Drop That Knowledge: The Story of Youth Radio

Young people come to Youth Radio, a community-based youth media organization headquartered in Oakland, California, from under-resourced public schools and neighborhoods in order to produce stories that will transform both their own lives and the world around them. The intention of this CBPR project is to document Youth Radio's story (goals, mission and lessons learned) in collaboration with the youth and adult staff who took a lead role in telling the story. As storyteller-researchers and teacher-learners, we look for a methodology that asks, “What good does it do to learn, teach, create, and write about youth media?” We are not detached, neutral observers. Given our different backgrounds and viewpoints, we developed a dialogic approach to fieldwork, analysis, and writing. By writing ourselves into our own story in the first person, we challenged accepted views about the unexamined authority of the researcher. There are parallels here to producing a radio story and journalistic ethics. In radio terminology, interview clips are called actualities, and the reporter's narration comprises tracks. Simple radio stories shift back and forth between these two elements, forming a pattern known in shorthand as acts and tracks: interview clip, narration, interview clip, narration, and so on, until the final word. Our personalized accounts connect the cultural and the structural, placing the self and the conventions of storytelling in a social context.