Study on young people as visual culture producers: findings about the gap between the school and the youth

Abstract

This article presents the first analysed data from the research project “Youth as Visual Culture Producers: Artistic Skills and Savoir in Secondary Education” financed by the Spanish Innovation and Science Ministry (EDU2009-13712). The main aim of the project is to enquiry on the different ways and situations young people are learning to produce images and to compare the findings with what schools are offering them on the same field of knowledge. The project has various stages and this article draws out the evidences gathered by a questionnaire answered during 2010-2011 by 786 teenagers, ages 15 to 19, from schools all around Spain. The two principal findings presented throughout the text are: on one hand, a group of evidences that corroborate the existence of a gap between the knowledge schools teach and that young people acquires outside school; and, on the other hand, the lack of consciousness young people present regarding the role of media as a source for their audiovisual production.