I Too Am
2018 – 2020
SUMMARY
‘I Too Am’: Teens, Media Arts, & Belonging brings together faculty and students from Annenberg and Cinema’s Media Arts + Practice Division with teachers and students from three Los Angeles high schools, providing youth with critical and creative tools to share stories about identity and belonging in the face of transitions and displacement. Youth address the question: ‘what is my story?’ as it relates to place, race, and class, considering what it means to be an American, a Californian, an Angeleno, and part of a local community.
Field trips transport youth to varied geographic environs, asking them to reflect on the way place speaks to us based on our backgrounds, shaping who we are, and how we see our own communities through a new lens. To supplement the field trips, teachers use the Critical Media Project to help students decode media representations of race, ethnicity and class. High-school students document their experiences, presenting them in a culminating media festival that collectively reflects on the impact of demographic and social change on community and place.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
- Provide students with critical and creative tools to tell their own media stories about identity in the face of transitions and displacement
- Empower and validate student voices through the process of storytelling, media creation, and public exhibition of their work
- Hone students’ critical media literacy, specifically around representations of race and socio-economic class
- Foster cross-cultural, cross-school dialogue among students around the theme of displacement and belonging
- Engage students in the exploration of different geographic areas outside of their local communities (and comfort zones), asking them to consider how places can impact who we are and how we see ourselves through a new lens
- Extend dialogue and reflection about displacement among Los Angeles high school youth by integrating media projects in future critical media literacy curriculum (via Critical Media Project)
