power of using media education to help urban teenagers develop their critical thinking and literacy skills. Drawing on his 20 years of experience working with inner-city youth at the acclaimed Educational Video Center (EVC) in New York City, Steven Goodman looks closely at both the problems and possibilities of this model of media education.

Responding to our national concern about adolescents, literacy, media, and violence, Teaching Youth Media:

• Describes the changes schools and after-school programs need to make in order to create a media education that empowers students to change their world.
• Explores the intersection of literacy and culture as youth learn to analyze information from a variety of sources, including television, newspapers, books, films, school, church, and their lives outside of school.
• Features case studies of students and teachers engaged in making video documentaries at EVC and in an alternative high school.
• Illuminates the practical day-to-day challenges faced by professional developers and teachers working to change the way education is practiced in their classes and schools.
• Looks at the profound “disconnect” that results when teachers and curriculum fail to recognize the social and cultural contexts in which urban students live.
• Explores the critical thinking and technical video arts skills students develop as they learn collaboratively to conduct interviews, research, shoot, log, and edit their documentaries.

Steven Goodman is the founder and Executive Director of the Educational Video Center (EVC) in New York City.

“This is a brilliant and exciting book. It may transform some corners of the world.”
—From the Foreword by Maxine Greene

“An extremely valuable contribution to several fields—educational technology, school reform, and media education—this engaging book is ‘past timely’ in that it puts a human face on the rhetoric about the benefits of technology in education.”
—Kathleen Tyner, author of Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information

“At last we have a wonderfully articulate description of how inquiry-based media education works to transform learning -- and teaching as well. It's going to the top of my 'recommended' reading list!”
— Elizabeth Thoman, Founder, Center for Media Literacy