Curating the self : media literacy and identity in digital video production by young learners

Digital video production in schools is often theorised, researched and written about in two ways: either as a part of media studies practice or as a technological innovation, bringing new, "creative", digital tools into the curriculum. Using frameworks for analysis derived from new literacy studies and theories of identity, this study proposes that digital video production by young learners is worthy of investigation as a new media form in its own right. Fieldwork was carried out in two schools among children taking part in video projects on themes of self-representation and identity; evidence was collected in the form of production notes, video interviews and the media texts themselves. The findings suggest that this new media literacy practice can be metaphorically conceived as a form of "curatorship" in the uses of multimodal editing tools for the intertextual organisation of digital media assets and their subsequent exhibition. The study begins by describing the development of the central research question, namely: "What forms and organising structures are used by young learners when negotiating and representing identity in digital video production?" This formulation is set out in theoretical, pedagogical and self-representational contexts before a subsequent chapter reviews some key contributions in the field to date in both formal and informal sites of learning. A transdisciplinary set of frameworks drawn from socio-cultural and media literacy theory is used alongside an adapted form of multimodal analysis to investigate a new set of skills and dispositions around identity, memory and voice, which, as suggested, merge in the concept of the producer as curator. The discussion leads to a set of proposals for teaching and learning with digital video in the primary school arising from a description of the key selfrepresentational possibilities inherent in the medium and framed by the concept of "curating the self" as an essential skill and disposition in new media