A Review of Research Connecting Digital Storytelling,Photovoice,and Civic Engagement

Defining Youth

To frame this review, we first identify some assumptions about the very idea of youth. As the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2013) notes, the term youth stresses a pivotal and developmentally explosive transitional period between the dependent stage of childhood and full independence of adulthood. Importantly, the concept of youth, or childhood, is culturally situated and varies a great deal across the globe. Many of the studies we review use the terms youth and children interchangeably and refer primarily to those who are under the age of 18 years. In the American lexicon, youth, children, young people, and young adults often operate as synonyms and include those who are not yet of “legal” adult age on the whole. In many other international contexts youth extends far beyond the age of 18 years. For the purposes of this review we assume the American definition of youth.

A nuanced definition of youth shifts the focus from biology and chronological age to the situated nature of youth and childhood that varies by community of practice, political perspective, or other socially learned frameworks. These factors underscore the diversity of any social group. In her work on youth activism and organizing, Bishop (2015) “recognizes the power of young people not as ‘kids’ to be controlled and ‘children’ to be quieted but as growing adults who possess the capacity to be leaders in the present” (p. 2). However, as James (2007) points out, creating the conditions or spaces for youth to confront issues that they have a stake in “is not simply or only about letting children speak” (p. 262). It is also about understanding the unique racial, ethnic, and cultural perspective that youth provide about their social worlds. Given the complexity of identity, it is not possible to write about a particular social group as if they speak as one (Matthews & Limb, 1999). Unfortunately, adults often overlook the assets and capacities that youth possess, and instead identify youth as the cause of community deterioration. Thus, youth, especially African American, Latinx, Native American, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer), and refugees fleeing their oppressive home countries, feel they have little voice (Valaitis, 2005) in the social, economic, or political life of their communities in the United States (Cammarota & Fine, 2008) or in other transnational contexts (e.g., Blundell, 2016). Their voices are underrepresented in dominant narratives about identity informed by White, middle-class heterosexual norms. Dominant narratives limit who belongs to a community—who matters—and ideas about citizenship. Rodriguez (2017) suggests that taking on a “youth lens” allows researchers to challenge the limiting histories linked with the psychological term (and its attendant raced, classed, and gendered baggage) adolescent. Doing so entails exploring the different ways in which young people are always coming to know in contexts that shape their political and cultural realities and the social positions they occupy.

Citizenship and the Pursuit of Socially Just Practices

Researchers suggest that digital storytelling and photovoice are participatory methods that have the potential to promote critical dialogue and to bring about change through developing civically engaged practices of advocacy and activism. However, Wood (2016) also urges educators and youth workers to assess how social interactions among young people, in this case Maori youth, and adults shape the experiences of both “inclusion and exclusion, and indeed the experience of being a young citizen” (p. 313). This is especially true when youth and young adults enter contested spaces where their citizenship is challenged or when community leaders resist their proposals for change. So what does it mean for youth to practice citizenship and democracy?

For Richards-Schuster and Dobbie (2011), “Youth civic action is the process by which young people engage in the public issues and institutions that impact their lives” (p. 235). Westheimer and Kahne (2004) observe that ideas about democracy vary and their research helps us see that ideas about citizenship and civic engagement can exist along a continuum. Civic engagement can include forms of personal responsibility or forms of participatory citizenship in which individuals “actively participate in the civic affairs and the social life of the local community” (p. 241), such as educating the community about a judicial system that can remedy persistent inequality in housing. Westheimer and Kahne (2004) add that justice-oriented citizens are not only committed to collected works of the community but also to analyzing and critiquing social issues and injustice as a form of civic engagement (see also Bowman, 2011).

Educators and youth workers have aligned their collaborations with youth with activist traditions that seek to produce justice-oriented citizens who participate in public policy advocacy, community organizing, and organizational decision making (Derr, Chawla, Mintzer, Cushing, & Van Vliet, 2013). For the purposes of clarity, we define socially just practices in studies with youth and actions that (a) ensure that everyone, particularly youth, has a voice in critical decisions about the equitable distribution of resources and that no one is excluded; (b) make certain that people have access to what they need to lead full lives, personally, socially, politically, and economically (Chambers & Gopaul, 2010); and as Johnston-Goodstar (2013) points out (c) recognize “alternative perspectives, values, and ways of being and democratically engaging in the world” (p. 316). Altogether, such a view of social justice promotes inclusion, values an asset-based approach to education, and underscores the equitable distribution of material, spatial, and emotional resources.

However, justice is also more than the equitable distribution of resources. Researchers claim that justice must also reclaim difference and give voice to alternative histories and cultures that have been erased. For that matter socially just practices can take the form of resistance that refuses to perpetuate a system one has experienced as oppressive and violent, whether through racism or the systematic removal of Indigenous people from their land (e.g., Tuck & Yang, 2014). Acknowledging refusal as a form of engagement (Tuck, 2009), indeed as civic responsibility, reframes the way educators and youth workers might think about success and outcomes in participatory work with youth (e.g., Burke, Greene, & McKenna, 2017). That is, naming and reclaiming traditions and culture without changing policies can still be a powerful form of civic engagement. This is also true when youth critique cultural exclusion (Wood, 2016). Within an international context, the global migration of people fleeing their homelands brings to mind the historically contested meanings of citizenship, civic engagement, and social justice. As young refugees and their families cross borders, they must find ways to develop a sense of belonging in nation states that resist their presence and deny their right to citizenship. To possess rights of citizenship is a difficult, oftentimes impossible path. However, Salazar (2010) explains that the challenge immigrant youth and their families face is to find ways to practice citizenship by using storytelling to develop collective capacity and counternarratives of oppression.

Organization of the Review

In what follows, we explain our method for compiling the data sources for this review. We then describe the ways researchers across fields in different socioeconomic and transnational contexts have sought to use digital storytelling and photovoice to foster youth civic engagement, the focus of the first question motivating this review. In doing so, we also call attention to the relational nature of this kind of work that positions youth as coresearchers and experts. Of importance are the spaces that foster young people’s engagement as civic actors, the quality of relationships between youth and adults, and the ways they negotiate power to ensure that decisions and actions remain in the hands of youth. We are especially concerned with youth from nondominant groups whose families continually bear witness to the effects of neoliberal reforms. With fewer safety nets, persistent inequality in health care, employment, housing, education, and an erosion of public spaces, youth and their families must find ways to navigate the sociopolitical structures that determine the extent to which a community has access to resources it needs to flourish. We also consider both the potential outcomes of an education that seeks to foster youths’ engagement in their communities and how it is that educators and youth workers can gauge youths’ developing conceptions of identity, literacy, citizenship, and social justice. Analyzing the potential outcomes of this work with young people informs the second question motivating this review: What are the conditions that enable youth to use what they learn to become active citizens? Finally, we discuss the implications of ongoing efforts in fields such as social work, urban planning, education, and health that seek to empower youth to become socially responsible citizens by creating school–community–university partnerships.

Method

This literature review is primarily based on electronic searches for journal articles and books focused on four target words or categories of words using our library’s search engine, which gave us access to EBSCO, ERIC, Academic Search Premier, Education Full Text, and Education Index: (a) critical youth empowerment; (b) digital storytelling and youth civic engagement; (c) photovoice and youth civic engagement; and (d) youth participatory action research and activism. We searched for peer-reviewed articles in English conducted primarily not only in the United States but also in Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia between 1995 and 2016. We limited the search to the past 20 years, a period that reflects a growing use of digital tools and photovoice in studies that examine the intersections between work on youth identity and civic engagement. This search produced a total of 781 articles (430 focusing on digital storytelling and 351 on photovoice). After reading the abstracts of each of these articles, we narrowed our search further by only including studies that met the following four criteria: (a) they focused primarily on youths’ participation in a school or community project using digital storytelling and/or photovoice; (b) they described a project that sought to engage underrepresented youth or youth in low-income neighborhoods at each phase of a given project in efforts to create change as coresearchers; (c) they documented youth using images to chronicle their research and elicit responses from peers and adults; and (d) they provided information about the number of young people participating in the study, demographic information, the context of the study, research questions, methodology for collecting and analyzing data, and both conclusions and implications. Our aim was to be as inclusive as possible. All the studies we reviewed were conducted within the context of a school or community project using digital storytelling and/or photovoice. None of the studies we identified were sponsored by faith-based institutions such as churches or mosques.

After narrowing our search based on these four criteria, we were left with a total of 152 peer-reviewed articles (39 studies focusing on digital storytelling and 113 on photovoice). The first author read all 152 articles and made decisions about which of these articles to include in the review based on whether or not they met these four criteria—especially studies in which youth served as coresearchers—and their relevance. In addition, we conducted supplementary searches in the reference lists of published reviews, books, and articles and used Google Scholar to locate relevant research that we might have overlooked. These were not qualitatively different from those we identified using the library database. In the end, 82 studies fulfilled our criteria, 27 focusing on digital storytelling and 55 studies using photovoice. Eighty-two percent of the studies using digital storytelling or photovoice were conducted in the United States. We identified a smaller number of studies conducted in Canada (7), Australia (4), New Zealand (3), the United Kingdom (3), and Africa (1).

Not all studies defined equity, social justice, citizenship, or civic engagement consistently or in the ways we have defined these terms above. Therefore, the goals of a given project varied and complicate efforts to generalize across studies and even identify relevant work. For example, some studies of youth-centered teaching and research using media in the title of their publication did not appear in our search, even if the authors of these studies connected media (e.g., video) to civic engagement (e.g., Johnston-Goodstar & Sethi, 2013; Morrell, 2004, 2007; Morrell et al., 2013). This may be attributed to the ways in which texts are catalogued and whether or not publishers and authors include relevant search terms that could be identified using our criteria. In fact, 20% of the studies that we include in the two attached supplemental tables (available in the online version of the article) appeared in reference lists and Google Scholar that did not appear in our search of EBSCO, ERIC, Academic Search Premier, Education Full Text, and Education Index. The supplemental tables include information about the source of a given study (i.e., the discipline and whether it was initiated by researchers in a university, school, or the community), age and background of participating youth, method of analyzing data, and the outcomes the researchers describe (e.g., youth empowerment based on youths’ evolving sense of confidence, leadership, and actions youth took as a result of their participation). In constructing this review, we acknowledge that our review is neither complete nor unchanging given the evolving nature of media and studies of civic engagement in different sociocultural and transnational contexts.

Importantly, we distinguish our approach to civic engagement and social responsibility from research that documents youths’ attitudes toward voting and youths’ voting patterns, a focus of research in many studies included in the recent launch of CivicLEADS—Civic Learning, Engagement, and Action Data Sharing. We did not include commentaries or conceptual pieces (e.g., Cook, 2015) or research that did not fulfill our four criteria. One example is Mirra, Filipiak, and Garcia’s (2015) reflective essay in which the authors describe their work with youth and explain how their ideas about research changed when honoring the voices of youth. In this case, youth challenged their ideas about what knowledge is, who produces knowledge, and for whom. Thus, the authors’ aim in this article was to explain how YPAR changed their approach to teaching.

Results

We return now to the two research questions motivating this review: (a) How and in what ways do digital storytelling and photovoice lead to socially just ideas and actions; and in our effort to build on and extend the work in CYE (b) What can we learn about the conditions in and out of school that enable youth to transform what they learn about themselves and the needs of others into action as citizens? To address these questions, analyses will focus on the 27 studies we identified documenting the use of digital storytelling and 55 studies using photovoice as methods that provide youth with opportunities to tell their stories and act on their commitments to civic engagement and change. We summarize the studies in the two supplemental tables (available in the online version of the article).

The average age of youth participating in the projects using digital storytelling and photovoice fell in the range of 13 to 17 years. Our search intended to locate studies of youth across methodologies in different disciplinary fields, but the studies we have identified show that researchers across fields relied on a set of common methods to gauge youth’s understanding of their role as coresearchers. These methods included semistructured interviews with youth, youths’ writing, maps, media artifacts, focus groups, written reflections, observation, and field notes. These studies relied on descriptive analyses to connect the uses of digital storytelling and photovoice to civic engagement, voice, and empowerment; youths’ perceptions of their own capacities for building community and influencing policy changes; identity formation; and learning in schools and in after school programs. Just three studies used mixed methods (i.e., pre–post interviews and focus groups) to quantify the effects of different interventions on youth perceptions of self-efficacy, agency, connections to community, and a commitment to community engagement (DeGenerro, 2008; Nicotera, 2008; Pritzker et al., 2012). That researchers have relied on qualitative methods, especially narrative research (e.g., Leitch, 2008), is not surprising given the emphasis on hearing youth voices and youths’ interpretations of their worlds based on image and text. This is an epistemological choice that grounds what researchers using photovoice and digital narratives choose to make visible in youth’s everyday lives, often aiming for “particularity,” not “generalizability” (Charmaraman, 2013).

In 30% of the studies reviewed, researchers brought to light young people’s contributions to making a visible change in a given community. In 21% of the studies, researchers documented youths’ ability to make connections with the communities they served. Twelve percent of studies described how youth used stories to define themselves in order to challenge stereotypes that tended to pathologize low-income minority youth of color and youth whose families had arrived in the United States as refugees. Finally, 3% of researchers observed that youth benefited from opportunities to produce knowledge by learning new skills—not just consuming knowledge—to evaluate the assets and challenges in the neighborhoods they occupy and developed skills to promote political efficacy and civic engagement.

Researchers and youth workers, however, also conclude that digital storytelling and photovoice alone cannot challenge the inequality, displacement and dispossession, or barriers to success that youth document in moving toward socially just ideas or action. Instead, researchers consistently describe the role that community-based organizations committed to social justice play in framing the process of using digital storytelling and photovoice to identify assets and problems in a community. The underlying assumption in the studies we reviewed is that critically analyzing the source of social issues such as poverty and the unequal distribution of resources in schools will prompt social action. Researchers also understood the need to provide young adults with models of other young people who planned and designed changes in their community (Duncan-Andrade, 2006).

Our review found that the relational nature of participatory research using digital storytelling and photovoice underscores the collaborative nature of research. But developing relationships in work that embraces social justice and action is an ongoing process of negotiating power to ensure that the work of YPAR and CYE places decisions in the hands of youth. Researchers (e.g., Goldman, Booker, & McDermott, 2008) stress both the context of producing digital narratives (e.g., collaboration, debate, discussion, support) that leads youth to recognizing their own capacity for inquiry and social activism and expectations of presenting their work to the public as conditions promoting both leadership and agency (i.e., the confidence to speak up). They also describe frustration youth had with each other, with the process, and tensions between adults and youth, thus pointing to the challenges of doing this kind of work (Wilson et al., 2007).

In what follows, we address the first question motivating this review: How and in what ways do digital storytelling, photovoice, and other youth-engaged research lead to socially just ideas and actions? In doing so, we focus on themes of digital storytelling and researchers’ emphasis on the process of making meaning using multiple modalities such as image, music, and text; the extent to which young people use storytelling to reframe identity; and the ways their stories form the ground for activism. We also discuss researchers’ understanding of how digital storytelling provides a means for reimagining education. We then turn to photovoice as a means for examining youths’ lived experiences and take up the argument that the affordances of photovoice and the relational nature of this work have the potential to promote civic engagement.

Discussion

The studies we reviewed highlight the ways that young people use digital stories and photographic images to identify social problems in the United States and transnational contexts, influence change, and serve as a means for increasing youth participation in civic life. These studies also urge educators and youth workers to pay greater attention to how social interactions shape experiences and the conditions that foster youths’ ability to take ownership of decisions that affect them.

Grasping the relational nature of work that centers the voices of youth as researchers is the focus of the second question motivating our review: What can we learn about the conditions in and out of school that enable youth to transform what they learn about themselves and the needs of others into action as citizens? In what follows, we draw on the extant research to provide greater specificity and clarity to explain the conditions that foster young people’s investments in their communities and civic engagement, building on the work Jennings et al. (2006) have done in the area of CYE.

Specifically, we outline five guiding principles for fostering CYE that have emerged from our review: (a) conceptualize the places where youth use the tools of digital storytelling and photovoice as sources of growth; (b) share decision making in ways that encourage youth to uncover their own capacities for creating meaningful change; (c) provide opportunities for reflection at every stage of work; (d) help youth unpack and understand the sociopolitical contexts of community engagement and change that contribute to inequality; and (e) encourage youth to interact strategically with community activists. For descriptive purposes, we have created categories, which, at times, overlap, in order to highlight themes that touch on the ways researchers understand space in and out of school, interpret what it means to promote authentic learning, foreground the sociopolitical contexts of education, and define empowerment.

Furthermore, we acknowledge that not all studies we have reviewed address each of these guiding principles. Instead, we offer a forward-looking set of ideas that provide a way to think about how educators and youth workers have explained the conditions that foster youth engagement, agency, and civic responsibility, as well as challenges to these conditions. Wilson et al. (2007) explain the conditions under which desired outcomes are likely to occur or have been shown to occur depends on a range of contextual factors: motivation, program goals, time management, the extent to which adults are willing and able to modify curriculum, group behavior, and the ability to guide critical dialogue.

Implications

Researchers in the United States, as well as in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Africa, suggest that digital storytelling and photovoice can encourage youth to see themselves as active citizens. Work that fosters such an identity can lead young people to pursue socially just ideas and actions. This is evident when adults provide meaningful contexts in safe spaces that allow youth time for reflection; share power and place decision making in the hands of youth; examine the sociopolitical contexts that serve as barriers to youths’ health and well-being; and foster intergenerational conversations that maintain the dignity of youth voices. Digital storytelling and photovoice, in particular, have a unique potential to facilitate youths’ opportunities for expressing their views to audiences who actively listen to their voices in spaces that matter and who are committed to responding appropriately. As Delgado (2015) points out in citing Lundy (2007), the values underlying the use of digital storytelling and photovoice are also consistent with the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child (see also Thomson, 2008). Indeed, youth can provide a source of knowledge and expertise that influence personal and community action (Wang et al., 2000).

Within the context of culturally sustaining and responsive relationships, digital storytelling and photovoice have the potential to foster youths’ civic engagement (Halsall & Forneris, 2016). Interactions among youth and adults provide models for the kind of culturally sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2017) work that stresses the literate practices of youth as “resources and assets to honor, explore, and extend” (p. 4). We witness the work at the Llano Grande Center where the pathways to “rich and varied practices” are embedded in local cultural traditions. Youth forge relationships that solidify their commitment to robust practices that sustain their heritage. In a study not included in our review, Indigenous youth affirm the connection to history when they join their elders in critiquing efforts to assimilate underrepresented peoples “into normative forms of knowing and disciplinary knowledge” (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016, p. 175). Through these intergenerational conversations, youth reveal their understanding of sovereignty and collectivity (e.g., Tuck, 2009). Intergenerational studies, then, reflect a commitment to maintaining culture in an effort to advance social justice and equity within the lived realities of culture and history (Beucher, 2016). This includes embracing difference as a source of strength and recognizes alternative ways of being in the world (Davis, 2011; Fletcher & Mullett, 2016; Johnston-Goodstar, 2013). Such a conclusion points to the conditions in and out of school that enable youth to transform what they learn about themselves and the needs of others into action as citizens.

However, there is much we can understand about learning as a collaborative process involving adult educators working with youth. Education is a transactional experience that is, or should be, reciprocal, respectful, and responsive to the assets that youth possess and that educators can learn from. Writing about her forays into a group of youth “power writers” in New York City 10 years ago, Winn (2016) posits the value of long-term relationships and seeks to measure, through narrative accounts, the impact of a program whose effects challenge objective, positivist accounts of development and change. Taking the long view in longitudinal studies is as important as “articulat[ing] social goals, near-term outcomes, and the underlying logic of the change process” (Stern & Seifert, 2009, p. 5). However, it would be important to study further how young people see themselves as evolving civic agents and the ways collaborative research in their communities changes their own life paths as engaged citizens committed to the health and well-being of where they live.

Researchers point out that teachers, teacher educators, and scholars working in racially and economically diverse contexts have long been concerned with their students’ limited interest in civics (Pellegrino et al., 2016). The result is what some might call a civic engagement gap between African American and Latinx youth and their generally Whiter and wealthier peers (Levinson, 2012; Marcelo, Lopez, & Kirby, 2007). However, such a perspective overlooks the extent to which youth of color have been victims of an education debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006) and struggle against the effects of economic and spatial disadvantage (Sharkey, 2013). Therefore, one could argue that the civic engagement gap may be reframed as “a civic opportunity gap” (Mirra, Morrell, Cain, Scorza, & Ford, 2013). Without opportunities, they may very well be reluctant to be assertive in the public sphere because they fear their voices won’t be heard (Derr et al., 2013).

Westheimer and Kahne (2004) are right to ask, “What kind of citizens are the schools trying to shape” (p. 263)? As educators interested in schooling’s civic purposes, they maintain that it is not enough to argue that democratic values are as important as traditional academic priorities. We must also ask, what kind of democratic values? What political and ideological interests are embedded in or attached to varied conceptions of citizenship that researchers describe? There are the very tangible results that illustrate youths’ contributions to redesigning a park or participating in the marketing and distribution of nutritious foods. But how do capacity building and collective efficacy fit into conceptions of justice, advocacy, and activism? For that matter, how can we as a research community measure agency and empowerment beyond the inferences that researchers have drawn from observation? In addition, how can we as educators and youth workers ensure that youth have access to places where they can practice democracy and the kinds of spaces where they can imagine alternative futures where they are no longer silenced or dispossessed? Unfortunately, education reform and economic development have ignored these questions almost entirely.

CYE and YPAR offer an epistemological perspective that locates knowledge in youth. Digital narratives and photovoice highlight the same perspectives but neither one can ensure participation, the quality of relationships among youth, families, practitioners, or community members, much less the ongoing pursuit of justice through collective efforts. Thus, research can begin to test some of the assumptions that researchers make about the approaches or conditions that can foster civic engagement. For example, what is the relationship between reflection and agency as a measure of youths’ contributions to policy changes or long term planning in a community? What factors have predictive value in how and to what extent youth become invested in their neighborhoods? Despite the accumulated body of research that connects digital storytelling, photovoice, and civic engagement, it will be important to measure and document changes in the attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and practices of young people, educators, and community members over time. Drawing out the differences and similarities between digital storytelling and photovoice can also yield a valuable discussion about the affordances of each method for fostering critical literacy, serving as a medium for building community, participating in advocacy and activism in order to create change, and becoming leaders.

Researchers suggest that designing learning spaces that foster youth civic engagement and participatory research cannot be limited to school but expanded to include the spaces that connect identity to historical, cultural, and linguistic traditions that affirm youth and their capacities as learners. Bang and Vossoughi (2016) ask critical questions in the design of learning spaces that acknowledge what matters, to whom at a given moment, and toward what ends. As researchers and youth workers, our own pathways for learning can be guided by efforts to understand more fully ways to construct authentic opportunities for youth to engage with community activists, leaders, and decision makers (Lee & Soep, 2016).

The studies we have reviewed suggest that education can serve as a site of possibility and cultivate in children and young adults an ethic of action, democracy, dialogue, and positive interdependency. If this is true, we can better understand the ways voice intersects with power in the context of race, class, gender, faith, sexuality, and age. As Matthews and Limb (1999) point out, inviting youth to design the spaces that most affect them is “a valued end in itself” and paves the way for youth to practice democracy. Perhaps just as important is that researchers can also understand the effects of silencing young people in matters that concern them.

Supplemental Material