research questions about youth culture

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Youth Culture

Introduction, theoretical interventions.

• Life-Cycle Shifts
• Socialization
• Language Use and Identity
• Subcultures
• Linguistic Style and Slang
• Schooling and Education
• Class and Labor
• Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
• Race and Racialization
• Modernity and Globalization
• Migration, Immigration, and Transnationalism
• Activism and Politics
• Violence and the Law
• Commodities
• Visual and Digital Culture

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Youth Culture by Shalini Shankar LAST REVIEWED: 28 May 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 28 May 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0081

The anthropological study of youth began as part of broader inquiries about life cycle, ritual, personhood, and generation (e.g., Margaret Mead’s 1952 classic Coming of Age in Samoa ). Such early studies were generally interested in childhood and adolescence insofar as they offered further insight about a society and adult notions of personhood. “Youth culture,” the term widely used in academic and popular circles today, emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a post–World War II phenomenon in the United States, Canada, and western Europe. A product of extended secondary schooling, delayed entry into the workforce, and the proliferation of consumer culture, youth culture has taken multiple forms with unique trajectories. Youth culture studies now include children, teenagers, and young people in their twenties, and have placed these individuals at the center of the inquiry, rather than as a liminal period before adulthood. This shift has led to productive understandings of broader anthropological questions of interest—such as race, gender, sexuality, class, globalization, modernity, education, and cultural production—while it also shows how youth action is a site of agency, resistance, identity construction, and social change. Scholarship examining style, adornment, and identity construction has made excellent use of the concept of subculture, while practice-based models have further considered the significance of leisure activity, such as consumption of media, commodities, and digital technologies, in young lives. Several other prominent areas have emerged, including childhood and socialization; psychologically informed approaches to child development; schooling as a lens to dynamics of race, gender, and class formation; and language use, identity, and subjectivity. In the past two decades or so, increased emphasis on the ways in which youth mediate globalization, modernity, migration, and transnationalism have come to the fore, as have studies that foreground issues of activism and politics. The potential of youth to be the initiators of social change, however measured, has been productively explored; so too have the struggles of youth as they cope with racism, poverty, abuse, violence, armed conflict, and other social ills. Methodologically, anthropological work on youth is marked by long-term, rigorous fieldwork using ethnographic and sometimes sociolinguistic approaches, and this in situ fieldwork has led to substantive insights about identity and subjectivity, while also attending to history and political economy. Such research has enabled youth to be regarded as significant contributors to the social worlds in which they operate, as well as how they may be poised to inherit and transform these worlds.

The shift to move youth from the margins to the center of anthropological inquiry has been a slow process. Still somewhat sidelined in the discipline overall, as Hirschfeld 2002 notes, theoretical interventions via review articles that define youth as a field of study help give it more of a presence. For instance, Bucholtz 2002 looks at youth culture with a practice-based approach that also considers language use. Korbin 2003 considers childhoods with violence, and Levine 2007 covers numerous contours and debates of this field. Revising approaches to theorizing youth, such as Durham 2004 , and considering issues of methodology and representation as shown in Best 2007 , keep critical focus on this field of inquiry. Sloan 2007 turns a focus on minority youth in particular (see also Shankar 2011 cited under Linguistic Style and Slang ). Undoing misconceptions about the ways that youth have been assessed in schools is also of major concern, especially to those working on the anthropology of education (see McDermott and Hall 2007 , as well as the citations under Schooling and Education ).

Best, Amy, ed. 2007. Representing youth: Methodological issues in critical youth studies . New York: New York Univ. Press.

A thoughtful collection of essays that examine the benefits and challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork with children and youth.

Bucholtz, Mary. 2002. Youth and cultural practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:525–552.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085443

This review article offers in-depth coverage of about three decades of youth culture studies. It establishes the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s as setting the stage for a practice-based approach, and draws in more recent work from anthropology and related fields.

Durham, Deborah. 2004. Disappearing youth: Youth as a social shifter in Botswana. American Ethnologist 31.4: 589–605.

DOI: 10.1525/ae.2004.31.4.589

Argues that youth should be considered less as a fixed category and more as a set of shifting relationships, and thus as a “shifter” in the indexical sense of indirectly pointing to broader social meanings.

Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. 2002. Why don’t anthropologists like children? American Anthropologist 104.2: 611–627.

DOI: 10.1525/aa.2002.104.2.611

Those working on youth culture may find the title question to ring true, as anthropology has largely marginalized youth as a legitimate field of inquiry and instead considered them primarily as a precursor to adulthood. This article offers reasons for these theoretical and ethnographic gaps and critiques anthropology’s overwhelming emphasis on adults.

Korbin, Jill E. 2003. Children, childhoods, and violence. Annual Review of Anthropology 32:431–446.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093345

An overview of numerous types of violence children face and are recruited into, including armed conflict, bullying, abuse, violent rituals, and neglect. Also considers the violent behavior of youth as a form of agency.

Levine, Robert A. 2007. Ethnographic studies of childhood: A historical overview. American Anthropologist 109.2: 247–260.

DOI: 10.1525/aa.2007.109.2.247

A survey of approaches from Mead and Malinowski to twenty-first contemporary ethnography of children, with an emphasis on developmental and psychological perspectives.

McDermott, Ray, and Kathleen D. Hall. 2007. Scientifically debased research on learning, 1854–2006. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 38.1: 9–19.

This intervention documents problematic classroom practices, testing, and teacher training brought about by the No Child Left Behind Act, and calls for less standardized testing and more individual case studies.

Sloan, Kris. 2007. High-stakes accountability, minority youth, and ethnography: Assessing the multiple effects. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 38.1: 24–41.

DOI: 10.1525/aeq.2007.38.1.24

Illustrates the value of ethnography in offering a counterpoint to dominant perspectives on minority youth schooling, including curriculum, pedagogy, and student experiences.

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348 Youth Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for youth essay topics? The field is exciting and worth writing about!

🔝 Top 10 Research Topics on Youth Issues

🏆 best youth essay examples, 🔎 argumentative essay topics about youth, ✅ simple & easy youth essay titles, 🥇 youth culture research topics, 📑 good research topics about youth, 📌 most interesting youth topics to write about, ❓ research questions about youth.

In your paper, you might want to focus on important youth issues, such as study problems, physical development, and mental health. Other options include analysing some sociological aspects of youth, exploring youth crime, and focusing on youth culture. In this article, we’ve gathered best research topics on youth issues: argumentative essay topics about youth, youth culture research topics, etc. We’ve also added excellent youth essay examples to inspire you even more!

• How does one’s youth affect their future?
• Youth: rights and limitations
• The youth physical development model
• Legal drinking age in different countries
• Student rights in higher education
• Youth mortality: causes and effects
• Adolescent obesity: how to prevent?
• Young marriages in developing countries
• Youth and political participation worldwide
• Minimum age for employment in the US: should it be changed?
• Empowering Youth Engagement in Society If young people in a given society are not actively involved in important activities in the society they can be destructive and thus negative change in the society. This can be achieved by engaging and […]
• Youth Crime as a Major Issue in the World The relationships that exist in the families of the youths could facilitate the indulgence in criminal activities for example when the parents are involved in crime, when there is poor parental guidance and supervision, in […]
• Modern Technologies and Their Impact on Youth This study presents an analysis of the impacts of the modern technology on the communication skills, personalities and social behaviors of the youth in the technological context that characterizes the network society.
• Youth Issues and Adult Society In most countries, the age of the youth is drawn at the time when an individual is treated equally under the law, normally referred to as the age of majority.
• “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by Wilfred Owen Literature Analysis The events of the past still haunt some of the countries, the relics of the war are still being found in the places of former battlefields, the veterans are being honored and the films about […]
• Youth Unemployment and Policy Solutions The inability to address the problem of unemployment in the given age group may result in the growth of criminal activity, child poverty, and people’s negative perceptions of life.
• Youth Unemployment as a Social Issue Different factors have led to the high levels of youth unemployment, with the most widely studied of them being the skills that are available to the unemployed youths.
• The Main Causes of Youth Violence Access to Guns and the Influence of the Media Shooting is one of the most common forms of youth violence, and guns are the primary weapons of perpetrators.
• The Technology Influence on Youth This paper examines some of the main effects of new technologies on adolescents and young people, including deterioration of the physical and mental condition, increased risk of becoming a victim of a fraudster, and the […]
• Solutions to Effects of Excessive Internet Use on Youth The education system and parents have a major role in the effort to reduce excessive use of the internet among the youth.
• Youth Misbehavior: School and Community Risk Factors The following paper analyzes school- and community-related factors that contribute and sustain adverse behavioral patterns assesses the influence of diversity and multicultural issues that may impact the success of interventions, and explores several possible ways […]
• The Effect of Social Media on Today’s Youth This theory is useful in the explanation of the impact of media during crisis, and will also be useful in the analysis of the impact of social media on the youth of the UAE.
• Youth Crime in Functionalism and Conflict Theories The analysis will focus on determining factors contributing to youth engagement in criminal acts, examining the types of delinquencies they are likely to commit, and establishing the socio-psychological facets associated with the teenagers in the […]
• Youth and Children Ministry What is required is a framework which aids thinking about the task of youth ministry that ensures that Biblical beliefs, values and practices are constantly upheld in our ministry to young people regardless of context.
• Youth Crime According to Conflict Theory The second one is that the youth might engage in criminal activities and violence due to misappropriation of resources, lack of jobs, and inadequate strategies to meet their social needs.
• Media Violence Effect on Youth and Its Regulation It is also important to note that the more important the media puts on violence, the more people are tempted to engage in it for the sake of attention.
• Amitai Etzioni: Youth Issues in “Working at McDonald’s” The article, ‘Working at McDonald’s’ by Amitai Etzioni explores the effect of the McDonald’s on students with reference to their studies. The author is against McDonald’s part-time jobs because they do not help the students […]
• The Influence of Peer Groups on Youth Crime The impact of youth crime on the community is profound, and so is the influence of criminal behavior on the lives of adolescents.
• Reasons Behind Youth’s Engagement to Drug Abuse in the 21st Century Although youths in the 21st century engage in drug abuse due to several factors, it suffices to declare factors such as the rising unemployment status, peer pressure, and their hiked tendency to copy their parents’ […]
• Youth Culture and Globalization The focus is also on the relations that exist between the youth and the society, as well as the factors that shape youths identity in terms of culture.
• Hip Hop Influence on Youth: Statistics and Effects Hip hop music is also said to perpetuate the rise in criminal activities among the youth. It is therefore recommendable for the youth to shun away from the vice brought about by hip hop music.
• Contemporary Issues Facing the Youth The paper addresses the issues affecting the youth of today with specific reference to unemployment and health. Solutions: Provision of financial relief to unemployed in the form of Unemployment Insurance System/ Entrepreneurial programs in […]
• Sculpture of Victorious Youth The sculpture of the victorious youth is made of bronze and was discovered in the year 1964 in the Adriatic Sea.
• Youth as the Period in a Person’s Life Youth is both a beautiful and challenging period in a person’s life. Now, living it, I am trying simultaneously to find my purpose and not lose my inner self.
• “Friend of My Youth” by Alice Munro The narrator’s attempts to portray her mother as an active member of the community and tell the story through her eyes indicate a close connection between her and the storyteller.
• Media Portrayal of Youth in Australia The portrayal of youth’s participation in society is a critical factor given the significant role of media in shaping the social concept of youth and the capabilities of young people.
• Western Films Influence on Youth However, there is a concern that its contents may have negative implications on teenagers in the developing countries because of the fundamental differences between the environment presented in the films and what they have in […]
• Social Movements and Youth Activism Research done by Earl unveils that, it is vital to guarantee that young people are actively involved in social movements, and activities in order to encourage active citizenship and build programs that effectively represent their […]
• Preventing Risky Sexual Behavior Among Youth The nation also losses productive people due to time wasted time and death of young people The two best strategies to effect change at the community level is through media and policy.
• Impact of Digital Drug and Electronic Addiction on UAE Youth Therefore, the primary purpose of this dissertation is to determine the impact of digital drugs and the electronic addiction they cause on the youth of the UAE to highlight the existing problem in society.
• Detailed Plan to Attract Youth on Stock Market Investment The management of Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange may consider starting mentorship programs, which target young people in this society in order to attract them to the stock market.
• Asian Youth Gangs Analysis Like most other forms of gangs, younger children are more easily persuaded to join than the older crowd as most of the time it is the leaders of each gang that are in there twenties […]
• Understanding Youth: Consumption, Gender, and Education Thus, because young people represent the specific social group, it is important to reflect on such issues typical for the development of the youth as the questions of consumption, gender, and education.
• Drug Abuse Among the Youth Essentially, this case study will allow the evaluation of the prevailing cases of drug abuse among the youth. In this regard, the pain and peer pleasure cannot be persevered to allow an explicit cure of […]
• Youth’s Aggression and Social Media The problem is in the fact that posts and messages in social media that have followed shootings include images, slogans, and texts provoking violence and aggressive behaviors in young people, and more attention should be […]
• The National Youth Service Corps Schemes in Nigeria Agumagu, Adesope and Njoku note that the core objective of the scheme is to instill in the Nigerian youth “the spirit of selfless service to the community, and emphasize the spirit of oneness and brotherhood […]
• Do Violent Video Games Contribute to Youth Violence? The violence and aggression that stains the youth of today, as a result of these video games, is unquestionably a cancer that ought to be uprooted or at least contained by parents, school leaders, governments […]
• Comprehensive Sex Education: Empowering Youth for Informed and Healthy Choices In addition to providing young people with the facts about sex and sexual health, it is also important for sex education to address issues related to consent, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.
• Socio-Psychological Trust Issues in Youth The truth is that behaviors associated with distrust, such as trust issues and paranoia, are high in the younger generation toward their peers and fundamental social institutions in the Western hemisphere, and these continue to […]
• Premarital Sex Attitudes Among Youth and Adults The purpose of the report is to find out the similarities and differences in people’s treatment of the issue. 20% of females considered premarital sex the major reason for undesired pregnancy and abortions.
• Morality, Faith, and Dignity in Modern Youth The blistering evolution of society combined with the appearance of new opportunities resulted in the significant deterioration of moral and values which determine the nature of human actions.
• Cultural Awareness Among the Arab Youth In fact, the course and consequences of political, social and economic transformations currently undulating across the Arab world championed by the Arab youths present an opportunity to understand the cultural values that need to be […]
• Social Networks and Youth Empowerment The increasing use of the sites has made them good places to train and advertise for various youth programs and activities; ministries of youth have realized the new way of approaching the young and they […]
• Promoting the Importance of Healthy Living in Singapore Youth Community This information proves that it is necessary to identify how the Singapore youth community can benefit from the promotion of healthy living.
• Youth-Led NGOs in Brunei Darussalam Within the past three decades, the youth in Brunei Darussalam has been on the frontline to identify the trends recorded in different parts of the world in an attempt to implement similar practices in the […]
• Poor Kids: The Impact of Poverty on Youth Nevertheless, the environment of constant limitations shapes the minds of children, their dreams and the paths they pursue in life, and, most importantly, what they make of themselves.
• Western Pop Culture and Street Fashion of Japanese Youth The research of the topic needs to be preceded by the explanation of the key subjects and notions used in the current paper.
• The Golden Age of Youth and Freedom However, it is interesting to compare it to the story which took place at the dawn of the cultural and sexual revolution in Chinese society.
• “The Wife of His Youth” Short Story by Chesnutt This is the case with Charles Chestnutt’s short story “The Wife of His Youth” in which the significant disruption of life experienced by the institution of slavery and the Civil War is illustrated through the […]
• Unhealthy Lifestyle Among the Singapore Youth The purpose of this report was to identify the reason for the continued unhealthy lifestyle among the Singapore youth despite the government’s efforts to promote healthier diets and lifestyles and find viable solutions to the […]
• Youth Sports: Negative Effects This type of social exclusion can be ascribed not only to the negative impact of youth sports but also to the inefficiency of educators.
• Exploring The Concept of Youth Cultures Accordingly, the focal concern of this paper has been to accurately comprehend the concept of youth culture and to find out the exact means of finding meaning to the youth identity on the background of […]
• Youth Drug Abuse Among, Education, and Policies Although drug abuse encompasses improper use of drugs disregarding the prescriptions of medical practitioners, the principal challenges of drug abuse occasion from abuse of drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and marijuana.
• Youth Leadership Development However, the exclusion of certain groups of people from the democratic process does not contribute to the flourishment of a system that hinges on the belief that “the operation and ownership of power” are essential […]
• Tourism and Leisure for Youth Target Market This is imperative as the pages provide a forum for potential tourists to identify a company that deals with the tour and travel activities through pictorial displays. For the youths, tourism or travel activities involve […]
• The Concept of Community Development to the Homeless Youths in Australia The nature of the issues and aspirations of the youths To come up with a clear description of the nature of the issues and aspirations of the homeless youths in Australia, an appreciative inquiry process […]
• Mental Health Issues Among LGBTQ (Queer) Youth Studies point to multiple factors that play a role in the risk of suicide among LGBTQ youth, such as gender, socioeconomic status, bullying, and school experience. There is a need for further research and interventions […]
• Non-Consensual Intimate Image Distribution in Youth That is the reason why the topic of an article called Young People Just Resolve It in Their Own Group is relevant and needs to be discussed. This paper aims to analyze the article and […]
• Religion and Culture: Immigrant and Minority Youth Religion is a fundamental way people experience and comprehend the world if culture describes how people perceive and comprehend the world.
• Suicide Among Youth as a Worldwide Issue The world needs to pay more attention to this issue because of the many young lives that society loses and the socioeconomic and psychological effects suicide causes.
• The Urgent Problem of Doping in Youth Sports: Solutions and Impact The solution to the problems is for the states to become more careful about the allocation of financial resources in the field of sports.
• Jamaica’s Unemployment and Positive Youth Development Although a recent positive trend in decreasing levels of joblessness is apparent as the country revitalizes its main source of income, the problem of the high level of unemployment among youth is persistent.
• Gender and Sexuality in Community Youth Work The primary duty of a youth worker enshrines competently rendering services to the public regardless of gender identity and sexual orientation.
• The Youth Criminal Justice Act in Teresa Robinson’s Case 1 of the YCJA is relevant to the article since the offender’s name is still unreported despite the evidence of his involvement in the homicide.
• Radicalization of British Youth Into Violent Extremism: The Role of Salafist Ideology Salafism believes that the most principal and genuine type of Islam might originate in the existence of the initial, honorable ages of Muslims known as the Salaf, who lived near the Prophet Muhammad in both […]
• Sex Variations in the Oral Microbiomes of Youths With Severe Periodontitis The periodontium provides nutrition to the hard tissues of the tooth and the alveolar process – the part of the jaw in which the tooth sockets are located, and it also tightly holds the tooth […]
• The Youth Justice Strategy Action Plan 2019–21 The Youth Justice Strategy Action Plan 2019 21 marks a crucial turning point in our effort to improve the juvenile justice system and lower the number of juvenile offenders and repeat offenders in Queensland.
• The University of Maryland’s Youth Sports Program To show the importance of youth sports programs, the report will focus on secondary research to depict the imbalance of academics and sports in the current curriculum used by many schools.
• Program to Tackle Drug Addiction Among Youth The core area of emphasis will be training the students on different ways to avoid the temptations of using drugs in order to lower the rate of addiction.
• Eating Disorder Among Youth and Its Aspects It is due to the fact that often the above sociological factors cause the development of psychological issues, especially among young people.
• Impaired Communication Amongst Youth The paper on ADHD is the research by Yuen-han and Chan who cite the most recent findings in the field and provide a set of recommendations for youth diagnosed with this condition.
• Retention of Youth by Indian Church of God A case study approach gives a chance to assess how strong the impact of the Indian Church of God is and to evaluate the role of individual members of the church, in particular, the senior […]
• Issue of Youth Homelessness in Canada The third and fourth factors, the lack of education and unemployment, are interconnected, resulting in inconsistent and low income and the inability to afford proper housing.
• Mentoring Youth: Trends and Tradition Considering the information provided in the text, the author’s primary research question concerns the fact what contemporary models of mentorship might be of relevance in the given environment and how these schemes could be implemented […]
• Substance Use Prevention Among Youth The strategy based on substance use prevention includes a number of tasks to follow to ensure the success of the intervention.
• Suicidal Thoughts Among LGBTQ Youth: Client’s Case Assessment The therapist must exercise special caution and delicacy while evaluating the factors related to the case and engaging the LGBTQ client in the process of treatment.
• The Use of Psychoactive Substances by LGBT Youth The purpose of this survey is to identify how reliable the information is that LGBT community adolescents are more likely to use psychoactive substances than heterosexual youth.
• The Problems of Youth Participation in Sports in the United States According to Atencio and Wright, the main issue covered in youth sports participation in the United States revolves around the relationship between the African American culture and basketball.
• The Role of Adults in Supporting the Youth Who Play Sports To reduce concerns and enjoy the chosen area of interest, one should recognize the role of adults in supporting youth to play sports.
• Guaranteeing Safety in Youth Mental Medical Services Centers There is expanding acknowledgment of the drawn-out effect of youth psychological well-being issues and the requirement for a more organized reaction in the US.
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Article contents

Youth and media culture.

• Stuart R. Poyntz Stuart R. Poyntz Simon Fraser University
• , and  Jennesia Pedri Jennesia Pedri Simon Fraser University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.75
• Published online: 24 January 2018

Media in the 21st century are changing when, where, what, and how young people learn. Some educators, youth researchers, and parents lament this reality; but youth, media culture, and learning nevertheless remain entangled in a rich set of relationships today. These relationships and the anxieties they produce are not new; they echo worries about the consequences of young people’s media attachments that have been around for decades.

These anxieties first appeared in response to the fear that violence, vulgarity, and sexual desire in early popular culture was thought to pose to culture. Others, however, believed that media could be repurposed to have a broader educational impact. This sentiment crept into educational discourses throughout the 1960s in a way that would shift thinking about youth, media culture, and education. For example, it shaped the development of television shows such as Sesame Street as a kind of learning portal. In addition to the idea that youth can learn from the media, educators and activists have also turned to media education as a more direct intervention. Media education addresses how various media operate in and through particular institutions, technologies, texts, and audiences in an effort to affect how young people learn and engage with media culture. These developments have been enhanced by a growing interest in a broad project of literacy. By the 1990s and 2000s, media production became a common feature in media education practices because it was thought to enable young people to learn by doing , rather than just by analyzing or reading texts. This was enabled by the emergence of new digital media technologies that prioritize user participation.

As we have come to read and write media differently in a digital era, however, a new set of problems have arisen that affect how media cultures are understood in relation to learning. Among these issues is how a participatory turn in media culture allows others, including corporations, governments, and predatory individuals, to monitor, survey, coordinate, and guide our activities as never before. Critical media literacy education addresses this context and continues to provide a framework to address the future of youth, media culture and learning.

• media culture
• media literacy
• consumer culture

Introduction

It would be absurd for teenagers today to forgo the Internet as a resource for schoolwork and learning experiences of all sorts. Whether to research an essay, acquire new skills, find an expert, watch a video clip, or contribute a blog post, the Internet is often the first source that students turn to pick up new information, to access useful networks, or to find resources that they need to accomplish whatever it is they want to learn. And why wouldn’t it be? The Internet is now a digital learning economy populated by YouTube and Vimeo channels, social media sites like Wikipedia, software and learning games, library data archives, learning television shows, documentaries, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and assorted other resources that are changing when, where, what, and how young people learn. Some educators, youth researchers, and parents lament this reality (Bakan, 2011 ; Louv, 2008 ), but today’s youth, media culture, and learning are nevertheless entangled in a rich set of relationships.

These relationships and the anxieties that they produce are not new. Since the earliest decades of the 20th century , learning dynamics have been thought to be integral to the way youth and media cultures weave together. But these relationships are vexed; the connections among youth lives, media, and education are sites of tremendous anxiety and concern around the world. Yet learning is now such a profoundly mediated experience that traditional dichotomies separating education and entertainment, work and leisure, expert and nonexpert, and pedagogy and everyday life are no longer helpful.

In this article, we examine this context and address how relations among youth, media culture, and learning have been understood since the turn of the last century. Our story begins in the Anglo-American world, but it has quickly become global as media and youth cultures expand around the world. We highlight the anxieties and panics common to thinking about media in young people’s lives and indicate where and how the mediation of youth learning has been taken up to support progressive ends through the development of novel resources, institutions, and pedagogies that nurture young people’s agency, identities, and citizenship. Our survey examines how specific media forms, including film, television, and Web design, have been calibrated to support young people’s learning through the media, and the development of media literacy education to promote critical learning about the media. To conclude, we detail three major problematics that continue to shape the relationships among youth, media culture, and learning.

Teen Screens

Teenagers graduating from high school in 2017 across the global North and much of the global South have always known smart mobile devices, social media, and YouTube, near-constant data surveillance, the ability to Google facts as needed, and texting, messaging, and posting as part of the regular rhythms of daily life. While many statistics have been collected over the years about the time that adolescents spend immersed in media, the general impression is that most children and youth are more involved than ever with media technologies and content. A new area of children’s and youth media has emerged in recent years. It is a world where the Internet, mobile devices, and “television,” now consumed across multiple platforms, compete for attention alongside older media (i.e., radio, appointment television, and movies). Various studies conducted in recent years have sought to understand these developments, with particular attention given to investigating the role of the Internet, social media, smartphones, and mobile technologies in young people’s lives. Regular television and radio continue to hold a place among teenagers’ media choices, and along with mobile phones, they are part of a primary youth media ecology in the global North and South (Common Sense Media, 2015 ; Livingstone et al., 2014 ).

Today, however, one can no longer assume that television programming is viewed on a television set via regularly scheduled broadcasting. While watching television continues to make up a significant portion of teens’ overall media usage in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other regions (Common Sense Media, 2015 ; Caron et al., 2012 ; Livingstone et al., 2014 ), smart TVs, on-demand services, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and video-streaming services such as YouTube, Netflix, and Baidu have redefined what it means to “watch television.” Because the options for consuming content now exist simultaneously across many platforms, there is also a significant amount of diversity in young people’s preferences and patterns of use. Music, for example, remains the most preferred medium among teens, but among only about one-third of teens (30%). After music, video games are a favorite among 15%, reading among 10%, social media among 10%, and television among 9%. The fragmenting of tastes and preferences is notable, with no single medium standing out above all. Added to this is the diversity of ways that teens can engage in these activities, as well as differences in relation to class, gender, and race/ethnicity (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). The point to be made is that changes in how young people spend time with the media are taking place as part of longer-term trends in how media is knit into adolescents’ lives.

At the center of this trend is the fact that young people simply have more media options—both in terms of the media technology used and the content available—and these options are tightly wedded to the daily lives of children and youth. For instance, 57% of teens in the United States have a television set in their bedroom, 47% have a laptop computer, 37% have a tablet, and 31% have a portable game player (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). Sonia Livingstone ( 2009 , p. 21) identifies these technologies with “screen-rich ‘bedroom cultures,’” which have become the norm for kids in countries across the global North. Adding to and fostering media use in screen-rich bedroom cultures is the fact that two-thirds of teens (67%) now own their own smartphone, on which they talk and text, access social media (40%), and listen to music in daily patterns and rhythms (Common Sense Media, 2015 ).

With all these media options available, it is not surprising that teens are more likely than in the past to be media multitaskers, able to pack more media into an hour of consumption than was possible in previous generations. Young people in the United States spend approximately nine hours a day consuming media, for example, but they consume more than one medium at a time. In fact, 50% of teens say that they watch television while doing homework, and 51% say that they use social media some of or all the time when they do homework (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). The typical teenage user today is someone doing homework while watching Netflix, listening to music, and responding to the occasional text, Snapchat, or Instagram message. In this way, screens do not go away as much as they have become environmental in youths’ lives.

This story casts a pall over contemporary youth cultures for some. It is as though the media machine is never absent from youths’ time and space. It is attached to and formative of the worlds of young people, and it would appear to allow for no distance or time away from screens and representations in everyday life. Concerns of this sort are not new. They echo panicked worries about the consequences of young people’s media attachments that have existed for decades. To make sense of these worries, it is helpful to begin with the history of youth and youth culture, terms which are not exclusive to, but find an early emergence in, the West.

Youth as a Distinct Life Stage

The concept of youth can feel as though it has been with us for centuries. But while the age of transition between childhood and adulthood exists across societies, the idea that this period is associated with a particular group of people—youth—and the cultures that they partake in is a recent phenomenon. Andy Bennett (Bennett & Kahn-Harris, 2004 ) tells us that historical instances of what we now call “youth culture” can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries to a group of London apprentices whose dress, drinking, and riotous conduct set them apart from others. Early youth cultures can also be linked to stylistically distinct groups of young workers in northern England in the late 19th century , and to what Timothy Gilfoyle ( 2004 , p. 870) calls the “street rats and gutter snipes” of New York City, who developed oppositional subcultures to challenge adult authority from the mid- 19th century onward. But it wasn’t until the turn of the last century that a modern notion of youth took hold. Schooling would be key to this development.

Publicly funded or supported schooling on a mass scale was regularized in the United Kingdom by the late 19th century and had been ongoing in the United States in the post–Civil War period (i.e., after 1860–1865 ). Public schools developed around the same time in French and English Canada, and slightly later ( 1880 ) in Australia. The practice of batching students into groups by age contributed to the emergence of a new subject position linked to the teen years. If schools started this process, worries about delinquency served to consolidate the notion of youth as a stage of development. Juvenile crime in particular, initially considered primarily an affliction of poor and working-class youth, became generalized by the 1890s as juvenile delinquency and applied to all youth (Gillis, 1974 ). The fear of rising crime rates led to legislative action and the expansion of welfare provisions in the United Kingdom and the United States. The resulting system of social services addressed adolescents as a particular age cohort with specific interests and needs (Osgerby, 2004 ).

By the early 20th century , in psychology and pedagogy studies, G. Stanley Hall’s seminal text, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, and Education (Hall, 1904 ) addressed this stage of life as a specific period of development associated with tumult and uncertainty—the sturm and drang of adolescence. Thinking of adolescence in these terms reflected the worries of legislators, educators, and reformers, but it was not until the early 1940s that the notion of youth culture was coined by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons ( 1942 ). Parsons used the phrase youth culture to name a specific generational cohort experiencing distinct processes of socialization that set them apart from others. Fears about young people’s maladjustment to war during the 1940s continued to feed worries about youth delinquency (Gilbert, 1986 ). But more significantly, a series of changes in the social, economic, and cultural lives of adolescents that began prior to World War II and consolidated during the postwar years proved essential to marking out a modern notion of youth culture.

Media and consumer markets were integral to these changes. From the start of the 20th century , mass media were among the key developments shaping youth culture and learning. This was evident in the United Kingdom and the United States, where industrialization and mass consumer markets emerged earlier than in other nations. This reveals something about the characteristics of youth culture; in many ways, youth cultures (dance, music, fashion, sports, etc.) have always been mediated and shaped by the effects of mass production, wage labor relations, and urban experience. In this way, youth and modernity are tightly connected. Modernity is linked to experiences of change driven by urbanization and migration, the expansion of mass, factory-based production, and the proliferation of images and consumerism as normative conditions of everyday life. Since the late 19th and early 20th centuries , youth have been harbingers of these developments and have often been considered the archetypical subject of modernity.

Early Mass Media and Youth Audiences

The tendency to link youth with the changes characterized by modernity has produced a history of anxieties where the relationships among youth, media culture, and education are concerned. These anxieties first appeared in response to the violence, vulgarity, and sexual desire in early popular culture (e.g., penny novels and mass sporting events, like Major League Baseball), which many educators thought posed an imminent threat to culture. The emergence of the cinema at the turn of the 20th century epitomized these fears by forever changing the nature of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. Movies can be understood with little tuition, meaning that they can fix the attention of all age groups on the screen, a development that proved particularly attractive to children. Early cinematographers were able to stage dramas on a scale unheard of in live theater, to command an audience much greater than literature could, and hence to shape the popular imagination as never before. But because movies work through the language of images, they were thought to create highly emotional—and intellectually deceitful—effects. Images were thought to leave audiences (particularly young people) in something like a trance, a state of passivity that left adolescents open to forms of manipulation that were morally suspect and politically dangerous.

These fears were common, and yet for some, the very fact that movies could reach larger and more diverse audiences—including women and the working class—meant that the medium held a promise for learning that couldn’t be ignored. Such responses not only reflected the sentiment of early film boosters, but they also were part of a more nuanced sense of how life—including the experience of learning—was changing in the 20th century . In a remarkable series of essays, Walter Benjamin ( 1969 , 1970 ) argued thus, suggesting that movies could widen audiences’ horizons through the unique technology of the shot, the power of editing, and sound design. These tools allowed people to see and experience distant lands, other times, and new and fantastical experiences in live-action and highly structured narrative formats. Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush ( 1925 ), MGM’s The Great Ziegfeld ( 1936 ), and Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz ( 1939 ) exemplified film’s early appeal because they seemed capable of helping people to dream and escape vicariously from everyday experiences to imagine a different (and perhaps better) world.

Not surprisingly, Benjamin’s was a minority view in the mid- 20th century . Far more common were fears that modern media would serve to undermine how young people learn proper culture—meaning good books and the right music and stories thought to foster a vibrant and meaningful cultural life. Benjamin’s colleagues in the Frankfurt School (so-called for the city where their work began), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, were especially influential in this regard. Drawing from their experiences with the role that media (i.e., radio and film) played in the rise of fascism in Germany, as well as their disappointment with the quality of early popular music and Hollywood movies, Adorno and Horkheimer ( 1972 ) argued that the culture industries (the artifacts and experiences produced by the corporations who sold or transmitted film, popular music, magazines, and radio) threatened to undermine rich and autonomous forms of cultural life. They meant that movies, advertisements, and eventually television were signs of the commodification of culture, an indication that culture itself—epitomized by the rich European traditions of classical music, painting, and literature—was being reduced to a sellable thing, a commodity just like any other in capitalist societies.

In this context, Adorno and Horkheimer suggested that culture no longer works to promote critical and autonomous thought; rather, the culture industries promote sameness, a uniformity of experience and a standardization of life that at best serve to distract people from significant issues of the day. Through childish illusion and fantasy, the culture industries produce false consciousness, a form of thinking that misinterprets the real issues that matter in our lives, leaving young people and adults blissfully unaware of key issues of common concern that demand our attention and action. For those suspicious of these observations, they are worth considering in light of Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States in 2016 . Since the election, it has become clear that distraction (by “fake news,” for instance) and illusion (facilitated at least in part by foreign manipulation of social media) played a vital role in the campaign and Trump’s eventual election.

Youth Markets and Media Panics

The concerns of the Frankfurt School found a receptive audience in the second half of the 20th century . The postwar decades mark an especially significant period of expansion in youth markets and youth culture in the West (Osgerby, 2004 ). Increasing birth rates during the postwar baby boom fueled the expansion of youth markets, as did the extension of mass schooling, which “accentuated youth as a generational cohort” (Osgerby, 2004 , p. 16). Complicating this were the emergence of television and an intensely organized effort to shape and calibrate the spending power of young people in the service of conspicuous consumer consumption.

First introduced to the general public at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, in the postwar years, television became a new kind of hearth around which parents and children would gather. In the United States, television was initially thought potentially promising for children’s education. The small screen represented the promise and possibility of modern times. Not surprisingly, this sentiment was short lived (Goldfarb, 2002 ). By the late 1950s and 1960s, it became apparent that “most children’s programming was produced with the size of the audience rather than children’s education in mind. [As a result,] television [became] the source of anxious discourses about mesmerized children entranced by mindless cartoons, punctuated by messages from paying sponsors” (Kline, Stewart, & Murphy, 2006 , p. 132; also see Kline, 1993 ). These worries aligned with increasing concerns about the dangerous and morally compromising influence of rock ‘n’ roll, popular magazines, early celebrities, and movies in youths’ lives, and what resulted was a media panic that harkened back to the earliest days of mass media.

Most often characterized by exaggerated claims about the impact of popular commercial culture on children and youth, media panics are a special kind of moral frenzy over the influence of media on vulnerable populations (Drotner, 1999 ). Stanley Cohen’s groundbreaking study of the mods and rockers, Folk Devils and Moral Panics , suggests that emerging youth cultures became the most recurrent type of moral panic in Britain after World War II (Cohen, 1972 ). He reveals how youth are positioned in postwar industrial societies as a source of fear and often misplaced anxiety. His study has been criticized for simplifying the meaning of the term moral panics and for underestimating how complex media environments can shape them (McRobbie & Thornton, 1995 ); nonetheless, his work draws attention to the ways that overwrought fears of youth and media culture can come to act as stand-ins for larger social anxieties. In the process, youth and youth culture become scapegoats. Media panics don’t offer helpful tools for explaining social change, in other words, as much as they distract parents, educators, and others from making sense of the formative conditions shaping young lives.

Media panics continued to appear throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. In the United Kingdom, for instance, media panics arose around “video nasties” and the risks that horror films and sexually explicit material were thought to pose for youth (Oswell, 2002 ). Related concerns arose in the 1990s regarding video games and violence, the presence of dangerous and disturbing messages buried in the lyrics of popular music, and fears about fantasy board games, including Dungeons and Dragons . More recently, anxieties have come to the fore having to do with the role of the Internet and social media in young people’s lives, including fears of “stranger danger,” cyberbullying, and the likelihood that teenagers are sharing explicit images of themselves and others online (i.e., “sexting”).

We note these fears not to dismiss them outright, but to draw attention to the history of anxieties that have characterized worries about youth and media culture. Such concerns are often underpinned by the view that young people are vulnerable and highly impressionable persons unable to manage the impact of media in their lives. Indeed, the wariness of public officials, parents, health practitioners, and educators toward media is still today often underpinned by deeper commitments to a sense that youth is a time of innocence and hope. Whether understood biologically as a period of maturation toward adulthood or as a distinct generational cohort characterized by shared processes of socialization, adolescence has long been a repository for both the greatest hopes and fears of a nation. While youth are often considered a risk to society and the reproduction of social order, they also have long been framed in connection with the future health and well-being of nations. The result is that youth often occupy a contradictory space in relation to media culture (Drotner, 1999 ).

On the one hand, popular media culture has been a vital resource through which youth communities, subcultures, and generations have defined themselves, their desires, and their hopes and dreams for decades. This continues to be reflected in the dynamic ways that youth are using and creating digital media to shape their lives and address matters of common concern in societies around the world. We take up these developments in more detail later in this article.

On the other hand, it is evident that consumerism and commercial media culture remain sources of tremendous anxiety. The media content that teenagers access—beyond the watchful eye of guardians and educators—and the way that they learn about gender, race, sexuality, the environment, and other issues continues to raise alarms. From at least the 1980s onward, the quantity of media culture has expanded around the world, meaning that more advertising, more commercial screens, more branded experiences of play, and more intensive systems of corporate surveillance and tracking have become common features of youths’ lives.

The digitization of media and the emergence of more dynamic, participatory media cultures (Jenkins, 2006 ) are crucial to this development, as we explain in the final section. But changes in media concentration and the development of vast media conglomerates—including Google, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, Baidu, and News Corp—that produce media commodities and experiences for various national markets have been instrumental in shaping the tensions and impact of media culture on youth lives. It is just these sorts of developments that have long raised the concerns of educators and others who remain deeply ambivalent about the relationship between consumer media and young people. The consequence of this ambivalence has led some educators to argue that media, including film, television, and the Internet, can have a broader educational impact, particularly given their ability to reach large audiences. In the following sections, we take up this possibility and address how learning media and media education have been developed to create forms of public pedagogy with the potential to enrich young people’s learning.

The Media as Learning Portal

While the ties between consumer culture and media continue to raise worries, television’s reach and increasingly central role in families have drawn the attention of educators who argue that it can be repurposed to have a broader educational impact. This sentiment crept into educational discourses throughout the 1960s in a way that would shift the thinking about youth, media culture, and education. Educational media programming was not a new idea in the decade so much as it extended and contributed to an older tradition of using stories and folk tales to teach moral lessons to children (Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ). What was different in the 1960s (and today), however, is that this work wasn’t (and isn’t) being undertaken around the local hearth; it was (and is) developing through the conventions, institutions, and practices of a highly complex media system.

Using this media system to create successful learning resources has been a delicate business. The idea of using radio and documentary movies as informational (and often didactic) educational tools to teach kids social studies, geography, and history has a long tradition in national schooling systems. More dynamic forms of educational programming came online in the late 1960s, led by a then-remarkable new program called Sesame Street that came to epitomize these developments.

Created by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in 1969 as part of the so-called American war on poverty (Spring, 2009 ), Sesame Street helped launch the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the United States as a counterweight to the influence of commercial programming in the American mediasphere. Originated by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, Sesame Street drew lessons from early children’s television programming in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom (Coulter, 2016 ) and set out to promote peaceful multicultural societies and to provide inner-city kids with a head start in developing literacy and numeracy skills. To do this, the now well-known strategy was to adapt conventions of commercial media—muppets, music, animation, live-action film, special effects, and visits from celebrities—to deliver mass literacy to home audiences.

By the late 1990s, approximately 40% of all American children aged 2–5 watched Sesame Street weekly. From the 2000s onward, the reach of Sesame Street became global, extending to 120 countries and including many foreign-language adaptations developed with local educators in Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Palestine, Russia, South Africa, and many other places (Spring, 2009 ). With global audiences, the show’s storylines and issues addressed have also changed. Sesame Street is now engaged in raising awareness and understanding about a host of global issues. For instance, in the South African coproduction, a muppet named Kami who is HIV-positive was introduced in response to the large numbers of South African children who are HIV-positive. Through Kami and related stories, the goal of the program is “to create tolerance of HIV-positive children and disseminate information about the disease” across South Africa” (Spring, 2009 , p. 80). Meanwhile in Bangladesh, the local version of Sesame Street has been used to promote “equality between social classes, genders, castes, and religions” (Spring, 2009 , p. 80).

This success led to the development of other CTW educational programs, including The Electric Company , 3-2-1 Contact , and Square One TV . A conviction that electronic and digital media can support progressive educational goals has also fueled the development of a learning media industry over the past two decades. We are in fact witnessing a veritable explosion of educational media, including an array of educational learning software ( Math Blaster , JumpStart , Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego , etc.) designed to improve older students’ competencies (Ito, 2008 ). Some of this media may be useful, but evidence about the learning value of many of these programs remains scant (Barbaro, 2008 ). On the other hand, at least three other forms of educational media have continued to develop, and in ways that can be beneficial to youth learning. They include public service announcements (PSAs), entertainment education, and cultural jamming.

Public Service Announcements

Public service announcements (PSAs) are now ubiquitous. They can be seen in schools, on television, online, and at commercial film screenings. They address issues ranging from the dangers of smoking, alcohol, and drugs, to concerns about youth driving habits, bullying in schools, what children are eating, and a host of other media-related social causes and health crises. At root, the strategy with PSAs isn’t altogether different from that of learning-oriented programs like Sesame Street . While the broad research and learning agenda that informs Sesame Street isn’t often replicated with PSAs, the idea that commercial media language can be repurposed to influence behavior is common to both formats.

PSAs use the language of advertising—quick, emotional, and sometimes funny messages that emphasize hard-hitting lessons—and the practices of branding to alter behavior or encourage youth to get involved with issues shaping their lives. Studies suggest these strategies can be remarkably effective for influencing young people’s behavior (Montgomery, 2007 , 2008 ; Wakefield, Flay, Nichter, & Giovino, 2003 ; Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ; DeJong & Winston, 1990 ). Wakefield et al. ( 2003 ) for instance, review a number of studies that show antismoking PSAs are useful tools for changing kids’ attitudes, especially when combined with school support programs that help youth to quit or avoid smoking.

These successes are important, of course, because they attest to the ways that learning through media can be nurtured in creative, dynamic, and effective ways, even in a time when media saturation is common in youth lives. A cautionary note is nonetheless in order. PSAs have become so common today that companies are using PSA-like formats to promote everything from cars to personal care products. The personal health products company, Unilever Inc., for instance, has been especially successful with their Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty.” Cutting across online platforms as well as television and film, the campaign has foregrounded the way that beauty ads create unrealistic notions about women’s body images. This is an important message, to be sure; however, while this campaign was underway, Unilever launched an equally provocative campaign for AXE body products for men. What stood out in the latter campaign was precisely the opposite message about women’s body images; AXE ads in fact seemed to suggest that women matter only when their appearance corresponds to a rather tired and old set of stereotypes. This doesn’t necessarily undermine the value of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, but it does suggest that the value of PSAs (particularly when developed as singular learning resources) may be waning as this style of communication becomes just one more strategy for channeling commercial messages to youth.

Entertainment Education

Another strategy, often called entertainment education , has a similarly long history in both the global North and South (Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ; Tufte, 2004 ). Distinct from the more explicit focus of learning TV and PSA campaigns, this strategy takes advantage of the fact that it has been clear for some time that youth negotiate their identities and values through popular media representations and celebrity identifications. Because of this, educators and youth activists have turned to network programming (e.g., Dawson’s Creek , MTV’s Real People , and Glee ), as well as teen magazines (e.g., Teen People and Seventeen ) as vehicles for developing storylines and articles that address issues in youth’s lives. Similar practices are evident around the world. In India, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa, for instance, popular television formats like soap operas and youth dramas (e.g., Soul City and Soul Brothers in South Africa) have been used to raise awareness and change unhealthy behaviors related to a host of issues, including child poverty, community health, HIV-AIDS, and gun violence.

In a related vein, the Kaiser Foundation in the United States has been influential in the development of a multinational set of entertainment education programs on HIV-AIDS in partnership with the United Nations. Since 2004 , the Kaiser Foundation has partnered with the United Nations, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the South African Broadcasting Corporation, Russia’s Gazprom-Media, Rupert Murdoch’s Star Group Ltd. in India, and more than 10 other media companies to develop a Global AIDS initiative. This eventually led to the integration of HIV-AIDS messages into various programs watched by young people, including a reality series in India modeled on American Idol , called Indian Idol (Montgomery, 2007 ). Similarly, series like the Degrassi franchise in Canada and the United States have addressed issues such as family violence, school shootings, mental illness, and questions about sexuality (Byers, 2008 ). Other series, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer , have ventured into similar territory, and while many educators are perhaps wary of the close working partnership between commercial broadcasters and producers in entertainment education, others note that the very success of this kind of programming demonstrates that media culture can be more than entertainment; it can be a form of meaningful pedagogy that helps young people engage in real social, cultural, and political debate.

Culture Jamming

Fomenting social, cultural, and political debate has been the objective of a third strategy used by educators and progressives concerned about youth, media culture, and education. Culture jamming draws on a long tradition of using media techniques with satire and parody “to draw attention to what may otherwise go unnoticed” in society (Meikle, 2007 , p. 168). Antecedents to culture jamming include the anti-Nazi dada posters of John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld) and the détournment tactics of the Situationist Movement of the mid-1950s and 1960s, which sought to dismantle the world of commercial media culture that transforms “[e]verything that [is] directly lived . . . into a representation” (Debord, 1994 , p. 1).

Culture jammers frequently argue that our lives are dominated by a vast electronic and digital field of multimodal texts (images, audio, and now hypertext and hyperlinks), and the only way to respond is to use the design methods (pastiche, bricolage, parody, and montage) and genres (advertising, journalism, and filmmaking) that characterize commercial media to challenge media power and taken-for-granted assumptions within contemporary culture (Kenway & Bullen, 2008 ). Mark Dery ( 1993 , p. 1) calls this a form of “semiological guerrilla warfare,” through which culture jammers fight the status quo by using the principles of media culture to upend the meanings and assumptions operating in this culture.

Perhaps the most common and popular form of culture jamming is the sub-vertisement that groups like Adbusters have made popular. Sub-vertisements use popular references and techniques in branding campaigns to turn the meaning of logos, branded characters, and signs (like the Absolut Vodka bottle) on their heads. (See http://adbusters.org/spoofads/index.php for a gallery of examples that target fast food culture, alcohol and fashion ads, and political communication.) Other groups, including the Yes Men , have developed another culture-jamming strategy based around highly elaborate spoofs of websites, media interviews, and public corporate communications. Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping is yet another example of culture jamming. Reverend Billy and his allies use impromptu, guerrilla theater tactics to raise awareness of the deleterious effects of consumerism (i.e., sweat shop labor, debt, climate degradation, etc.) in society. The idea behind this and similar work is to use fun yet subversive tactics to offer radical commentary about common images, brands, and ideas that circulate in our lives. These learning practices are open to all, of course, but they have been especially relevant among educators eager to address critical issues about youth media culture.

Media Education and Direct Interventions in Youth Learning

Learning media aims to educate people through various media forms, and while this continues to be a popular strategy, for more than 80 years educators and activists have also turned to more direct interventions to affect how young people learn and engage with media culture. Media literacy education addresses how media operates in and through particular institutions, technologies, texts, and audiences. In its early development, media education tended to position schools and teachers as the defenders of traditional culture and impressionable youths. Early relationships among youths, media cultures, and education were framed around a reactionary stance that implored educators to protect youth from the media. F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson ( 1933 ) were the first to champion this protectionist phase of media education in their book Culture and Environment , which is credited as the first set of proposals for systematic teaching about mass media in schools. Leavis and Thompson’s work includes a strong prejudice against American popular culture and mass media in general and reflects the aspirations for early media education within schools to inoculate young people against media messages to protect literary (i.e., high) culture from the commoditization lamented by mass culture theorists (Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012 ).

These sentiments remained strong into the early 1960s, but much as learning media took a new and compelling turn in this decade, so too did media education. Fueling this trend was the belief that educators could adapt curricula and teaching practices to the increasing role of commercial television and movies in young people’s lives. In the United Kingdom, this sentiment led educators to develop a screen education movement based around the critical use of movies in classrooms. Drawing from the influential work of Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy ( 1957 ) and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society ( 1958 ), the purpose of screen education was to study the popular media that teenagers were watching so that they would be in a better position to understand their own situation in the world, including the causes of their alienation and marginalization.

A similar desire to help youth see connections between school and everyday life motivated early initiatives in media education in Australia and Canada. Pedagogically, this led to the development of film analysis and film production courses, which drew inspiration from cultural shifts in the way that movies were understood. No longer seen simply as forms of entertainment, film education focused on the way that popular Hollywood movies (e.g., Easy Rider and Medium Cool in 1969 ) reflected social and cultural values and were thus thought deserving of critical attention. This meant teaching students to understand the language of cinema and the ways that movies engage and shape prospects for social and political change.

As an outgrowth of this work, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the first sustained period of institutionalization of media education. Key curricular documents were produced, and media education entered the school curricula in many countries in a formal way for the first time. The Canadian province of Ontario led the way, mandating the teaching of media literacy in the high school English curriculum in 1987 . Eventually K–12 students across Canada would receive some form of media education by the end of the 1990s. Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, the late 1980s witnessed the integration of media education into the curriculum as an examinable subject for students pursuing university entrance. This helped to fuel the popularity of courses in media studies, film studies, and communication studies in schools, and by the 1990s and 2000s, additional intermediate courses in media studies were added to the curriculum.

In Australia, the late 1980s and 1990s marked a period of expansion in school-based production and media education training, in part because such training was seen to be an ideal way to equip young people with the technical skills and competencies needed to compete in a globally competitive, highly mediated world (Edith, 2003 ; McMahon & Edith, 1999 ). Similarly, in various non-English-speaking countries, including Norway, Sweden, and Finland, media literacy developed and expanded throughout the 1990s (Tufte, 1999 ).

Even when not included in the formal curriculum, media education became a pedagogical practice of teachers aware of the impact of the media in the lives of their students. In particular, in those countries in the global South where the broader educational needs of the society were still focused on getting children to school and teaching basic literacy and numeracy, media education may not have emerged in the mandated curriculum, but teachers were drawing on media education strategies to help youth make sense of and affect their worlds.

In the United States, school-based media education initiatives were slower to get off the ground. In 1978 , in response to children’s increasing television consumption, the Parents-Teachers Association (PTA) convinced the U.S. Office of Education to launch a research and development initiative on the effects of commercial television on young people. In short order, this initiative led the Office of Education to recommend a national curriculum to enhance students’ understanding of commercials, their ability to distinguish fact from fiction, the recognition of competing points of view in programs, an understanding of the style and formats in public affairs programming, and the ability to understand the relationship between television and printed materials (Kline et al., 2006 ).

Ultimately, attempts to implement this curriculum were hampered in the early 1980s as President Ronald Reagan’s move to deregulate the communications industry challenged efforts to develop media education in U.S. schools. Nonetheless, these early developments proved crucial in establishing the ground from which more recent media education initiatives have grown. Robert Kubey ( 2003 ) noted that as of 2000 , all 50 states included some education about the media in core curricular areas such as English, social studies, history, civics, health, and consumer education.

Beyond schools, a number of key nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have developed over the past two decades and have promoted dynamic forms of media education. The Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA), a national membership organization chartered in 2001 to organize and host the National Media Education Conference every two years and to promote professional development, is of particular note. So too are the Media Education Foundation (MEF), which produces some of the most important media education resources in North America, and the Centre for Media Literacy (CML), which offers a helpful MediaLit Kit to promote teaching and learning in a media age.

Literacy and Production

While often led by educators, parents, and young people, these developments in media education have been enhanced by interest in a broad project of literacy. The role and discussion of literacy discourse in media education go back to at least the early 1970s in the United States (Kline et al., 2006 ). As media education has internationalized, however, there has been a tendency to turn to literacy metaphors to conceptualize the kinds of media learning enabled through media education. As media education has increasingly become part of school curricula, the language of literacies also has been a familiar and useful framework to situate classroom (and out-of-school) practices. The New London Group’s ( 1996 ) “pedagaogy of multiple literacies” has been especially influential, offering a framework to address the diverse modalities of literacy (thus, multiple literacies) in complex media cultures, alongside a focus on the design and development of critical media education curricula.

While the New London Group’s work has helped to support the development of media literacy education in an era of multimodal texts, the arrival of the personal computer and the emergence of the Internet have been accompanied by the proliferation of a whole host of digital media technologies (e.g., cameras, visual and audio editing systems, distribution platforms, etc.), encouraging the integration of youth media production into the work of media education. Media production has an impressive history in the field of media literacy education going back to at least the 1960s, when experiments with 16-mm film production in community groups and schools were part of early film education initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and other countries. By the 1990s and 2000s, media production became a common feature in media education practices because it was thought to enable young people to learn by doing , rather than just by analyzing or reading media texts. Newly accessible broadcasting (or narrowcasting) opportunities made available through Web 2.0 platforms (e.g., YouTube, Facebook, wiki spaces, etc.) accelerated these developments, encouraging the growth of information training programs in schools that focus on Web design, software training, and mastering camera skills in ways that emphasize technological mastery as an end in itself.

The turn to information training is perhaps not surprising, but while technical skills training can help young people to learn key competencies that may lead to job prospects, technical training on its own misrepresents the critical and civic concerns that have long animated media literacy education. How the civic and political involvement of youth are emerging inside highly engaging digital media cultures is one of three major issues examined in the next and final section of this article, where we address pressing questions about contemporary relationships among youth, media culture, and learning.

Contemporary Issues in Youth Media Culture and Education

Recent questions about youth and media culture are tangled up with the participatory condition common to network societies (Sterne, Coleman, Ross, Barney, & Tembeck, 2016 ; Castells, 1996 ). The age of mass media was preoccupied with problems of representation, atomization, homogenization, and manipulation, and these problems defined the thinking about youth consumption and commercial culture in much of the 20th century . This is reflected in the anxieties and studies noted earlier in this article. As we have come to read and write media differently in a digital era, however, a new set of problems has arisen (Chun, 2016 ). Among these is the new role of participation and a participatory turn in media culture that has enabled users (or those we used to call audiences ) to become more active and involved with brands, franchises, celebrities, technologies, and social media networks across everyday life (Jenkins, 2006 ). This turn is evidenced by the increasing amount of time that youth spend with screens, but it is also a function of the way that many of us now interact with media culture. Audiences have always been actively involved with still and moving images, celebrities, sports, and popular music, among other artifacts. Fan cultures exemplify this, as do studies of how real-life audiences talk about and use media (Buckingham, 1993 ; Williams, 2003 ; Silverstone, 2001 ; Scannell, 1989 ; Radway, 1984 ).

But today we are called on to participate in digital media culture in new ways. Participation has become a condition that is “both environmental (a state of affairs) and normative (a binding principle of right action)” (p. vii), and our digital technologies and highly concentrated media industries are woven into the fabric of this state of affairs (Sterne et al., 2016 , p. vii). “These media allow a growing number of people to access, modify, store, circulate, and share media content” in ways that have been available only to professionals or a select few in the past (Sterne et al., 2016 , p. viii). As digitalization has changed the nature of media production, we have not only become more involved and active in our media use, but our interaction with digital media has allowed others to interact with us in new and sometimes troubling ways. This is the paradox of the participatory condition, and it shapes how youth media culture and education are connected today.

Issue 1: Surveillance, Branding, and the Production of Youth

To begin with, the pointy end of the participatory paradox has to do with the way that digital media cultures allow others, including corporations, governments, and predatory individuals, to monitor, survey, coordinate, and guide our activities as never before. With our data footprint, states, political parties, media, toy, and technology companies (as well as health, insurance, and a host of other industries) become data aggregation units that map and monitor youth behavior to interact with, brand, and modify this behavior for profitable ends. Big data enables the production of complex algorithms that produce what Wendy Chun ( 2016 , p. 363) calls “a universe of dramas” that dominate our attention economies. These dramas (the stories, celebrities, associations, and products with which we interact) are “co-produced transnationally by corporations and states through intertwining databases of action and unique identifiers.” Databases and identifiers enable algorithms to target, engage, and integrate a diverse range of youth into the global imaginary of consumer celebrity cultures and the archives of surveillance states (Chun, 2016 ). The American former military contractor and dissident Edward Snowden draws our attention to this universe in the documentary CitizenFour , which tells his story, and makes clear that instead of governments and corporations being accountable to us, we are now, regularly and without knowing it, accountable to them (Snowden, 2016 ).

Compounding these concerns, strangers can now access youth in ways that magnify the potential damage done by the pointy end of the participatory paradox. Fears about stranger danger and cyberbullying have been especially acute in recent years, and while these fears are not new (Poyntz, 2013a ), they have been central to panicked reactions among parents, educators, and others wary of youth media culture. These fears are often connected to worries about online content that young people now access, including vast troves of pornography available at the click of a button, as well as worrying online sites that promote hate, terrorism, and the radicalization of youth. The actual merits of concerns about who is accessing youth and what content they are accessing are sometimes difficult to gauge; nonetheless, it remains the case that for the foreseeable future, one of the fundamental issues shaping relationships between youth, media culture, and education is how and through what means youth are produced and made ready to participate in contemporary promotional and surveillance cultures—particularly when this happens for the benefit of people and institutions that exercise immense and often dubious power in young lives.

Issue 2—Creative Media and Youth Producing Politics

On the other end of the participatory paradox is a second issue shaping youth, media culture, and learning. While network societies produce new risk conditions (like those noted previously) for teenagers, digital media undoubtedly have enabled new forms of creative participation and media production that are changing how youth agency and activism operate. Mobile phones, cameras, editing platforms, and distribution networks have become more easily accessible for young people across the global North and South in recent years, and as this has happened, youth have gained opportunities to create, circulate, collaborate, and connect with others to address civic issues and matters of broad personal and public concern in ways that simply have not been available in the past. Since the mid-1990s, online media worlds have emerged as counterenvironments that afford teenagers a rich and inviting sphere of digitally mediated experiences to explore their imaginations, hopes, and desires (Giroux, 2011 ).

The fact that young people’s online worlds are dominated by the plots and affective commodities of commercial corporations means that these worlds can foster a culture of choice and personalized goods that encourage youth to act in highly individualized ways (Livingstone, 2009 ). But the skills and networks that teens nurture online can be publicly relevant (Boyd, 2014 ; Ito et al., 2015 ). The Internet, social media, and other digital resources have in fact become central to new kinds of participatory politics and shared civic spaces that are emerging as an outgrowth and extension of young people’s cultural experiences and activities (Ito et al., 2015 ; Soep, 2014 ; Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2014 ; Poyntz, 2017 ; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012 ; Bakardjieva, 2010 ).

These practices extend a history of youth actions wherein culture and cultural texts have been drawn on to contest politics and power (including issues of gender, class, race, sexuality, and ability) and matters of public concern (including climate change and the rights of indigenous communities). Youth who lack representation and recognition in formal political institutions and practices often turn to culture and cultural texts to contest politics and power (Williams, 1958 ; Dimitriadis, 2009 ; Maira & Soep, 2005 ; McRobbie, 1993 ; Hebdige, 1979 ; Hall & Jefferson, 1976 ). Recently, these tendencies have been evident in the actions of the Black Lives Matter movement , which has produced an array of cultural expressions, including a video story archive and a remarkable photo library that lays bare the experiences and hopes of a movement that aims to be “an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”

Beyond North America, in Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Chile, Spain, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and other places, a range of bottom-up communication for social change practices has been part of epochal political actions and assemblies often led by students and other young people demanding government action on social justice and economic and human rights (Dencik & Leistert, 2015 ; Tufte et al., 2013 ). The contexts for these actions are complex, but in general, they point to instances where political cultures are emerging from young people’s cultural experiences and learning, challenging the meaning, representation, and response of those in power to matters of public concern.

More generally, across a range of youth communities, peer networks, and affinity associations, participatory media cultures are enabling levels of engagement, circulation, and cultural production by young people that are altering relationships between youth creative acts and political life. Kahne et al., 2014 have described these emerging practices as part of a wave of participatory politics that include a cross-section of actions that often extend across global communities. Examples include consumer activism (e.g., product boycotting) and lifestyle politics (e.g., vegetarianism); groups like the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), which use characters and social justice themes from the novels to encourage connections between cultural and civic life; a community gathered around the Nerdfighters , a YouTube channel and movement organized around John and Hank Green and their mission to “decrease world suck”; fascinating examples of participatory storytelling, including the use of video memes by and about undocumented immigrant youth to draw attention to lives that have largely disappeared from mainstream media culture; and youth-driven campaigns and petitions organized in conjunction with groups like Change.org and Openmedia.ca to challenge public policy and focus attention on major injustices by institutions and officials using memes, videos, and mobile phone recordings of violence, inequity, and exploitation (Ito et al., 2015 ).

In addition to politically mobilized youth and youth drawn into mediated politics through cultural pastimes, there is evidence that youth connections to politics are being nurtured further by a diverse range of community youth media initiatives and groups that have emerged in cities across the global North and South over the past 20 years (Poyntz, 2013b , 2017 ; Asthana, 2015 ; Tufte et al., 2013 ; Tyner, 2009 ). Such community groups are part of a response to the risk conditions that shape contemporary life. They are crucial to negotiating citizenship in highly mediated cultures and for addressing digital divides to equip young people with the resources and networks necessary to manage and respond to experiences of change, injustice, violence, and possibility.

Community youth media production groups are part of an informal cultural learning sector that is an increasingly significant part of the work of provision for socially excluded youth. These groups are of many types, but they are symptomatic of a participatory media culture in which new possibilities and new opportunities have arisen to nurture youth creativity and political action. How to foster these developments through media education and the challenges confronting these efforts represents the third major issue shaping connections between youth, media culture, and learning today.

Issue 3—Youth, Media Learning, and Media Education

Media literacy education refers to learning “a set of competencies that enable one to interpret media texts and institutions, to make media of [one’s] own, and to recognize and engage with the social and political influence of media in everyday life” (Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012 , p. 1). We might debate this definition, but the larger point is that since at least the mid-1990s, media literacy education has made many gains in school curricula and among community groups and social movements, as noted previously (Skinner, Hackett, & Poyntz, 2015 ). At the same time, the challenges facing media literacy education are significant. For instance, the massive and relentless turn to instrumental forms of technical and creative learning in the service of job markets and competitive global positioning in formal schooling has mitigated the impact of critical media education.

Over the past two decades, a broad set of changes in schooling environments around the world have increasingly put a premium on preparing teenagers to be globally competitive, employable subjects (McDougal, 2014 ). In this context, the lure of media training in the service of work initiatives and labor market preparation is strong; thus, there has been a tendency in school and community-based media projects and organizations to focus on questions of culture and industry know-how (i.e., knowing and making media for the culture industries), as opposed to the work of public engagement and media reform. This orientation has been further encouraged by a return to basics and standardized testing across educational policy and practice, which has encouraged a move away from citizen-learning curricula (Westheimer, 2011 ; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004 ). These developments have led to efforts to redefine media education in the English curriculum in the United Kingdom, in ways that discourage critical media analysis and production (Buckingham, 2014 ).

In like fashion, the pressure to return to more traditional forms of learning has led to education policies in the United States, Australia, and parts of Canada that are intended to dissuade critical and/or citizen-oriented learning practices in schools (Poyntz, 2015 ; Hoechsmann & DeWaard, 2015 ). Poyntz ( 2013 ) has indicated elsewhere how this orientation shapes the projects of some community media groups working with young people, but the upshot is that instrumental media learning has come to complicate and sometimes frustrate how media literacy education is used to intervene in relationships among youth, media culture, and learning (Livingstone, 2009 ; Sefton-Screen, 2006 ).

This situation has been complicated further as the field of media literacy education has evolved to become a global discourse composed of a range of sometimes contradictory practices, modalities, objectives, and traditions (McDougall, 2014 ). The globalization of media literacy education has been a welcome development and is no doubt a consequence of the globalization of communication systems and the intensification of consumerism among young people around the world. But if the result of this development has been an outpouring of policy discussions, policy papers, and pilot studies across Europe, North America, Asia, and other regions (Frau-Meigs & Torrent, 2009 ), this has at the same time also produced a complex field of media literacy practices and models that have led to a generalization (and even one suspects a depoliticization) of the field. This has happened as efforts have emerged to weave media literacy education into disparate education systems and media institutions (Poyntz, 2015 ).

As the proliferation of media literacies has been underway, a raft of new media forms and practices—including cross-media, transmedia, and spreadable media (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013 ) have also encouraged the production of a myriad of discourses about “ digital literacy, new media literacy [and] transmedia literacy” (McDougall, 2014 , p. 6). These and similar developments have ensured that media literacy education remains a contested field of objectives and meanings. While this can be interesting for academics, it may be less than encouraging for young people, educators, and others eager to draw on media education to affect contemporary relationships between youth, media culture, and learning. And let it be noted that the impact of these developments is not only relevant to the ways that youth negotiate media culture, but also to the future of democracy itself.

Concluding Thoughts

Media cultures have come to play a significant role in the way that young people go about making meaning in the world; this is especially true of how knowledge is shared and acquired. As a result, media are part of the continual shaping and reshaping of what learning resources look like. Both inside and outside the classroom, young people are increasingly able, even expected, to utilize the vast number of resources now available to them. Yet, many of these resources now foster worry rather than learning. The fact that “Google it,” for instance is now a common phrase referring to the act of information seeking is in itself telling; a distinct culture of learning has emerged from the development of the Internet and other media technologies. In fact, many young people today have never experienced learning without the ability to “Google it.” Yet this very culture of learning is indistinguishable from an American multinational technology company that is not beholden to the idea of a “public good.” If the project of education is not just to be for the benefit of a select few, but for society and a healthy democracy as a whole, however, then these contradictions must be engaged. So while media cultures are a significant feature of young people’s lives, it is becoming clear that media cultures have augured complicated relationships between youth and education in ways that are not easily reconciled.

The project of media education is not without its own set of challenges and contradictions, including those highlighted in this article. But it remains indispensable if educators, parents, and researchers are to support young people in navigating learning environments and imagining democratic futures.

Acknowledgments

Parts of this article have been adapted from Hoechsmann et al. ( 2012 ).

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• Tufte, T. (2004). Entertainment-education in HIV/AIDS communication: Beyond marketing, towards empowerment. In C. von Feilitzen & U. Carlsson (Eds.), Promote or protect? Perspectives on media literacy and media regulations (pp. 85–97). Gothenburg, Sweden: International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth, and Media.
• Tufte, T. , Wildermuth, N. , Hansen-Skovmoes, A. S. , & Mitullah, W. , (Eds.). (2013). Speaking up and talking back? Media empowerment and civic engagement among east and southern African youth . Gothenburg, Sweden: Nordicom.
• Tyner, K. (2009). Mapping the field: Results of the 2008 survey of youth media organizations in the United States. Youth Media Reporter: The Professional Journal of the Youth Media Field , 3 , 107–143.
• Wakefield, M. , Flay, B. , Nichter, M. , & Giovino, G. (2003). The role of the media in influencing trajectories of youth smoking. Addiction , 98 , 79–103.
• Westheimer, J. (2011). No child left thinking: Democracy at risk in American schools. Colleagues , 3 (2), 10–15.
• Westheimer, J. , & Kahne, J. (2004). What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy. American Educational Research Journal , 41 , 237–269.
• Williams, R. (1958). Culture and society . London: Chatto and Windus.
• Williams, R. (2003). Television: Technology and cultural form . London: Routledge Classics, 2003.

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The Youth Voice Playbook: Engaging Youth in Research is brought to you by:

Planning Ahead

Preparing Yourself

Start here.

Ethics & Laws

Keep young people safe.

Budgets & Resources

Make it worth their time, figuratively and literally.

Youth Recruitment

Find and invite young people.

Making It Happen

Designing Activities

What to do with youth once you bring them all together. (This chapter is a gold mine.)

Facilitation

Every group – heck, every moment – is different. Here’s how to set the tone and maintain it.

Reflecting & Sharing

Documentation

Reflect on and capture what happened.

Making Sense

Invite youth to help you make meaning.

Closing & Sharing

Involve youth in sharing the results of your project.

Center for Digital Thriving

Character Lab

Youth voice is a game-Changer.

The Youth Voice Playbook is a free resource collaboratively produced by three organizations: the Center for Digital Thriving , Hopelab , and Character Lab . We created it because we want to help build a future where all young people can thrive – and to make that happen, we know young people’s voices need to be heard, their experiences understood, and their ideas elevated. We also know that a lot of people who share this core belief aren’t sure where to start or how to meaningfully build youth advisory into their work. If you’re one of them, consider this Playbook your all-in-one guide to everything from planning and recruitment to our favorite activities for exploring young people’s perspectives and then making sense of what you’ve learned. The Playbook shares usable resources, honest insights, and real stories. It’s designed to help, and packed with information that we wish someone had shared with us as we all started engaging youth in our own workstreams.

Here’s What’s Included:

(click a card to jump to its chapter).

How you show up in this work is foundational. Start here!

Read this section if you’re an adult who has ever thought something along the lines of “kids these days… (smh).” Or maybe you want to involve youth in your research, but don’t know where to start. This is the place!

Involving youth in research is really valuable, but it also requires a lot of care.

For good reason, minors are highly protected when they’re involved in research activities. You’ll need to make sure you’re familiar with the regulations in place to protect their well-being and that you have a green light from relevant governing bodies.

Before you start inviting youth to join you in your project…

…think through both how you’ll make it logistically feasible for them to come (they can’t just skip school to join you!) and how you’ll make it worth their time, both figuratively and literally. This chapter covers financial and human resource considerations, including compensation.

Recruitment

Sounds simple, right? Hahaha! 🙂

This chapter focuses on how to actually find young people and invite them to join you in your project!

This chapter is a gold mine! It has so many cool activity ideas!

Even if you think you already know what you want to do with your group’s time and how you want to actually collect information from youth, you’ll want to check this one out.

Figuring out how you want young people to feel and contribute…

…is a key place to start. This chapter will guide you through ways to set the tone, and then how to maintain that tone throughout the actual gathering. Good facilitation is a real skill and art, and every group – heck, every moment! – is different, but this will give you a place to start.

Documentation & Reflection

How will you summarize what you learned?

This section shares practical advice on capturing what happened during your time with youth.

Making Sense of the findings

Now we’ll shift to that key step of making meaning.

Sense-making may happen near the end of the project or it may happen iteratively, but regardless, we’ll focus specifically on involving young people in this process.

Regardless of how young people are involved…

…it’s important that they hear in some way about what happens as a result of their input and expertise. This chapter shares ways to do that meaningfully, including how you might involve youth in publication, presentation, and dissemination of results.

Among the many benefits of bringing youth voices to the fore:

Transform your understanding, ask better questions, avoid misinterpretations, get new ideas, support young people, who this playbook is for:.

The short answer is anyone who is doing research that impacts youth! * This might be traditional academic research, user research, or research & development work. Regardless of the type of research you’re doing, we hold a fundamental belief that youth should be involved in research about the issues that impact them – and that the work is stronger when young people shape it. In the words of many other movement leaders, “Nothing about us without us!”

Why create a playbook now?

“Youth voice” is trending. On the one hand, this is amazing! But on the other hand, we know that doing this authentically and well takes a lot of work. Youth participatory methods are an important way to amplify youth voice and agency in matters that impact them ( United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989 ), but also require facilitators to create conditions that allow for genuine learning, empowerment, and input. This playbook is here to help you do just that.

A note from the authors:

We hope that this playbook can provide inspiration, food for thought, and some practical guidance for researchers, non-profit leaders, funders, program staff, and anyone else who knows that they have much to learn and gain from working more closely with young people.

Some parts of this playbook, especially chapters 2 and 3, might feel daunting. That’s ok! It’s true that doing research with minors involves a number of complexities that often scare people off. We’re here to walk you through those complexities and share all the tips and lessons we’ve learned along the way. Also, you should know that there are organizations that exist to help facilitate the tricky parts of this process for you, so you can focus less on logistics and more on research. We’ll share some of those examples throughout this playbook.

Youth voice has been critical to our own work. Young people’s perspectives have helped us realize who we were unintentionally excluding, when we were missing the mark, and when we weren’t thinking deeply or complexly enough about an issue. Engaging with youth voices has helped us see totally new ideas, stay nimble and creative, and develop the skill of working intergenerationally. It’s also been a good reminder to take ourselves less seriously. We hope you’ll join us in this approach of partnering meaningfully with young people to do research – we really think it’s worth it.

In their Words:

Thanks for checking out this playbook! We’d be remiss to not share a few quotes from some students in the CLIP program who reviewed this playbook:

“I felt very supported during my time in CLIP and it’s great to see that other orgs could be following a similar model.”

“I think the tone of the writing is very pleasant and is conversational. This gives me a positive and enjoyable time reading as I don’t feel as if it is totally a boring lecture.”

“The tone and language communicate that the voices of youth are something that should be taken with utmost seriousness.”

We hope that these sentiments also ring true for you – that as you explore this model of doing research in your organization, you’ll find this playbook to be an enjoyable and positive companion. We believe that youth voice should be taken seriously, prioritized, and invested in, and we wish you all the best on your journey of collaboration with young people! May it bring you as much insight, growth, and joy as it’s brought us.

Get in the game →

Prepare yourself to show up to this work.

Need help figuring out where to start?

Try our decision-making flowchart to help you figure out where to dig in and what you can maybe skim over. 👇

Launch Flowchart

FIRST QUESTION

Do you want to know more about the benefits of youth voice work, tell me more…, for all who’ve just begun, we recommend chapter 1, yes, for sure, keep scrolling, second question, do you already have permissions and approvals from your organization to safely engage youth, not yet…, never fear, chapter 2 is here, third question, do you have a plan for how to compensate youth participants, say more…, chapter 3’s the place to be, fourth question, could you use some help thinking through recruitment, no, i already have a group., learn more in chapter 4, fifth question, when you get young people together, do you know how you’ll use the time, not yet…, our favorite activities…, yes, i’m set., sixth question, can we help you build a positive environment for your sessions, unsure…, lotsa tricks in chapter 6, seventh question, do you have a plan for documenting the sessions, not exactly…, need support chapter 7’s got your back, eighth question, have you considered involving youth in data analysis, chapter 8’s great for this., ninth question, might you want to involve youth in sharing your findings, collab and shine in chapter 9, last question, was your project more awesome because of young people’s involvement, back to the beginning for the next round, back to the beginning for the next round.

Center for Digital THriving

A research and innovation center at Harvard focused on creating resources to help people, especially youth, thrive in a tech-filled world.

Hopelab is a funder, connector, and science translator that supports and builds equity-centered solutions to improve the mental health of young people.

A nonprofit organization that advances scientific insights to help kids thrive by working with researchers, educators, and students.

A nonprofit that facilitates youth engagement in design processes to create impactful solutions by integrating young people’s perspectives.

* We’re intentionally not defining youth , because each reader’s audience is likely different. Suffice it to say, we’re talking about people in late childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, who are often the “beneficiaries” of programs that they don’t get to help design. Typically this might mean somewhere around ages 12-20, but many of the things we discuss in this playbook can also be applied to younger or older audiences.

How to cite

Character Lab, Hopelab, & Center for Digital Thriving. (2024). Youth Voice Playbook: Engaging Youth in Research. Cambridge, MA, USA: Center for Digital Thriving.

Character Lab: Kelly Organ, Abbie Wyatt-McGill Hopelab : Emma Bruehlman-Senecal, Amy Green Center for Digital Thriving : Eduardo Lara, Emily Weinstein, Beck Tench, Carrie James

Acknowledgements

We would also like to acknowledge the following teens part of the CLIP program at Character Lab, for their feedback and insight throughout this process: Manuela Rubio Cana, Jerzaria Twillie, Shola Williams, Tithi Mehta, Methuki Kariyawasam, Christopher Fuentes, Jazlyn Fuentes, Trinity Holderbaum , Alexis Sapp, Tonisha Saint Fleur, Noor Bhatti, Kyela Jones, Valeria Perez, Jaynesha Mauvais, Peter Gadzeti, Amira Martin, and Cayden Draeger .

Privacy Policy   |   Accessibility Policy

If you have an idea for something missing or a way this resource could be improved, please let us know at [email protected] .

(Also, if you’ve done work that’s been informed by this playbook, email and let us know!)

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212 Youth Essay Topics & Research Titles about Teenage Issues

Young people face unique social and emotional challenges, which can be interesting to explore in your essay. If you’re looking for engaging topics for your youth research, you’re at the right place! On this page, you’ll find youth development topics, awareness ideas, and titles about teenage issues.

🔝 Top 7 Awareness Topics for Youth

🏆 best essay topics on youth, 🎓 most interesting seminar topics for youth, 👍 good youth research topics & essay examples, 💡 simple youth-related topics, 🌶️ hot research topics on youth issues, 📌 easy youth essay topics, ❓ research questions about youth.

• The Influence of Social Media on Youth
• Causes of Youth Unemployment
• Impact of Reality Shows on Youth: Essay Sample
• How Gaming Consoles Influence the Youth
• Effects of Domestic Violence on Children and Youth
• Youth’s Use of Social Media and Its Impact on Narcissism
• Sexual Activities and Responsibility Among Youth
• Conversation between a Youth Worker and an Emo Teenager This paper aims to create a hypothetical conversation between a youth worker and an emo teenager about teenager’s decision to become emo and future goals in life.
• Social Problems and Policy: Youth Unemployment and Mental Health In the history of the US, the federal and state governments have been at the forefront to facilitate effective social programs.
• Youth Ministry: Goals, Methods, and Standards Youth ministry is the practice of working with younger people that promotes Christian faith and church attendance.
• Effect of Advertising on Youth The provocative images used combined with the harsh language often leave the youths at the mercy of the cruel world.
• The Forums for the Youths Case study one entitled ‘youth public intellectuals’ (YPI) is a youth organization that fights for the rights of the black and Latino youths.
• Employment and Working Conditions: Youth Exploitation Young workers are more vulnerable to exploitation as compared to old workers. This exploitation is base on payment and working conditions among other workplace issues.
• Western Movies and Their Effect on Arab Youth There is the fear that Western movies are affecting the Arab Youth. Parents believe that these movies are the source of the queer behaviors among the youths.
• At-Risk Factors for Youth in Alberta The paper states that one of the massive problems that might influence the youth of Alberta and their future is an environmental disaster.
• Empowering Youth Engagement in Society The reference list of the books about positive changes that can be accrued from youth participation in the various community activities.
• Parents Are to Blame for Youth Violence Violence among youth has drastically increased in recent times. This problem of violence has become a global phenomenon whereby youth from all walks of life are engaged in violence.
• Child and Youth Work Trouble Youth The child and youth care (CYC) domain of social awareness is the significant sphere for today’s youth. In this respect, the paper is dedicated to the role of the CYC practitioner.
• The Relationship Between Youth, Lifestyle and Consumption The idea of youth in the modern world has not been explicitly attached to a certain age group, and became the focus of the global consumer culture as a whole.
• Adult Sentencing for Youth: Canadian Perspective The proponents of so-called restorative justice reason that the criminal justice system should operate on the premise that a juvenile action does not equate to that of an adult.
• Challenges with Homeless and Runaway Youth in Hawaii The number of homeless youth is high in the state. They have unique needs and are exposed to risks that differ from those faced by adults living on the streets.
• Challenges With Homeless and Runaway Youth in Waianae The problem in question is concerned with one of the acutest burdens of young people living in the Waianae area of Hawaii: homelessness.
• Western Movies and Arab Youth The Western movies tend to reflect a lifestyle that is luxurious in nature and full of freedom, different from the contemporary lifestyle in the Arab world.
• The Beatles’ “Let It Be” and Youth Music Culture The Beatles were one of the most powerful musical icons of the 1960s and, as a result, their songs could serve as a good reflection of the time when the band was active.
• Building a Business to Address Youth Unemployment An opportunity to build a business based on the youth unemployment problem has both strengths and weaknesses, also opportunities for further development.
• Unequal Opportunity of Urban Youth The current paper indicates that unequal opportunities for urban youth manifest in three spheres – employment, healthcare, and education.
• Lack of Emergency Shelter and Its Effect on the Homeless Youth Emergency shelters are specifically designed to meet the unique needs that homeless youths face due to their tender age and lack of life skills.
• The Public Health Campaign on STDs Among the Youth This essay discusses unprotected sex among teenagers as a public health issue that promulgates the spread of STDs, and the public health campaigners on STDs.
• Community Policing: The Alternative Solution to Youth Crime Community policing is a better alternative especially when it comes to the sensitive nature of juvenile crime.
• Youth Crime Prevention and Needs Assessment To assess needs of youth offenders, one should employ the approach of recidivism prevention and conduct assessment at any stage of the juvenile justice system.
• Sex Education: California Healthy Youth Act It is quite beneficial that stigma now has less impact and is decreased when addressing sexuality education. This practice allows the youth to be healthier.
• Media Consumption’s Role in Youth Recreation This essay analyzes the role of media consumption in youth recreation, focusing on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and the Internet in general.
• Promoting Youth Cultural Diversity Awareness Today’s youth must be aware of cultural diversity to avoid problems that may arise when interacting and working with people who are different from themselves.
• Youth Struggling with Mental Illnesses Mental health problems are a group of illnesses that affect a person’s general well-being and negatively affect everyday life.
• Review of a Youth Risk Behaviour Survey Youth Risk Behaviour Survey is the primary national source of data concerning the youth and their health-related attitudes, so it should be reliable and not biased.
• Smartphone Addiction Among American Youth While the smartphone is a valuable tool that has benefited civilization, the ensuing mental addiction has a profound, lasting impact on individuals’ health.
• Balenciaga’s New Style as an Indicator of Modern Youth This essay aims to analyse the current Balenciaga Triple S sneakers collection, a defining era of the second half of the last decade.
• Working Youth: Psychological Observations in Café This study reviews various meanings of working in the experience of young individuals based on field notes and a few-hours observation in one of the local coffee shops.
• Child Development: Youth and Crisis According to the previous literature findings, the individual’s psychological maturation is interdependent with the development of identity and the parent-child relations.
• Youth Life and Social Changes in Developed Countries This essay analyzes social changes affecting young people in developed countries in the social, political, economic and cultural spheres.
• Anxiety Among Substance-Abusing Youth
• Cinema, American Youth, and Rebellion Against Authority
• Animal Abuse and Youth Violence
• Factors That Restrict Success Within Youth Sport
• Can Fixed-Term Contracts Put Low-Skilled Youth on a Better Career Path?
• Family Networks and Youth Access to Jobs
• Discrimination Against LGBT Youth in US Schools
• Entrepreneurship: The Future for Our Youth and Our Economy
• Crime Youth and Childhood Understanding Theory and Research
• Alcohol Advertising Raises Consumption Rates in Youth
• Can Employment Subsidies and Greater Labor Market Flexibility Increase Job Opportunities for Youth?
• Drug Abuse and Its Effects on Youth and Teenagers
• Engaging Parents, Youth, and Schools in Developing Academic Success
• Are Today’s Youth Digital Natives
• Antidepressants and Youth: Healing or Harmful
• Factors That Fuel the Spread of HIV Infection Among the Youth
• Homeless Children and Youth: Causes and Consequences
• Education and the Youth Movement in Nazi Germany
• Casual Sexual Behavior Among Youth
• Adolescent Development and Development of Youth Programs
• Health and Wellbeing Australian Children and Youth Related
• Does Cyberbullying Impact Youth Suicidal Behaviors
• Are Our Youth Different? New Beliefs for Old Practices in Entrepreneurship
• How Advertising Influence Youth Attitude Toward Dressing
• Education and Youth Unemployment in South Africa
• Addressing Depression Among Native Youths The current paper aims to utilize a Medicine Wheel model and a social work paradigm to manage depression among Native American Indian youths.
• A Contemporary Issue Affecting Immigrant-Origin Youth Immigration is an arduous journey that affects not only adult immigrants but also their children, who have to face the challenges of continuing their development.
• The Parent-Teacher-Youth Mediation Program The Parent-Teacher-Youth Mediation Program is designed to build relationships between family members from different generations.
• Youth Programs: Youth Justice Program This paper examines Youth Justice Program and offers an alternate version of it, analyzing the ways in which the alternative meets specific needs.
• Why Promote Acceptance of Youth Styles Among Adults? Partnering with young adults and respecting their perceptions promotes essential opportunities such as leadership structure, skill-building, and cause-based actions.
• Aboriginal Youth’s Risks and Resilience More research focusing on strategies to reduce risks and develop resiliency for Aboriginal youth will help make their lives easier.
• Youths and the Welfare Provision Services In Alberta, Ontario, and Manitoba, youths involved in the welfare provision services have common interests and issues that affect them.
• Ethical Issues in Medical Care of Youth The question of what attitude of doctors on the part of ethical considerations should be appropriate for children will be relevant for a long time.
• Discussion of Youth Services Provide Care In Alberta, Ontario, and Manitoba, youth services provide care to youths between 18-29 years old and under the care of directors.
• Public Schools and Vaccination of Youth Vaccines could be described as safety measures to prevent illnesses by stimulating an immune system to produce a prepared defense against a particular sickness.
• E3YDH’s Creating Opportunities for Youth Program E3YDH’s Creating Opportunities for Youth Program offers a solution to the problem of young employment in Mbombela, Mpumalanga, with the help of a creative economy.
• Youth Self-Reported Health and Their Experience of Parental Incarceration The study utilizes data from the Minnesota Student Survey, which was conducted every three years and included questions on health behaviors, dietary habits, and sleep patterns.
• Discussion of Why the Youth Join Gangs Youth violence is a big problem in many parts of the world, including America but when the youths form gangs, the challenge becomes even bigger and harder to solve.
• Youth Primary Prevention Education Program Youth Primary Prevention Education aims at preventing sexual violence with a focus on promoting positive individual, relationship and societal behavior.
• Treating Substance Use Among Youth Experiencing Homelessness in California Homelessness puts the youths in unstable housing situations and at a higher risk of substance use. Homelessness in California has been one of the top challenges.
• The Spiritual Bond Between Youth and Adults In the work “The Man to Send Rain Clouds,” Silko highlights the essential role of spiritual heritage. He depicts the spiritual bonds between different generations.
• The Role Cultural Continuity Plays in Youth Suicide Rates Among Indigenous People Even though Canada is considered one of the world’s developed countries, suicide cases are rising, especially among the indigenous groups.
• Youth Victimization: Prevalence and Implications In the ‘Youth Victimization: Prevalence and Implications” report was written by the experts of the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center
• A Latino Youth Photovoice Project on Teen Pregnancy The improvements within the education should have been discussed in a more thorough manner; the means of increasing teen pregnancy awareness among Latin American students.
• Homeless Youth in Colorado: The Urge to Act Some youngsters are forced to leave their homes, and some have unstable emotional states or experience other different issues in their lives.
• At-Risk Youth and Sex Trafficking Issue This essay attempts to look at the issue of child sex trafficking and provide a better understanding of its harms.
• Real Education for Healthy Youth Act Real Education for Healthy Youth Act of 2019 is a bill initially sponsored by Junior Senator Cory Booker that promotes comprehensive sex education in higher education institutions.
• Juvenile Delinquency: The Marginalized Youths For the delinquency programs and policies to work, the government must give priority to the marginalized youths. It should emphasize matters concerning the youth.
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The historical narrative of Taiwan folk song movement as student cultural production

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• Published: 27 September 2024
• Volume 2 , article number  64 , ( 2024 )

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• Chi Wan 1 &
• Xiaohua Zhu 1  

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Scholars have concerned with the possibilities of the independent cultural production in the educational field. In the schools, the educated are surrounded by the powerful diverse cultural influences. Those have been discussed in different issues from sociological, anthropological and semiotic perspectives. In fact, there is a gap between theoretical and practical research in cultural studies. Therefore, it’s necessary to explore the production and educational significance of student culture from the perspective of specific culture event. This paper chooses Taiwan folk song movement as a specific Chinese cultural event occurred in the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. It can be named as “student soundscape” because it is created by the high school and the college students. The slogan of this movement “Sing Our Own Songs” was initially to question the students’ cultural dependency on western pop music and the stereotype of Chinese urban songs named as “Era Music”. It is the ordinary students who seek for a cultural turn- a new native art form with authentic common experience. With their humanism ideal and complicated affection, emphasized as “nostalgia”, this generation of youth have experienced a trip in search for cultural roots and developed a cultural renaissance age.

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1 Introduction

One of the many facets of the modernity of education is the institutionalization of education, which has led to the narrowing of the Chinese and Western traditions of “cultivation” in the contemporary era, referring only to “school education.” The criticism educational scholars have pointed out that the curriculum content transmitted in the current school system is a “chosen result”. The educational culture of those “silent” people have been hidden in the space of school education, and even more “marginal” issues could not be discussed throughout the narrative and writing of educational history. Only some scholars have explored the cultural history of popular urban or rural popular culture with a broad meaning of “education” [ 1 ].

The concept of “elite culture” in education also affects the research paradigm of the student group in the academic community. For example, the sociological community’s narrative approach to youth culture and the use of theoretical tools to explain the underlying texture of cultural phenomena often adopt the discourse “youth” as “non-mature people” who need to be socialized through certain mechanisms and rituals. This means that youth are generally considered to be difficult to completely change the cultural lifestyle of adults, and they maintain a “resistance” or “free-floating” relationship with adults [ 2 ]. However, in fact, while revealing the reality, the discussion of such theoretical assumption and conclusion also obscures another aspect of youth culture, that is, in a specific historical context, the cultural creation and cultural life of youth are rich, multidimensional, and pioneering. Youth sound culture is often understood by cultural critics as a unique cultural expression of “adolescence”, which requires “more mature ways” of reflection, introspection, and deepening after students enter adult society. For example, in the popular music show “Band's Summer” in 2023, one of the Taiwanese bands “Constantine's Changing Ball” was criticized by live music critics for its theme and the emotional expression that fit the “characteristics of adolescence”, stating that “people need to settle down with age”. This argument is typical of equating “youth” with “youth culture”, which is the “manifestation of immature emotions” of youth during adolescence. Footnote 1 Therefore, the researchers need to examine the educational implications of sound culture from a new perspective. As a wave of youth culture movement, it is also related to the vocalization of serious social issues and the internal exploration of people’s spiritual world, and forms a unique “soundscape” in the public space.

In the existing research on youth culture in the academic, the sound culture of students has not received widespread attention. Only a small number of related studies have involved how sound has become a medium for the formation and transmission of collective human memory, such as examining how sound museums inherit human cultural collective from the perspective of media studies [ 3 ]. The researches on the sound culture of Chinese local students from the interdisciplinary perspective of cultural history and education are relatively scarce. The exploration of the educational significance of the production and dissemination of sound culture is only limited exploration by a few scholars. This study responds to the emerging trend of “cultural study” in the academic and attempts to propose corresponding propositions in combination with the educational issues of young students. Specifically, this study chooses a specific cultural event as the topic from the historical perspective to narrate the Taiwan folk song movement, which has a profound influence on Chinese popular music and starts an era of “Renaissance in Taiwan music” [ 4 ], and summarizes the core concepts as the expression of youth culture.

The Chinese mainland has not attained too much about the folk song movement emerging in Taiwan in the 1970s until recent 30 years. Due to the lack of communication between the two sides at that time, there was a “time displacement” intersection. From the late 1980s, the “folk songs” had developed into mature industry, along with Taiwan’s newly emerging youth culture —— rock music, entered the cultural life of young people in the 1990s. They together with the song writing of the mainland students, formed a campus sound culture dominated by fresh tunes and pure lyrics of campus folk songs.

Zhang Zhaowei, a post-1960s cultural scholar in Taiwan, now a documentary director, is the earliest researcher to sort out the history of this folk song movement. In 1992, to accomplish for his master’s degree at the Graduate Institute of History at National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, he wrote and published his thesis——” Who is Singing Their Own Songs There? A History of the Development of Modern Folk Songs in Taiwan in the 1970s ”. He divided the folk song movement into three threads: Chinese modern folk songs, Tamkang University-China Tide Magzine, and campus songs. This kind of historical clue sorting has been basically recognized by subsequent research, including Zhang Mengmeng’ s thesis for Capital Normal University master degree “ Cultural Meaning of Folk Song Movement in Taiwan ”. She has discussed three routes of contemporary folk songs’ lyric-writing, from the “sleeping awakening” to “holding high the banner” and then to “moving forward and apart with conflicts”. The types of folk songs could be categorized into “roots”, “poetry”, “ballad” and “reality” [ 5 ]. The other researches like Highway 61’s “Distant Homesickness”[ 6 ], Ma Shifang’s “Underground Homesickness Blues” [ 7 ], and Li Wan’s music reviews “Wind” [ 8 ], “Elegance” [ 9 ]and “Ode” [ 10 ] published in “Reading” magazine all follow this path. In the article “Folk Songs and the Public: The Left-wing Branch of Taiwan’s Modern Folk Song Movement in the 1970s”, Luo Manli makes detailed corrections to the development of these three lines [ 11 ]. Li Yitong describes the historical line of the folk song movement in Taiwan, and provides the mass culture perspective [ 12 ]. In literature study, Ji Xiaoyan focuses on the lyrics rich in “poetic” and humanistic connotations born in the “Taiwan Folk Song Movement” from 1975 to 1985, she emphasis the Taiwanese folk songs that should be placed in the field of modern Chinese poetry [ 13 ]. The above researches offer the basic history facts and the outline of the movement, however, it’s also important to discuss and narrate the crucial historical event from the perspective of education and culture study.

Zhang Zhaowei considers the movement as a process of searching for collective identity in that generation. The collective manifestation of beliefs and values is neither political nor economic [ 14 ]. The 30th anniversary concert of folk songs with the theme of “Forever’s Eternal Song” in 2005 attracted many young people. Zhang Zhaowei believes that the reason may be beyond the beauty of the songs and the starry lights of the singers, “but more because of a sense of ritual built by the years and values shared on stage and off stage—a sacredness that cannot be explained by political, commercial, and religious logic; this is precisely what these growing young hearts long for but cannot obtain” [ 15 ].For the young students in Taiwan who emerged from the pressure of the school entrance examination in the 1970s and entered the campus to begin their own independent development, folk songs were one of their forms of cultural practice and self-education. These “school folk singers” call themselves “singers” to distinguish themselves from the popular “stars”. In addition to a very small number of people from the popular music circle, the vast majority are campus students, creating a unique student sound culture-scape independent of Western popular music and Taiwanese popular music named “Era Music” in the spirit of amateurism. Its influence extends beyond the campus space and becomes a model for public education.

The generation of young people who listened to and sang folk songs has now become “middle-aged”; campus culture, which once created sound personality expression and shaped identity of young people, has gradually been destroyed by the ferocious popular culture industry and becomes part of mediocre pop culture. In the face of such a reality, it is necessary to conduct historical comparative research, that is, to return to the “pre-industrial stage” to investigate the youth’s culture production. It is not only to rediscover the “hidden” youth student culture in historical research, but also to consider the educational significance of youth culture: what is the significance of the culture created by young students in their growth process for themselves? How had these works been spread and formed the collective memory of that generation? What is the educational significance of their enlightenment journey compared to today’s reality?

2 Research design

2.1 historical materials collection.

The sources of historical materials in this paper are mainly as follows: First, the existing academic research on the history of folk songs, represented by Zhang Zhaowei, Ma Shifang, Highway 61, sorted out the whole process of Taiwan folk song movement. The second is the study of cultural history, including the drastic changes in Taiwan over the past half century. That time has brought about the spread of influential social trends and made the educational response to the demands of cultural change. Therefore, the historic researchers from literature, society, intellectuals and other fields have also paid attention to the important works in the Taiwanese folk song movement. The third is the record archives. Some of the works had ever not been opened for political reasons, but now is digital music industry era. Digital media websites such as NetEase Cloud Music provide most of the record open services. Fourth, many interviews and documentaries were filmed, so that the ideological portraits of some key figures could be recorded. For example, Hu Defu, Yang Zujun and others have maintained close ties with the media and academic circles in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland. Hu Defu is still active in the mainland music industry, cooperating with Phoenix.com to make humanities programs, and Yang Zujun has tracked many parties to record Li Shuangze.

2.2 Theoretical concepts

2.2.1 culture production.

Culture production has been discussed in many disciplines. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron develop an analysis of the reproduction of culture through education which is shown to play a key part in the reproduction of the whole social system [ 15 ]. Cheng Meng shows the cultural autonomy of those Chinese peasant children, and analyzes the creativity of the implied rules and their intrinsic relationship with cultural production. He also pays special attention to the dark side of such a cultural production. The impact of the class crossing journey of “the son does not inherit the father’s occupation” on the individual moral, emotional and cultural world has been narrated [ 16 ]. Wei Ran and Zhu Lili explain the relationship between mainland literature and Southeast Asian literature creation from the perspective of intersubjectivity. The collections are in the outline of cultural production to break nostalgia and establish identity [ 18 ].

2.2.2 Cultural resistance

Resistance in everyday life is of interest for academics and researchers of cultural psychology, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and human development [ 18 ]. Stuart Hall thinks that using “class-against-class” to understand “popular culture” is not proper, because there is no fixed content of the latter concept. The capacity to constitute classes and individuals as a popular force —— that is the nature of political and cultural struggle: to make the divided class and the separated peoples into a popular democratic cultural force. Hall also emphasizes Black music cultural meaning of resistance [ 19 ]. Nadine Dolby notices that youth culture research during the late 1980s and 1990s both expanded and questioned the notion of “resistance”. It was further complicated by theoretical moves within poststructuralism and postmodernism that weakened the grand narratives undergirding much of the Birmingham School research [ 20 ]. Jennifer Sandlin examines popular culture as a site of cultural resistance. Specifically, she explores how “culture jamming,” a cultural-resistance activity, can be a form of adult education [ 21 ].

2.2.3 Classicism

On modern Chinese literature, the academia involves the confrontation between Romanticism and Realism and the Modernist thought represented by Symbolism, but nothing about Classicism [ 22 ]. However, classicism of modern Chinese literature can be traced in 1920s, such as Wu Mi and Xue Heng school. Huang Haiqing reveals that the core of Yu Guangzhong’s poetics is the relation between tradition and modern. Yu’s system is constructed on the base of “modern poem”, but still blending with occidentalize and classical language. In other word, Yu’s poetic can be called “neoclassical poetic way”, which has its own profound and abundant connotation. In further analysis, the system of Yu’s neoclassical poetics includes not only literary research, but also some other artistic fields, such as fine arts and music [ 23 ].

2.2.4 Cultural populism

Cultural populists confront elite positions, such Michel de Certeau. He thinks of the daily practical activities as “tactics of daily resistance”, like talking, reading and purchasing. [ 24 ] The other representative of cultural populism, Paul Willis, explains “grounded aesthetics” to satisfy the need to eliminate the isolation of art and daily life. For him, culture is “common”, and the artists are also the “normal” people. [ 25 ] There is a vibrant symbolic life and creativity in everyday activity and expression. Willis spends so much time to describe the everyday culture of youth, reveals the extraordinary symbolic creativity of the ways in which people use, humanize, decorate, and invest with meaning their life spaces and social practices including music creation and consumption [ 26 ].

2.3 Narrative framework

This paper largely continues the historical narrative thread of the musical efforts of classical humanists and cultural populists in different directions, just like what Zhang Zhaowei’s dissertation emphasizes. Differently, this paper attempts to respond to the opposition between "elite" and “mass” (or “common”) in the field of cultural studies from the perspective of specific cultural events. At same time, we try to take them as the possibility of culture production and how the culture response to the social issues. In the narrative of the folk song movement, we use key words to summarize critical conclusions. Cultural resistance can be regarded as the cultural psychology of Taiwanese. Classicism and populism represent different forms of cultural production, till the 1980s witness cultural industry development. So many same-like pop songs had been criticized. Finally, the songs are compared with the music production under the new media and new cultural communication modes of contemporary times.

3 “Resisting westernization”: the rise of Taiwan modern folk song movement

The literature of Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s represents the awakening of “self-awareness”. The most influential thoughts were Chinese Cultural Revival Movement leaded by Kuomintang and the Debates Over Country Literature, which made the encounter between the traditional and the modern, the westernization and the Sinicization [ 27 ]. After the Kuomintang took control of Taiwan’s political power, there was a serious Westernization of politics, economy, culture, and even the educational sector. At that time, a popular saying —— “Come, come, come to Taiwan University; go, go, go to the United States”, reflected the basic trajectory of student education, as few overseas students returned to Taiwan. This phenomenon has also received attention in the mainland, and in the 1980s, there were articles discussing those trends of Taiwan young students. [ 28 ]Existentialism, as a pioneering Western modern trend of thought, surged into the campus and cultural circles, while in political philosophy, liberalism in the United States and Britain dominated. In the context of valuing personal freedom and spiritual experience, Taiwanese collectively exhibited “identity anxiety”. The cultural orientation of the 1960s focused on the inner spiritual world, and the “local” realism that emerged in the 1970s was the result of the development of two different paths, “introversion” and “extroversion”, under the reality of Taiwan's loss of cultural roots, erosion by foreign civilization and rapid economic expansion. There were endless cultural debates between the East and the West, the traditional and the modern. These two paths also gave rise to two different styles of cultural construction among students in the 1970s. Below, we will mainly describe the voices of two different styles of students according to the time line, which finally became two narrative modes of gender characteristics.

The slogan of the folk song movement, “sing our own song”, is generally believed to have first appeared in the “Coca-Cola” incident at Tamkang University with main event information in Table  1 . On December 3 in 1976, Tamkang College of Arts and Sciences (now Tamkang University) held a “Western Folk Song Concert”, hosted by the well-known radio music program anchor Tao Xiaoqing, who later became known as the “Mother of Folk Songs” for her commitment to promoting folk song creation. At the concert, due to the temporary accident of the original singer Hu Defu, his friend and Tamkang Mathematics graduate Li Shuangze took his place. When it was his turn to perform, Li Shuangze asked the singer who had sung English songs before: “What is the feeling of a Chinese singing Western songs?” In response to the host’s question about “where is the modern folk song of China”, he replied, “Huang Chunming said in his ‘Local Suite’ that ‘before we are able to write our own songs, we should always sing the songs of our predecessors until we are able to write our own songs [ 29 ].” Apparently, he had pondered this question before. Subsequently, he sang several Taiwanese folk songs. This incident, also known as the “Tamkang Incident”, and its protagonist Li Shuangze, became a legend in Taiwan's cultural history. Hu Defu regardes Li Shuangze as the pioneer of a new era. In the documentary produced by Yang Zujun, he said, “If the era is a curtain that can be opened, I think Li Shuangze is the one who pulls the curtain” [ 30 ]. In 1976, Liang Jingfeng, then a teacher in the German Department of Tamkang University, recalled Li Shuangze and commented, “When he heard us singing, ‘What do you want to be a man?’ (in the song “Direction”) and he felt as if the time was going to change.“ [ 30 ] In the legend, the “big fat” Li Shuangze carried a guitar on his shoulder and hung a bottle of Coca-Cola on the head of the guitar, resembling a knight. Li Shuangze, who had just returned from studying abroad in the United States and Spain, said to the students and audience, “It is really exciting to return to my own land from abroad, but I am still drinking Coca-Cola…” Lv Qinwen was a student of the Department of Architecture of Tamkang University in 1975. He recalled Li Shuangze’s appearance at this folk concert, “Li questioned Tao Xiaoqing in person. He gave an example that everyone was a banana because the banana peel is yellow, and the heart is white. After such an admonition, and with a moment of embarrassment, he began to sing those songs again”. In Lv Qinwen’s opinion, “Tao Xiaoqing represents figures of Western song culture for that.” Cai Yurong was a student of the Department of Chemical Engineering of Tamkang Univeristy in 1974. He believes that Li Shuangze “is not targeting anyone for the phenomenon of sublime and flattering beauty in the entire Taiwanese campus atmosphere. If he is targeting anyone, it must be the students of Tamkang Univerisity. This is a starting point. It is the movement to understand oneself with songs, and it should be the real root on campus, so his credit is the credit of enlightenment” [ 30 ].

According to Li Wan’s speculation, maybe Li Shuangze should take a glass and make the Tamkang University Coca-Cola Incident [ 8 ]. Coca-Cola and American popular music are two major “symbols” of American popular culture, dominating the body and mind of young people around the world. This aggressive questioning and reflection caused a heated debate among campus. Zhou Yu was the founder of the Gengxin Experimental Theatre Troupe in the 1970s. When talked about the cultural wave of the 1970s, he emphasized, “it’s all of getting rid of the shackles of the old system. Everyone was looking for a way out within their own scope, pursuing freedom, pursuing personality, finding their own personality. The past was like a tight spell that restricts us” [ 30 ].

For Li Shuangze’s folk songs, his good friend Wang Zhenhua commented, “there is no doubt that Li Shuangze’s folk songs are greatly inspired by American folk songs and rock music. I have heard him sing Taiwanese and mainland folk songs, but his profound understanding of folk songs should come from Europe and America, or more accurately, from his own experience” [ 31 ]. Li Shuangze was the generation of Taiwanese who grew up independently under the “nationalist” education of the Kuomintang and the dilemma of foreign cultures from the United States. However, he noticed the voices of neglected ethnic groups and oppressed people from European and American folk songs and rock music. The media often referred to this type of folk singer as a “protest singer”, and Li Shuangze’s legend is about “smashing coke” to “protest” Western culture; the legend of Yang Zujun is as a “non-party person” (a more simplified classification is the Democratic Progressive Party) against the Kuomintang regime; Hu Defu is fighting for the rights of indigenous people. But in fact, Li Shuangze, Yang Zujun, and Hu Defu are not so much using singing as a tool for political propaganda as they are constructing cultural identity for their own identities. When recalled Li Shuangze, Wang Zhenhua reflected on the folk songs' meaning of “the author is the people”, “popularity is not folk songs”, “criticism is not folk songs”, and even that “art” and “folk songs” were opposites. Popular music is not the creation of the people, but a commercial consumer product produced in bulk by the industry. It blocks the public's voice of singing, and even caters to the emotional expression needs of the masses with vulgar cultural packaging. Folk songs are poems, which can “arouse, view, group and complain” as Confuse said, while popular songs are the emotional foam that dissipate individual willpower and rationality, which can only make the audience lose themselves—this is not the nutrient of young people’s growth, but misleading and abetting. Folk songs are not as refined as high-brow music. Li Shuangze said bluntly that he didn’t want to be an artist, although he also painted, wrote poem and songs (he graduated from the Department of Mathematics at Tamkang University and often attended lectures in the Department of Architecture). If art is the highest form of “civilization”, Li Shuangze chooses “culture” as a way to counter the “massification” of the technological world created by human rationality’s excessive processing. In a mechanized world, all young people are “the same type of person”- drinking Coca-Cola and consuming cultural industrial products brought about by the globalization of capital. (The tension between civilization and culture has been raised by Alfred Weber [ 32 ] and Cao Weidong [ 33 ].)

4 “Roots”: the wave of Taiwan modern folk song movement

The “Tamkang incident” was not an accidental event, and the transformation and reconstruction of popular culture was not “a castle in the air”. In the 1960s, the ivory-tower intellectuals already realized the value and urgency of collating folk songs. In 1966, musicologists Shi Weiliang, Xu Changhui, and Li Zheyang initiated the first “folk song collection movement” program after the war and established the “Chinese Folk Song Music Research Center”. In the next year, Xu Changhui and his colleagues discovered the famous country folk singer Chen Da, whose songs are recorded (in Table  2 ). Born during the Japanese occupation period, Chen Da learned to perform Yueqin from his elder brother as a child. Influenced by rural Taiwanese opera and folk rap art, he could not read and only speak the Southern Fujian dialect. When Xu Changhui saw him, he “lived alone in a house that was not fit for human habitation, without any relatives or friends, in a dark, impoverished and lonely world, living with a broken Yueqin”. Xu Changhui sighed, “When he picked up the Yueqin and sang the song that wanted to cry, I felt how real this world, this ‘red-eyed boy’ world that was forgotten by people in the metropolis, was!”[ 34 ] In addition to personally participating in the collection and adaptation of folk songs, Xu Changhui also wrote books and made contributions to the academic community, highlighting the value of Hengchun folk songs as a form of folk culture. Later, he also participated in local folk song and popular culture docking activities. Chen Da’s singing was not a formal “symbol of local culture”. He traveled around the countryside, singing short songs that advised young people to respect their parents, be frugal and hardworking, not to be conceited, and cherish love. He also sang about life experiences, lyrical tunes, and self-composed long narrative stories, telling stories about history and love between men and women. Before being discovered by academics, Chen Da was known as a “barefoot teacher” among the people [ 35 ].

However, the influence of academic folklore research did not extend beyond the academia in the 1960s, and it was impossible for collectors to encourage all young people to engage in field research and collectively “sort out the ancient Chinese heritage”. In fact, it was not until the “folk song” became a popular cultural trend in the 1970s that the “hometown accent” of Chen Da spread to young people's ears and continued to be sung.

Among the popular music trends familiar to students, the first was the promotion of folk songs on the European and American pop music charts. In April 1971, Hong Xiaoqiao, a female singer, hosted the TV singing program “Golden Melody Awards” to promote folk-style Western songs, which achieved a great success. Before that, she also tried to sing the folk song “Donna Donna” (a Jewish folk song, which was popularized by the American folk singer Joan Baez in the 1960s. The Donna in the song is a woman who longs for freedom) at a “hot music concert” for teenagers who wanted to hear “hot songs”. At the concert, Hong Xiaoqiao failed miserably, and Li Shuangze helped her to strum the guitar and quietly left the stage through the sideway with the lively music on the stage… In this way, the trend of singing folk songs finally emerged in the early 1970s. Li Shuangze also met singers such as Hu Defu, Yang Xian, Wu Chuchu and some folk choirs in cafes, restaurants and other public places. From “hot songs” to “folk songs of other places”, then to “local folk songs”, this process was not so clear at the time, and the pioneer Li Shuangze's exploration was not so smooth.

In the winter of 1974, Li Shuangze prepared to work together to make and sing own songs in order to help Hu Defu organize a folk concert. They gathered in a restaurant, where it was raining in a winter night. Someone was singing “The Night Rain in the Port City”——”The young men, they don’t know where they are going”. “The Night Rain in the Port City” was originally called “The Blues of the Rain”, which was a famous song created by Yang Sanlang, a pioneer in Taiwan’s folk music industry in 1951. The song is filled with desolation and confusion, which is also the voice of every generation of depressed youth. In this situation, Li Shuangze asked himself, “it’s sad and shameful that our generation can’t sing songs in our own language.” Hu Defu sang two sentences of “Fishers, swim and swim…” and then sighed sadly —— “I just can't!” Young people who have already developed self-awareness could only lament that “our generation can't sing songs in our own language” [ 36 ].

Later, Li Shuangze went abroad to hold an art exhibition and pursue further study. While he left Taiwan to roam in various folk countries, Yang Xian, a domestic folk comrade, sang the rhyme of homesickness in the classical culture context.

5 “Where is homesickness”: classical humanism in Taiwan folk song movement

In 1974, Hu Defu invited Yang Xian as a guest to sing “Four Rhymes of Homesickness” at his folk song concert. Yang Xian was a graduate student in the Department of Biology at Taiwan University and had just stayed on to teach at the graduate school. During his campus years, he learned guitar playing and composition in the spare time, and then composed the poetry collection “White Jade and Bitter Gourd” of Yu Guangzhong into songs. He collaborated with several students at Taiwan University to produce and perform. Yu Guangzhong also attended the concert, and after listening to “Four Rhymes of Homesickness”, he admired it very much and wrote eight more poems. They were added together to perform at the “Concert of Modern Folk Songs” held at Zhongshan Hall in June of the following year, and were quickly published as “Collection of Modern Folk Songs in China” (in Table  3 ). The source of “folk songs” in the “Modern Folk Song Movement” is thus—even though it later triggered dissatisfaction from the academia, who believed that these songs were neither “modern” nor “folk songs” in the sense of folklore. Despite the controversy, the momentum of the “Folk Song Movement” was preserved and gained a foothold in the overall cultural circle. Yang Xian also gained the status of “Father of Modern Folk Songs in Taiwan”. The concert invited some people from the literary and music media, including Yu Guangzhong, Tao Xiaoqing, and newspaper reporters and columnists. The responses were very good, and later the folk song community also regarded this concert as the beginning of the “Year of Folk Songs”. The “ Forever’s Eternal Song—Folk Song Carnival” in 2005 was based on the 30th anniversary calculated in 1975. In June 2015, a 40th anniversary concert with the theme of “To sing a Sixiangqi Again” was held in Taipei.

When emphasizing the significance of this concert, later generations often consciously eliminate the voices of opponents of the “movement”. At that time, not only did the academicians have doubts about these works with the name of “modern folk song”, but ordinary audiences also did not fully accept them. According to Li Shuangze’s record, as early as 1974, at the concert of Hu Defu, when Yang Xian began to sing “Give me a pail of Yangtze River water”, someone under the stage scolded, “The Yangtze River water is round or flat, you know nothing!” Of course, Yang Xian did not know whether the Yangtze River water was “round or flat”—in fact, no young people who were born in the post-war “baby boom” in Taiwan had ever seen the Yangtze River water. The “Yangtze River” was nothing but the imagination of young people about the mainland on the other sea side, the ancient Chinese geographical space and cultural space.

The lyricist Yu Guangzhong and the composer Yang Xian are two generations with a great age difference, but they are both in a similar state of “anxiety of influence” which originally refers to the psychologyin literature and now we use to describe the psychologyof cultural subjectivity [ 37 ]. The two have created a new common “inner space” that attracts many “wandering souls” who live in “foreign lands”, especially elite intellectuals in Taiwan’s cultural circle. After they transferred from the overall westernization, they turned to the Chinese traditional culture—the “traditional culture” here is naturally the classical world of Chinese scholars. Therefore, Yu Guangzhong and Yang Xian’s “homesickness” and “Chinese complex” are essentially the aesthetic empathy of elite intellectuals towards Chinese history and culture. Whether it is the “Rondo” expressing personal emotions, or the “Hengchun Seaside” and “Westward Passing Yangguan” looking out to the vast land of the north and south, all are exquisitely crafted works that are extremely concerned with “literary” and “musical” qualities. They are completely different from the context of Li Shuangze, Hu Defu, and Yang Zujun, and have been opposed by the latter, especially Li Shuangze. Li Shuangze abandoned Yang Xian’s use of bel canto singing and complex instrumental arrangements (such as symphonic orchestration, string, piano, and jazz drum configurations), which are incompatible with the simplicity of popular singing and writing. In his own creation, Li Shuangze only used simple accompaniment instruments such as guitar, harmonica, and folk instrument Yueqin.

Yang Xian admitted in an interview that his creative approach “represented the aspirations and aesthetic of intellectuals at that time”. “Although I am from an agricultural college and have worked in the fields, you cannot experience some of the most basic things in Taiwan. We are not in the same circle, and their circle has their composers and singers. However, after all, intellectuals are the backbone of society, so we cannot be silent. Most students in the cultural circle prefer their own things, and we just need some resonance. As long as we can sing what we like, that’s fine”[ 38 ]. His reflection after 30 years shows the basic attitude of a student group that existed as elite intellectuals in university campuses and later integrated into the middle class. Before students made the voice of “singing their own songs”, most middle-class adults refused the local “mimi sound” (Era Music), and they could still choose elegant music and Western popular music. Like Yang Xian, campus students who received elite humanistic education since childhood would neither appreciate nor create the culture of the people at the bottom.

In 1977, Yang Xian released his second album “Westward Passing Yangguan” (in Table  3 ), and after two “temporary departure” concerts, he went abroad to study. Later, he switched careers to become a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, opened a clinic, and did import and export of drugs. At the height of his career, he left Taiwan’s music scene, without turning his “amateur” into “profession”. Yang Xian has always been firmly opposed to using music as a career because of his love for music. During this short music career, he believes that music, like other “events of life “, “is just an experience. My life still needs other different experiences to be complete.”[ 39 ]

Judging from Yang Xian's musical career and later life trajectory, art is not a self-contained world for him. Another “experience mode” (Michael Oakeshott's term [ 42 ])—religion—is the true home of his soul.

In the United States, Yang Xian lived a tranquil life without music and devoted himself to the infinite religious world. He grew up in a Christian educational preschool after losing his father as a child, but he was a Buddhist. Yang Xian also met his spiritual partner Ding Naijun, as well as Ding Naijun’s sister Ding Naizhu and brother-in-law Lai Shengchua in the United States. He and Ding Naijun practiced together, occasionally meeting, talking, and translating spiritual books until Ding Naijun died of cancer in 2003.

Yang Xian’s contribution to Taiwan's music industry cannot be ignored, but in addition to building the significance of Yang Xian and his works from a professional perspective of music history, we can also listen to Yang Xian's “voice” from the perspective of education: why did Yang Xian sing his own songs in his youth? What is the significance of “singing his own songs” for his growth? After the awakening of self-awareness among this generation of young people, in order to solve the inevitable life dilemma they face, some of them turned to literature, some devoted themselves to historical research, some were keen on politics, and after the political movement, they turned to academic careers. Economist Qu Wanwen currently as a professor at the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Center of Taiwan's “Academia Sinica”, came to NTU in the early 1970s after graduating from Taiwan's Taipei First Girls High School. “For a young woman who is sensitive to her own growth, coming to NTU is a physical and mental liberation” [ 43 ]. “Being introspective” and “facing reality” are the common contradictory psychology of this generation of intellectual youth. Yang Xian realized the “loneliness of human” very early, and said he was “a lonely person”. His introverted personality caused him not to try to face external reality and seek his own foundation by facing the earth and the people like Li Shuangze, who is full of vigor and vitality and eager to try in various fields.” According to people who have seen Yang Xian, he is gentle and gentle, always with a calm and indifferent look” [ 44 ].

6 “Rooted”: populism in the Taiwan folk song movement

Where does the answer come from? When asking the questions on the campus of Tamkang University, Li Shuangze already had a vague answer. The process of finding the answer is certainly not like the one his former idol mentor Bob Dylan sang in the famous folk song “ blowing in the wind”—”The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…” Li Shuangze, who never caught the “answer” in the wind, stared at Dylan’s photo in front of the Folk Village coffee house in Greenwich Village, New York, the headquarters of counterculture, until he met the girl coming towards him:

“Do you know Bob Dylan? I don’t know. Who is he? Ah! Do you know a singer named Woody Guthrie?” “Aha! I know, I like him, my father likes him, and my grandfather likes him too; listen, this is your land, this is my land, from California to the island of New York, from the waters of the Golden Stream to the redwood forest, this land was originally opened up for us!”

Whether this is Li Shuangze’s true experience or a story he made up, it indicates the emergence of a new spiritual journey stage: young people who listened to the music of the British and the American protest singers The Beatles and Dylan in the 1950s and 1960s and gained initial enlightenment, full of passion, were instead moved by an ordinary old folk singer, Woody Guthrie. He recalled the lullabies his mother sang when he was a child:

The baby is sleepy, and grows one inch every time it sleeps. The baby is reluctant to leave, and grows a foot every night. When the sun sets, I hold my baby in my arms carefully and look at it. My son is my heart and soul. I'm worried about him catching cold.

The lullabies have constructed childhood memories abandoned behind the years, or are the maternal voices that accompany people’s lives and emerge when an individual’s existence is obscured for too long? Like the ballads (narrative folk songs) sung by Hengchun elderly Chen Da with an old Yueqin, the lullabies are entrusted with the hope of maintaining cultural ties.

The above text of Li Shuangze is quoted from the article “Where Did the Song Come From?” [ 45 ] At the end of the article, he added that the purpose of writing this article was not only to commemorate the folk music concert at Tamkang University, but also to “tell those who follow us that we have tried hard to walk down a 'wrong' path” [ 45 ].

Li Shuangze is not walking alone on this “wrong” path. During his half-year abroad, the old and the young generations of Chinese “country ballads” emerged. On March 31, 1977, Tamkang held a “Night Concert of Chinese Folk Songs” inviting Chen Da, and young generation campus singers Yang Zujun, Wu Chuchu, Tamkang's student choir, including Fengyao Chorus and Tamkang Chorus, as well as teachers from the school and some outsiders. Unlike the indoor concert held by Yang Xian 2 years ago, this concert was an outdoor performance, like the “Ballad Night” concerts commonly seen on university campuses today, where people “sit on the ground” and “stand up and sing” in an open space. The repertoire of the performance included original folk songs, mountain ballads, children’s songs, pop songs, etc., and was not limited to the “folk songs” recognized by the academy. (The main setlist was in Table  4 ) However, from a historical perspective, the significance of this performance should lie on highlighting the rap narrative ballads of Chen Da. Although from the perspective of the performance at that time, Chen Da was not popular among campus students who were more accustomed to Western pop music, and even some boys laid down on the ground impatiently and began to chat; but Chen Da entered the university campus from the folk world, guiding college students to see the world outside the campus, and also promoting the “modern folk song” path opened up by Yang Xian closer to folk music.

The reason why Li Shuangze can make a voice different from the academism and ordinary literati in the campus also lies in the campus culture. Since the” Diaoyu Movement” and the dismissal of 13 teachers from the philosophy department, the liberal teachers and students in NTU had been basically expelled. While in Tamkang Univeristy, there was still a left-wing cultural atmosphere. These two concerts have received great attention and reports from campus publications “Tamkang Weekly” and “China Tide”. The magazine “China Tide” was originally a comprehensive publication, edited by Su Qingli until the third issue. Later, with the assistance of Chen Yingzhen, they created the famous magazine “ China Tide “—the most prominent left-wing cultural-social force in Taiwan since the mid-1970s, and gathered different people, such as Wang Xiaobo, Chen Guying, Lin Zaijue, Jiang Xun, Wang Jinping, Yang Kui, etc. China Tide advocated a realistic literary style and actively intervened in the local literature debate in 1977. The magazines began to explore and organize the literary works of Japanese colonial period writers. The magazine articles were written about the history of the peasant and worker movements during the Japanese colonial period, the petition movement for parliamentary establishment, analyzing political and economic issues, and attempting to link Taiwan’s anti-Japanese resistance to China’s national revolution: both were anti-imperialist revolutions. China Tide also reported and commented on real-life social issues such as labor, industrial pollution, gambling, farmers, prostitution, fishermen, the indigenous, and the Jade Reservoir issue. “[ 47 ] Tamkang Weekly has published several articles in a row, discussing the dispute between Chinese and Western cultures behind the “singing our own songs” at the 1975 concert. The newly established China Tide directly participated in the 1977 concert and organized an academic discussion to explore the creative source of folk songs. Just like Yang Xian’s “modern folk song” had been widely recognized and spread in the intellectual and cultural circles, the Tamkang campus tried to expand the influence scope for the voice of civilians. The campus cultural tradition of Tamkang University was later inherited by Lin Shengxiang, a student major in traffic management who entered the campus in the 1990s. He sang rock in Hakka dialect, gave up rock singing folk songs, and used music to participate in the “anti-eservoir movement”, focusing on the situation of laborers migrating from rural areas to cities.

7 “Inheritance”: the standard-bearer in the Taiwan folk song movement

Unfortunately, Li Shuangze, who had great ambitions, had too little time to create and sing his own songs. From the early summer of 1977 to September, he created 10 songs (also said to be 11 or 12), including “ Old Drummer” (in Fig.  1 , Li Shuangze’s handwriting of the lyric of the song “Old Drummer” has been kept), “I Know”, “Our Morning”, “Beautiful Island”, “Young China”, “Heart Song”, “Hong Mao City”, “Direction”, “Yugong Moves Mountains “, and “Farewell Song”. Apart from Li Shuangze and his friend and poet Liang Jingfeng, the lyrics were all adapted from poems by poets such as Jiang Xun and Chen Xiuxi. For example, the song “Direction” uses a simple soundtrack, a simple melody like folk songs, and plain lyrics like “What kind of person should we be? We should be free people. What kind of song should we sing? We should sing innocent songs” [ 48 ].After Li Shuangze’s death, Yang Zujun and the others recorded his works and published album “Respect! Li Shuangze Sings His Own Song”, in which the songs were full of the personality——honest and upright.

Li Shuangze’s handwriting as the lyric of the song “Old Drummer”——”Ours songs are the flame of the youth, are the chorus of the harvest” [ 49 ]

Li Shuangze drowned while saving a swimmer before he could publish his works. After his accident, Hu Defu and Yang Zujun sang those songs on various occasions. Later, Hu Defu added a section of “Formosa, beautiful Formosa “to the song “Formosa”, which is the version “Beautiful Island” circulated today. Two highly popular works——” Beautiful Island “ and “Young China”, are included in Yang Zujun's album released by Synco Cultural Corporation in 1978. Although this album is a true “folk song” creation album that conveys the voice of the local land and the people in the history of the folk song movement, it had been banned by the authorities due to Yang Zujun’s active participation in social movements, and the album was fully recalled 2 months after its release. “Beautiful Island” was later used as the name of a non-party publication and was banned for a long time; “Young China” also suffered the same fate due to its “longing for reunification”. In Yang Zujun’s main works released publicly, those songs are full of national complexes (the main setlist is provide in Table  5 ). After the 1990s, Taiwan’s local consciousness was extremely inflated, and “Beautiful Island” was used as a tool for “Taiwan independence” ideological indoctrination. However, in Li Shuangze’s memorial album “Beautiful Island “ and “Young China” are sung together, so how can they “represent” two diametrically opposed political positions?

Li Shuangze’s influence on Yang Zujun can be described as a “mentor who changed the trajectory of her life”. Yang Zujun was a student in the English Department of Tamkang University. She grew up with Western music and sang Western songs in college. After the “Coca-Cola incident”, Li Shuangze’s questioning shook Yang Zujun’s mind. This young girl began to think about the value of individuals in that “great era” in her singing—”When I was in my early 20 s, I was always thinking that: If singing is not for the purpose of being able to bear some national, state, and social significance in that great era, then what is the purpose of singing? And my life has been in this kind of rigid national thinking, through ups and downs, joy, reflection, but I can’t find sufficient reasons for myself to rely on and grasp the first half of my life. I can’t figure out the sophistication and refinement of the adult world, which is probably my biggest problem to date. Even at nearly 50 years old, I still can’t figure it out and can’t do it!” [ 53 ].

After Li Shuangze’s death, she not only sang folk songs, but also shed her schoolgirl's inexperience and reserve, and held a “Green Grassland Ballad Charity Concert” for child prostitutes (most of Taiwan’s child prostitutes at that time were the daughters of indigenous peoples). She invited Wu Chuchu, Native Sound Quartet and other folk singers to perform for free. The repertoire included Taiwanese traditional folk song “Dark Night”), classical poetry adaptation “Song of Goodness”, as well as “Beautiful Island”, “Old Drummer” and so on. The concert received widespread attention from the society and consciously penetrated the bottom and working class. Up to now, Yang Zujun has maintained a sense of justice and protested the unfairness of reality, and has not been deeply involved in the political whirlpool.

Like Yang Zujun, Hu Defu has attended many concerts but has not released many albums in total. He is a Puyuma who grew up in the Dagu Mountain area of Pingtung, Taiwan. His mother is from the Paiwan ethnic group. At that time, school education forced uniform Mandarin teaching inside and outside the classroom, weakening the influence of the indigenous culture of “ethnic minorities”. After entering university, Hu Defu worked part-time in a coffee shop and sang English songs until he met Li Shuangze. Only then was he inspired to try singing the song “Beautiful Rice” passed down by his ancestors. Later, he created works such as “The Child on the Cow’s Back” and “In A Flash” (his works are in Table  6 ). Even after the “folk song” situation officially opened in 1977, Hu Defu did not participate in the production activities of the music industry, but worked with Yang Zujun to protect the rights of indigenous children who were sold to cities as prostitutes. After Yang Zujun was banned from singing, Hu Defu also gave up the rich life he should have enjoyed after the newly resurgent popular culture industry, and focused his energy on protecting the rights of indigenous people. After the folk song movement declined in the 1980s, Hu Defu continued to collect indigenous songs and preserve the culture of his own ethnic people.

It wasn’t until 2005 that Hu Defu released his first album——”In A Flash”. The album cover said: “The soul of sound, the journey home” [ 54 ]. This “odyssey home” allowed him to grow from a “stuttering” teenager who never dared to sing to one who could now sing to young people living in cities. In the interview, Hu Defu reminded—— “Let them know that although we have entered many doors in the distant past, we still have to go back and knock on our own door.” “Folk songs themselves are a way for a nation or a group of people to express their opinions and voices, whether it is an attitude towards politics, or an appeal for their own survival and development conditions, or a demand for basic dignity, whether it is a black folk song or our song, we can see the traces of our speech. That's all that matters” [ 56 ]. In those years, Li Shuangze shouted, “Sing our own song”, allowing young people in a culturally barren era to write and sing their own songs. Now, nearly 40 years after Li Shuangze’s death, the folk song movement has long been washed away by economic trends and become a memory of the previous generation. Will the sound with spiritual power ring out again? Hu Defu said, “I still think that everyone should play the role of Li Shuangze and be responsible for folk music. We should continue to create an environment and stage for later generations to continue to write such songs, to gather, and to continue to convey such voices. This is what I want to do now. At this age, I also want to be with young people. I want to be another Li Shuangze” [ 56 , 57 ].

8 “Aftermath”: the contemporary significance of Taiwan’s folk song movement

However, as reminded above, the initiators of folk songs made the call for “singing their own songs”. But they did not put on a posture of “protest”. Contrary to that, the singers have not all participated in the operation of the music industry. From this point of view, Luo Dayou and the “pretended naïve” campus folk songs he criticized were imprisoned in the thriving cultural industry in the 1980s. Both them became different types of goods deliberately produced to cater to the different consumer tastes of the public. Jiang Xun whose poet “writing to the hometown” had been adopt as Li Shuangze’s “Young China” said the folk songs were natural and belonged to the tradition of The Shi King [ 57 ]. Hu Defu’s campus teacher Yu Guangzhong named the folk song as “new folk” in 1975 [ 58 ]. However, after the commercial intervention of young students, “campus folk songs” became the content and object of consumption. At that time, Li Shuangze’s deafening cry—”sing our own song” became a cultural fantasy of idealists. To this day, many domestic TV programs aim at young students as consumer groups, such as “Happy Boys” and “Chinese Good Songs”. They are not only fill students' culturally hungry appetites with commercial products packaged as “young people’s own voices”, but also destroy the future of youth cultural practice. The young students are of poor culture dream to be singers, such as folk singers, rock stars, and electronic music divas. They eager to make a living from music with their “talents”. However, they have not realized that this is getting farther and farther away from singing as a life. The new generation of independent musicians, represented by mainland folk singer Zhao Lei, do not blindly follow the market, but have successfully created highly influential works. He has caused people to think about a series of aesthetic issues, such as “good life” and “sincere emotion”. Those are related to the richness and sound development of young people's lifestyles and educational lives.

Finally, returning to the question raised at the beginning of this article. The Taiwan school folk song movement has laid the foundation for popular culture, especially pop music, both in Taiwan and mainland China. Now it is hard to imagine what form today’s popular culture, especially youth culture, would have taken without the Taiwan school folk song movement. In the folk song movement, youth culture has shaped the national cultural identity and emotional cohesion of the Taiwanese public and the mainland people, which is especially obvious in the narrative style of Taiwanese campus folk songs.

The narrative of the texts of the school folk song movement includes not only lyrics, but also poems, movies and novels. The folk song movement’s relationship with poems has already attracted the attention of the current academic community, especially literature researcher. In some movies, such as the movie “Special Smile”, they describe the singing scenes of female folk singers; and the emotional tone of the film has a light sense of melancholy. The movie narrative is often related to the emotional life of intellectual women, we think it can be regarded as a “affection revolution” Footnote 2 in modern female’s culture production. Another film,” Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? “, is also about female folk singers. In contrast, it is more intense than “Special Smile”. The film reveals the exploitative nature of musicians under the mechanism of cultural industry, and the original healthy family life of female folk singers is torn apart by capitalism. On novels, taking Luo Dayou’s song “Orphan of Asia” as an example, it is from Wu Zhuoliu’s novel of the same name. This novel and the lyric examine the tragic history of the colonization of the Taiwan island. The different narrative texts construct common main melody of social transformation. (The information of the movie and songs setlist is provide in Table  7 .)

However, it’s meaningful to notice that the topics and emotional tone are different among the folk songs as the Table  8 ’s clarification. The most interesting fact is: in the narratives of these texts, there can be a common deep emotional accumulation– nostalgia. It should be noted that around “nostalgia”, there are differences in gender dimensions. The male singers focus more on the “migration history” of the Chinese nation being invaded, that is, the “trauma narrative” of intellectuals, like “The People of Tangshan”, “ Love to China”, “Beautiful Island”, “Yueqin”, etc. Among those, “The Descendants of the Dragon” is the representative. It narrates the many tribulations and traumas encountered by the Chinese nation in modern history, thus condensing the sense of national identity of the Chinese descendants. At the same time, in addition to left-wing intellectuals such as Yang Zujun expressing dissatisfaction with the rule of the Kuomintang and sympathy for the toiling masses, some campus students have created a large number of “female wandering ballads”. This kind of narrating is more consistent with the characteristics of contemporary female independent music in 21 century, among which Hong Xiaoqiao, Qi Yu, Xu Jingchun, Pan Yueyun, female writer Sanmao and other creators are representatives, expressing their yearning for freedom of “distance” just like in the song “Olive “. With the transition in society, the momentum of Taiwan's school folk song movement has gradually weakened, and the expression of emotions in cultural production has become more and more multi-dimensional. Still, the “traumatic narrative” characteristics of rock music and independent pop music have been retained, and diversified musical motives such as criticism of urbanization, of commercial society, of environmental destruction, and speaking out for women's independence have gradually developed. On the surface, the school folk song movement is just a special historical event, but its gestation, development and growth are of great value for thinking about contemporary youth culture: young people are not the consumer of pop culture (just as many youth culture studies tend to think), but also the creators and re-producer of emerging culture. In the process of students sound culture development, they shape the historical memory and a new cultural identity of young people to the nation-state in a national nihilism time, and leaded a for-coming gender liberation movement.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their professional opinions.

Research on the curriculum practice of national spirit in the context of modernization of education in China for National Education Science Planning Youth Project of the Ministry of Education in 2023(Project Number: EMA230509).

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Wan, C., Zhu, X. The historical narrative of Taiwan folk song movement as student cultural production. Discov glob soc 2 , 64 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-024-00092-2

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