Digital Media Production of Refugee-Background Youth: A Scoping Review

Amir Michalovich

doi:10.3390/journalmedia2010003

Abstract

Reviews of research have provided insights into the digital media production practices of youth in and out of school. Although such practices hold promise for the language and literacy education of refugee-background youth, no review has yet integrated findings across studies and different digital media production practices to explore this promise. This scoping review summarizes and discusses the key findings from research on varied types of digital media produced specifically by refugee-background youth in and out of school. It situates digital media production practices in the context of this diverse population, which experiences forced migration, and highlights 5 main themes from findings in 42 reviewed articles. Digital media production afforded refugee-background youth: (1) Ownership of representations across time and space; (2) opportunity to expand, strengthen, or maintain social networks; (3) identity work; (4) visibility and engagement with audiences; and (5) communication and embodied learning through multimodal literacies.

Highlights

The ubiquity of digital media consumption and production in youth’s lives prompted the growth of education research that explores how learners access, analyze, evaluate, and produce media in multiple modes of communication, broadly defined as media literacy (Aufderheide 1993)
The current study provides a scoping review of research, relevant for language and literacy researchers and educators, that goes beyond one form of digital media production
Future studies could focus on how meanings are expressed using the affordances of different modes, how youth’s work is taken up by audiences, how their work circulates in online or offline spaces, the ethical challenges raised by refugee-background youth’s digital media production, and the actual learning processes that are involved in producing their digital media as compared to an exclusive focus on artifacts. This scoping review identified five prominent, interlocking, and mutually inclusive thematic patterns that synthesize the affordances of digital media production for refugeebackground youth from findings across 42 peer-reviewed journal articles relevant for language and literacy educators and researchers

Summary

Introduction

The ubiquity of digital media consumption and production in youth’s lives prompted the growth of education research that explores how learners access, analyze, evaluate, and produce media in multiple modes of communication, broadly defined as media literacy (Aufderheide 1993) The purpose of this scoping review is to situate scholarship relevant for language and literacy researchers and educators concerning digital media production in the context of its use by refugee-background youth, a diverse population with different language and literacy needs, challenges, and resources. This study analyzes the main themes of findings highlighted by peer-reviewed journal articles examining the digital media production of refugee-background youth It maps available knowledge and gaps in research so that researchers and educators may gain a better understanding of the affordances of digital multimodal literacy practices for this population of learners and judiciously advance this area of inquiry. The study is guided by the following research question: What are the key findings across peer-reviewed articles pertaining to the affordances of digital media production by refugee-background youth?

Methods

Results

Conclusion