About two summers ago, I volunteered with an non-profit education organization called ImMEDIAte Justice (IMJ). ImMEDIAte Justice is a summer camp, located in East LA, whose mission is to teach young people, in particular minority girls and queer youth, about reproductive justice through filmmaking. The overall purpose is to use media tools to teach marginalized youth about sex and reproductive justice, while simultaneously teaching them media literacy. As the website states,
"ImMEDIAte Justice is a movement to inspire a new, youth-driven media conversation about sex, gender, love and relationships... ImMEDIAte Justice provides girls with the close community, resources, and training they need to become powerful storytellers and changemakers."
In his introduction, Sefton Green writes, "but the attention to how young people make meaning and constitute their own agency through forms of cultural identification and appropriation...all posed a series of challenges for State education at virtually every level (56). IMJ's critical, activist driven pedagogy definitely challenges State educational practices. California law requires public schools to provide comprehensive sex education. However, according to a 2011 study, "Uneven Progress: Sex Education in California Schools,” many school districts, despite state law for comprehensive sex ed, still don't provide students with complete information.
As an activist driven organization, IMJ sees this as a problem in need of intervention. ImMEDIAte Justice is an example of "the 'impact' of Cultural Studies on the forms and practice of Education as system and as institution, as well as the more microlevels of individual learning and even theories of learning" that Sefton-Green outlines (57). It goes beyond simply "completing the information gap" in California's sex ed practices and creating it's own model of sex education that puts the learner at the center. At the center of IMJ is the belief that identity is a key feature of learning (63). For that reason their curriculum goes beyond a discussion of just sex and reproduction, and to include a discussion of gender, sexuality and relationships as well. Furthermore, IMJ can be considered a part of the non-formal education sector as it is a community based, volunteer run, organization. By locating itself in a working class community, primarily serving brown youth (primarily girls and queer and trans youth) and using media as it's teaching framework - both production practices as well as critical analysis through media literacy - IMJ offers "excluded and disadvantaged youth the opportunities to participate in culturally expressive activities as ways of motivating and re-engaging them in education" (61). Brown girls and brown queer and trans youth are the students which are often the most excluded in generalized comprehensive sex education curriculum and practices and IMJ works in particular with them, using expressive activities (filmmaking) to motivate and re-engage them in education.
IMJ highlights the way Cultural Studies "has been used to frame an offer of schooling to resistant and disengaged youth; and the ways in which practical and informal forms of pedagogy have supported identity-based theories of learning (57)."
While IMJ is doing work that I consider important (I also like that they ask for volunteers directly from the communities they work with as well as WOC, QWOC and TWOC), I'm left with the same question Sefton-Green asks, "can this criticality ever 'escape' its outsider or marginalized status?" (66). Can these critical approaches to educational curriculum ever be taken seriously as legitimate educational practices?
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