Abstract
Goodman gives an inspiring account of new directions in youth media education, analyzing the Educational Video Center’s methodology of bridging the growing urban/rural and digital divides in America by bringing youth together to live, learn, and collaboratively create Web sites and documentaries about urgent problems plaguing their urban and rural communities. Closely following the experiences of two of the participants—one from New York City and the other from Appalachia—this chapter offers unique insight into the interplay between the trauma, social disconnection, and material constraints these young filmmakers struggle to overcome, and the empowering possibilities that these pedagogical strategies open for emerging filmmakers as they learn to reach across cultural divides to form close friendships and resilient identities of authorial agency.
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Notes
- 1.
I am especially indebted to James Hatfield and Kendri Feliz for their kindness, patience, and assistance; to their coordinators and teachers whose commitment and hard work made the WAC project possible, including Marie Cirillo, June Pyle, Mary Grueser, Emanuel Garcia, Dawn Ivey and William Isom; and to Hana Sun and Hive New York for their generous support.
- 2.
When the EVC students first joined local Clear Fork Valley youth in a documentary camp in the mid-1980s, some 6300 miles of Appalachian streams were contaminated by acid runoff from the mines, and unemployment in the region averaged fifteen to forty percent with about twenty-five percent living below the poverty line. The trauma of extreme poverty, hunger, and food insecurity was widespread in the local community (Eller 1985). The short films the youth made at the time on land ownership, community gardening, and hunger reflected these realities (Letta’s Family 1985; Making a Home on Roses Creek 1986; see also Goodman 1986).
- 3.
One Tennessee student had flown in a plane for the first time three months earlier to present the group’s urban/rural digital inclusion project at Mozilla’s international MozFest in London.
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Goodman, S. (2019). Bridging Urban/Rural and Digital Divides: New Directions in Youth Media Education. In: Hermansson, C., Zepernick, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17620-4_25
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