1GyAp2x

Work 305and classroom management, was one of my best years because I didn’thave to force the kids to be in the classroom.” While at a local classroomlevel, these educators are doing their best to make the most of the opportunitiesput forward to their students; the risk, as Renee Hobbs (1998)points out, is that media production can be constructed as a curriculumgeared for low-achieving students, who “are allowed to ‘play’ with videobasedand computer technologies, while high-ability students get moretraditional print-based education.” While higher-achieving students areengaged with computers and media production as part of a more generalmedia ecology they inhabit, the classroom becomes a place for a moreremedial form of media education for students who do not have thiscultural capital.In contrast to the orientation of classroom teachers, educators in youthmedia programs had a different view of the potential of media education.Educators in the hip-hop program that Mahendran (Hip-Hop MusicProduction) observed and the video-production program at the Centerwhere Dan Perkel, Christo Sims, and Judd Antin (The Social Dynamics ofMedia Production) observed saw their roles more in terms of vocationaltraining than in general or remedial education. Media production is tiedexplicitly to the hope of employment in creative-class jobs, though educatorsat the Center struggle daily to instill this ethic of professionalism inthe media-production process. At times, the goal of producing work in avocational vein conflicts with the goal of empowerment and the developmentof youth voice. Hobbs (1998) describes this as a tension betweenmore expressive and vocational forms of media education. Although youthwere encouraged to take charge of their own projects, adults would interveneto focus them and orient them toward the goal of creating a polishedwork. In contrast to the hip-hop program, where youth were motivated bytheir existing engagements and knowledge of popular culture, youth inthe Center’s program had to rely more on the adult educators to set theagenda and provide the cultural capital for their work.Among youth engaged in youth media programs, we also found somewho were deeply pessimistic about what opportunities formal educationafforded them, and who saw a more vocational orientation toward digitalmedia as an alternative to a middle-class school-to-work trajectory. One ofthe participants in Dilan Mahendran’s hip-hop music production study,Louis, an eighteen-year-old African-American, describes a moment during