The Civic Imagination Project

“We talked about… trying to find a balance between everybody having a seat at the table in creating news versus trusted news sources. What does that mean and what might that [future] look like?” In the comment she made during my civic imagination and the future of journalism and media literacy session in Boise, Idaho, the participant quoted above summarized a key tension between participatory and inclusive media practices and a commitment to professional and trusted news curation. In many ways, this tension defined the entire “Media Literacy and Civic Engagement in the Digital Age” event organized by the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and the BSU Idaho Media Initiative at Boise State University on April 11, 2018.

In June of 2013 we ran a world-building workshop with the Muslim Youth Group at the Islamic Center of Southern California. This was the very first such workshop that we facilitated, collaborating with an existing community of young people and their mentors to imagine a fantastical world where anything is possible and then to tell stories within that world. Students worked in groups to flesh out discrete narratives under their shared world umbrella, and then to make short videos telling their stories in the style of a news segments so that they could all be collected and tied together as a Fantasy Newscast...