Supporting Awareness through Participation: Young People as Co-Researchers on Digital Media Use

Resumen

Students from junior high and upper secondary schools are made active participants in the research process, as co-researchers in developing digital media use in Swedish public school. In the (new) sociology of childhood young people are considered active participants of the contemporary media culture (Prout, 2005) as they are fluent users of digital media (Buckingham, 2006; Livingstone & Haddon, 2009). At the same time, the school environment (and especially so the Swedish public school) is constrained in the access to and the use of digital media, and hence school context is limited in relation to how the young people/ pupils will experience and understand the affordances of digital media in general, and user created content in special. In this presentation we will focus on our methodological experiences and reflections on young people as partners in the research process. This methodological approach is influenced by the notion of “concientización”, or consciousness (making conscious), as developed by Freire (1974).