Storying as Reclamation: Digital Storytelling and Transformative Collaborative Practice with Young People

Overview: This presentation will center the transformative power of collaborative practice using digital storytelling to enhance a sense of community and collective efficacy with young people living in city contexts. By creating a space that acts as the ‘center of gravity,’ this program demonstrates that storying is reclamation.Proposal text: Research has demonstrated that arts-based programs have on positive impact on young people, with empirical studies demonstrate that in particular young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds that participate in arts programs have moderate to significantly higher rates of academic achievement, college enrollment and degree attainment, volunteering, non-academic reading and library visits, civic engagement, and voting (Catterall et al., 2012; Jeannotte, 2003; Ware, 2014). Young people that engaged in arts-centered extracurricular activities are significantly more likely to participate in other prosocial activities associated with increased self-efficacy and the promotion of protective factors that are central to empowerment and positive youth development (Catterall et al., 2012; Prince et al., 2019; Sampson et al, 1997). Yet, little research has focused on the collective impacts of arts-based programming that young people and their communities experience, impacts that far exceed aesthetics and creativity to encourage collective efficacy and social change (Doucet et al., 2021; Goessling, 2017, 2018, 2020).

Young people have few spaces and places in our society outside of the constraints of formal, prescriptive programs and educational experiences to express themselves creatively, making arts-based programming ripe contexts for developing creative expression and interpersonal effectiveness (Ballard et al., 2021). In particular, such spaces driven by participatory, youth-centered practices have demonstrated positive outcomes that far exceed creative expression, including increased a sense of belonging, skill acquisition, and civic engagement (Wallace-DiGarbo & Hill, 2006; Goessling, 2020; Wright et al., 2016; Zarobe & Bungay, 2017).

This paper highlights findings from an intensive mixed methods collaborative youth participatory action research study with Youth FX, a digital media and filmmaking program in Albany, NY. Located in a high-poverty/high-crime neighborhood, this program provides a platform for young people to engage in a co-creative youth driven space, staffed by former participants and focused on emancipatory processes that encourage creative, collective expression, skill acquisition, and social action to impact the broader community. In this study, young people collaborate with a social work researcher to chronicle their processes using participatory action research. These young people ultimately produce a documentary to capture the experiences of being in a transformative space that acts as a ‘center of gravity’ for young people and community members, despite the public narrative of participants being “at-risk” and the neighborhood being “disordered.” In their stories, young people demonstrate together they foster a sense of community and collective efficacy, being the community capacity to come together for action in the interest of the collective good based on shared expectations for behaviors and action (Bandura, 1996; Walton, 2016). Working with young filmmakers of color, visual artists, musicians, educators, community organizers, poets, activists, urban farmers, tech specialists, sound editors, and other community members, young people at Youth FX breath life into the essence of collaborative practice and demonstrate that social work can benefit from engaging more with one of the most undervalued facets in society at large: youth voice. This presentation highlights that when given the space to create and work together, young people embrace storying as reclamation.