Building Youth Civic Engagement through Media Education and Educational Commons

Abstract

The Italian case study, presented in this chapter, develops the concept of educational commons building on the field of media education and the notions of “participatory culture” and digital commons. The motivation for this study arose from the need to reconsider education as a shared resource and to examine the importance of experimenting with, monitoring, and evaluating (digital) co-creation practices that may engage and empower young people within their communities. Hence, our research questions were: (a) How do young people collectively experience and build the educational commons? (b) How do participants (youth and adults) in educational commons experience peer governance, and how do they handle and resolve conflicts? (c) How does the co-creation of a photo blog as a shared space of action help young people discover and develop a “civic intentionality” in the (digital) public sphere? (d) What are the effects of applying a commons’ logic to address inequalities and achieve social inclusion of young people from vulnerable social groups? The analysis of the textual data collected through interviews and focus groups, logbooks, fieldnotes, observation grids, and audiovisual documentation, we have been able to (a) reconstruct the micro-context in which the case study activities took place, (b) comprehensively describe the relational dynamics, the processes, and the products using unobtrusive methods, and (c) assess the impact of the activities concerning the objective of developing “civic intentionality” and reducing educational inequalities through an educational-commons and media-education approach.