Keywords

1 Introduction

Democracy and unequal opportunities to be heard appear to be highly contradictory concepts when considering that democratic actions are impossible to perform without the manifestation of the ideas, values, civic attitudes and skills that enable us to engage with others and to live together despite our differences. Hence, and in order to reduce social inequalities through educational commons, in this chapter we emphasise the need to build collective views as a way to politicise the apparently individual problems that, after the active exercise of commoning dialogue, become collective, systemic issues.

We do so by presenting the experience of one of the case studies developed by Pompeu Fabra University with young people aged between 16 and 18 years in vulnerable situations. This study was performed in observance of educational commons principles and alternative audiovisual approaches to explore the possibilities and challenges of using media to foster the emergence of commoning practices and to shape collective voices. The case studies were conducted at a non-formal education association in the Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona that works with children and young people at risk of exclusion.

The study was organised in two rounds and involved a total of 42 workshops that combined educational commons principles and alternative audiovisual approaches using a participatory audiovisual methodology. The results show that this approach not only encourages young people to act as commoners and fosters the emergence of commoning practices; but also evidences how the workshops helped the participants to reinforce their media literacy practices and embark upon the exploration of new ones. Finally, the study identifies the connections between the dimensions of educational commons and media literacy.

This chapter is divided into six sections. It begins with a theoretical exploration of the pedagogies of the commons, and of audiovisual and media literacy. It goes on to describe the content and goals of the case study and how it was carried out, and then explains in detail how the methodology was applied and how the data was collected and analysed. Finally, we discuss the results and present the conclusions.

2 Theoretical Approaches

2.1 Educational Commons Pedagogies

Educational commons are learning communities where decisions about educational processes are co-managed and co-constructed by children/young people and educators in conditions of equal power, recognising everybody’s knowledge and challenging the hegemonic structures and profit-driven logic of markets [1].

Child-centred alternative pedagogies that facilitate the process of commoning education could be viewed as tools that challenge dominant discourses and empower democracy and children’s rights. In the case study presented in this chapter, educational commons pedagogies were implemented in order to foster the emergence of commoning practices using audiovisual media, with special emphasis on the implementation of pedagogical documentation, the pedagogy of listening and project work.

The use of pedagogical documentation such as photos, evidence of work done in the sessions (brainstorming on cards, collective storyboards, etc.), drawings, notes, videos and others, allows educators and researchers to draw on pedagogical practices and reflect on them, in order to gain a deeper understanding of what was done in the sessions. It also presents an opportunity to “listen” to children/young people from a different perspective, namely the way they express themselves through their work.

Pedagogical documentation thus involves ‘thoughtful reflection and analysis’ [2], p. 6 as the process allows educators to think about their own pedagogical practices, whereby the learning is not only documented, but those documents become a part of the learning [3], p. 15. Pedagogical documentation could perhaps be viewed as “memory-enhancing material” that fosters “re-cognition” [4], p. 69 and mixes subjective and objective thoughts with individual and collective memories, thereby producing new meanings.

We could say that documentation is a kind of listening, what Sisson and Whitington [3] call ‘visible listening’, as it evidences children’s learning in progress, the path they have taken and the process they have used. Pedagogical documentation and the pedagogy of listening are thus interconnected, suggesting that listening to children is an essential means to reevaluate how they approach and understand the world.

However, mainstream educational approaches promote a narrow understanding of listening, one that is centred on the reception and comprehension of codes, and which considers that children need to learn to listen ‘better’ and promotes the idea that their voices are less of a priority or that they are not competent enough for their voices to be heard [5]. This approach turns children’s voices into “sounds” or “noisy distractions” outside of institutional agendas [6].

In contrast, the pedagogy of listening challenges this traditional view of children as incompetent at understanding complex realities and elaborate critical discourses, and instead focuses on their skills in order to build their own understanding of the world and share their feelings, ideas and interpretations through different codes. As Rinaldi [4] remarks, children have “the desire and ability to reach for the meaning of life and their own sense of self as soon as they are born” [4], p. 2 and it is the responsibility of adults to empower this ability in order to promote what Reggio Emilia calls “internal listening”, meaning the process by which children represent and recognise themselves while expressing their ideas, and which allows them to develop a more conscious vision of their world. They also get the opportunity to listen and to be listened to, to develop the empathy and capacity to accept other peoples’ opinions, to negotiate with others and to build collective worldviews.

Work projects are another core element of the educational commons methodology that share certain features with the pedagogy of listening and pedagogical documentation, and especially its focus on teachers and children as co-researchers. According to Giamminuti [21], project work is a creative co-research approach whose starting point is the observation of children’s interests and active listening to their questions. The challenge for adults is to generate other questions that can stimulate the emergence of collective research spaces. Hence, project work could be considered a subversive methodology as it turns the classic “goal-centred approach” into a “process-centred approach” that does not respond to instrumental or pre-established objectives. This does not mean that the goals that guide the learning and research process should not be clear, but that their fulfilment cannot occur at any price and to the detriment of the reflective and collective process of knowledge construction.

Having said that, the promotion of commoning practices through the implementation of child-centred alternative pedagogies breaks from hegemonic approaches, although this is not always easy or comfortable for adults [7]. This inconvenience is probably due to our adult-centric perspective of education related to age-defined categories and expressed in adult-centric dynamics and forms of social organisation that endow upon adults the ability to control what children do [8]. Such systems have been developed throughout history and were reconfigured from the economic, cultural and political dynamics that make up the capitalist mode of production, settling in social imaginaries and enabling their material and symbolic reproduction [9].

2.2 Audiovisual and Educational Commons

Participatory action research (PAR) is the starting point of the participatory audiovisual methodology (APM) implemented in the case study, since it is designed to ensure that it is the young people themselves who guide and construct the research by identifying the problems that affect them and proposing alternatives linked to change and social justice [10]. PAR thus considers young people to be active subjects within the research process and who have the critical capacity to appreciate reality and therefore produce knowledge and act as co-researchers alongside adults [10].

From the theoretical point of view, the participatory audiovisual methodology was inspired by two techniques: narrative production [11] and photovoice [12]. The former is focused on the co-construction and co-interpretation of written texts and the latter is based on capturing and interpreting realities from photographs taken by the participants themselves. In the case of narrative productions, “…the words of the participant are not recorded, but rather the way in which he/she wishes his/her vision to be read” [11], p. 19. This means that the process goes beyond the discussion of the theme and also involves collective negotiation and resignification. Similarly, from the photovoice perspective [12], it is the participants who use photography to visually frame a problem with the aim of generating horizontal, collective dialogue that will foster the emergence of collectivity, and therefore political views, that will pave the way towards possible actions of resistance.

Having said that and taking into account our goal of developing research practices that contribute to social transformation; during the case study, the participatory audiovisual methodology guided our action research practices, combining the principles of educational commons pedagogies (listening, documentation and project work) with the use of audiovisual material as a tool for the social construction of reality. Thus, alternative audiovisual approaches, which have often been used for the construction of discourses of resistance [13], are a symbolic way to validate alternative visions of being and existing in the world [14].

The incorporation of audiovisual material also encouraged the youngsters to work collaboratively in a format that they use in their daily lives. As they were already familiar with audiovisual logic and language, there was a high level of autonomy among the participants, who could take control of the situation and break traditional adult-adolescent power relations, promoting the emergence of alternative media approaches and commoning practices with a special emphasis on listening and governance as they shared, exchanged and negotiated ideas and positions in order to build and rebuild collective meanings and discourses.

2.3 Media Literacy and Alternative Media Approaches

Working with participatory audiovisual methodologies intrinsically implies accompanying young people with the process of discovering the role played by media in society, their economic structure and their political interests. This accompaniment places special emphasis on strengthening their ability to interact with media in a broader sense, and making them able to express themselves through a variety of codes and formats. Moreover, there is a focus on the need to highlight the role that beliefs, sub-conscious attitudes and emotional responses play during our interactions with media and to emphasize the importance of taking a critical attitude to one’s own knowledge and practices when it comes to media use [15].

We took the transmedia literacy approach [16], which involved a different reading of the teenagers’ media realities, focusing on what they do with the media in order to learn from it and exploiting its ability to expand their interest towards other areas and to promote their engagement. Transmedia literacy does not bypass the need to teach young people media skills, it is more a case of expanding this framework to include research into the media activities that young people engage in outside of educational institutions and trying to bring that knowledge into the classroom.

Hence, paying attention to young people’s media practices is a way to promote social equality, as their relationship with the media could condition to a large degree their possibilities for participation in civil and political life, which to a large extent silence the individual and collective voices of the most vulnerable groups.

For this reason, part of our results transversely analyse the relationship between adolescents and media by taking Ferrés and Piscitelli’s [15] approach to media literacy competences (explained in the methodology section). Even viewed from a “competence” perspective—more focused on the goals than on the process—it has a lot in common with the educational commons approach, especially regarding collectivity and self-governance, offering a global vision of the relationship between the media and its users.

3 The Case Study

The case study was carried out in a non-formal education association (third party) located in the Raval neighbourhood in the centre of Barcelona, which is characterised by the co-existence of tourists, local Catalan or Spanish residents and the more than 50% of the population that is from immigrant backgrounds. The over 40 nationalities particularly include people from Pakistan, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Morocco [17].

The third party that we worked with runs educational programmes for children in the neighbourhood aged 3–18, although our case study only worked with the oldest group (16–18 years old) who are part of an academic accompaniment programme, having been referred by the social services or their schools.

The case study was conducted in two rounds. The first was from January to June 2022 and the second was from January to March 2023. In both cases, the participatory audiovisual methodology was applied but adapted to the needs and characteristics of each group.

First round (January to June 2022). Two gender-balanced groups participated in the first round. One was made up 12 adolescents who attended the workshops on Wednesdays; while in the other group, 16 young people did likewise on Thursdays.

During the first round, 16 participatory workshops were run with each group (a total of 32) and the main theme was “the future”. Each group was presented with the challenge of producing an audiovisual piece, in the format of their choice (video, podcast, photos, etc.) and taking whatever approach to “the future” that they chose. To do this, this round was structured as follows:

First, the participants discussed their ideas of the future. They then reflected on the possibilities of media and explored the ideas of the future among the younger children at the centre. After that, they discussed what they had learned and decided on the format of their final piece, which they subsequently recorded and edited. Finally, an exhibition was held at which they shared the process and results of their work with the community.

The outcome was the creation of two audiovisual pieces (one by each group). The first group decided to create a video podcast criticising the education system entitled “They ask a lot of us and give us too little. What young people like us think about the education system”. The second group’s piece, called “Untitled Future”, was a video of a series of interviews about the obstacles young people need to overcome in order to be happy and reflections on generational differences.

Second round (January to March 2023). The second round consisted of a single group of 15 teenagers. This group also had an even balance of boys and girls. Ten participatory workshops were held on the main theme of mental health issues, which the children had chosen before the workshops began. In contrast to the previous round in which the audiovisual pieces were only shared on social networks; in this one they were part of two reports produced by the Diari de Barcelona, a newspaper produced by students from Pompeu Fabra University. The 10 workshops were structured as follows:

First, the participants discussed what they understood by mental health and what stigmas they found in society. They then talked about the different journalistic and audiovisual formats they knew and decided which ones would be best for the audiovisual pieces that they wanted to produce. After that, the pieces were produced with the help of intern students who worked for the Diari de Barcelona. Finally, the researchers organised an exhibition focused on the process and the participants’ experiences during the case study.

The outcome was the publication of two news reports; the first was entitled “The Impact of mobile phones on young people” and included two videos: one that criticises beauty standards and another that reflects on young people’s addiction to mobile phones. The second report was called “Put on my glasses: a look into bullying” and included a video of an interview with a mental health professional about bullying.

4 Methodology

This section explains how the data was collected and analysed. The subsection on data collection explains how the workshops were constructed, the pedagogies used (including the combination of educational commons and participatory audiovisual approaches) and our observation process. The subsection on data analysis explains the categories and indicators that we used for data analysis.

4.1 Data Collection

A total of 42 participatory workshops were run for data collection, 32 in the first round (16 per group) and 10 in the second round. Participant and non-participant observation were also performed in each of the workshops. These techniques (participatory workshops and observation) are explained below:

Participatory workshops. As mentioned in the theoretical framework section, the participatory audiovisual methodology practices are a combination of educational commons pedagogies and alternative media approaches. Our participatory workshops were structured into 4 phases.

  1. (1)

    Discussion of the topic. In this phase, the objective was to generate a commoning context to provide a space in which the participants could talk and be listened to, as well as freely discuss and exchange ideas about a specific topic and build collective discourses. All of this entailed a special emphasis on the pedagogy of listening and the postulates of pedagogical documentation.

The pedagogy of listening enabled us to focus on the discussions and negotiation of meaning among the participants, the aim being to be sensitive and creative enough to get their own visions to emerge. Likewise, we used materials and activities, such as drawings, collages, photographs, written texts, and so on, framed within the pedagogical documentation approach to encourage the youngsters to think about their own work. Meanwhile, pedagogical documentation allowed the educators and researchers to constantly rethink and reproduce meanings, making them increasingly more in tune with the adolescents’ needs (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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Collage on what ideas do you think exist in society about mental health? Source The authors

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  1. (2)

    Production of the discourse or narrative. Once the collective discourse had been agreed upon, the objective was to organise and structure the adolescents’ meanings and discourses for translation into an audiovisual script or storyboard. Although the pedagogy of project work is transversal throughout the whole process, it is especially important in this phase when the collective creation of the audiovisual piece begins.

The pedagogy of listening is another core element, as the adults must encourage mutual listening, the emergence of different opinions and the capacity to negotiate points of view in order to achieve consensus and make decisions about the final pieces. The pedagogy of documentation also plays an important role, for throughout the whole process the participants were encouraged to reconsider their previous thoughts and attach new meanings to their own ideas (Figs. 2 and 3).

Fig. 2
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Source The authors

Storyboarding tool.

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Fig. 3
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Source The authors

Tools to help the participants think about the format and topics that they would like to develop.

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  1. (3)

    Audiovisual production and filming. After determining the narrative structure of their pieces, in an exercise of peer governance, the participants were left to make all the decisions as to how they would turn these narrative structures into images. In this phase, they started doing everything that they had chosen to do, and put teamwork into practice as they decided on and exchanged roles, made decisions on the spot and generated a collective product. It was at this point that the elements of peer-governance, such as collective agreements and conflict resolution, emerged (Figs. 4 and 5).

    Fig. 4
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    Source The authors

    Recording during the second round.

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    Fig. 5
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    Source The authors

    Recording during the first round.

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  1. (4)

    Community outreach, in which the participants used an exhibition to present their work to the community, which included members of the association, people from the neighbourhood, educators, and so on. This gave them the chance to get their work seen and thus get their voices heard. The exhibition emphasised the process of their work more than the results, and highlighted how adults should guide these processes of collective reflection. This was a way for the teenagers to be recognised by the community and to be appreciated as creative, reflective and active people (Figs. 6 and 7).

    Fig. 6
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    Source The authors

    First round exhibition. People watching the audiovisual pieces.

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    Fig. 7
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    Source The authors

    First round exhibition. One person says whether he/she agrees or disagrees with the participants’ statements during the process.

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Participant and non-participant observation. Participant observation was carried out by the researchers who ran the workshops, and non-participant observation was done by an external researcher who did not participate in them. For the latter, an observation sheet was designed and organised into 6 categories: (1) space, in which we observed the distribution of the young people in the space; (2) discourse, in which we focused on the questions and discussions that they formulated; (3) attitudes, in which we observed how they reacted to the workshop activities; (4) participation; (5) teamwork; and (6) relationship with the adults, to observe the dynamics between the educators and researchers with the young people.

4.2 Data Analysis

In total, we analysed 42 observation sheets. Where the circumstances allowed, the workshops were also recorded and subsequently transcribed. So, a total of 22 workshop transcripts were also analysed.

In order to analyse the data, some of the core dimensions of the educational commons and their indicators were taken into account, such as children as commoners and commoning practices. In addition, in order to analyse the transversal findings connected to media literacy, we considered the six dimensions proposed by Ferrés and Piscitelli [15].

From these six dimensions (language, technology, interaction processes, production processes, ideology and values, and aesthetics) we focused on the three that emerged from the results: technology, which seeks to understand the role played by information and communication technologies in society and their possible effects, production processes to recognise factors that transform corporate productions into messages subject to the socio-economic cultures of these industries and to understand the rules and self-regulatory codes that protect and regulate the various social actors; and ideology and values, which seeks to find out how media representations structure our perception of reality and, among other things, to analyse individual and collective virtual identities, and detect stereotypes, especially in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, social class, religion, culture, disabilities, and so on, while also analysing the causes and consequences.

The following table presents the convergence of these two types of dimensions for the analysis of the results (Table 1).

Table 1 Dimensions and indicators for data analysis
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5 Results

Through the process of constructing and running the group projects in both rounds, practices could be identified that were linked to the educational commons. Also, new forms of use and appropriation of the media could be discovered, promoted and explored.

Even though it was not the original objective of the research, the indicators of media literacy appear transversally in the participants’ commoning process as they gave each other feedback and made the collective construction process horizontal and collaborative.

For this reason, the results are organised into subsections according to the core dimensions of the educational commons, and in each of them, we analyse transversally how the practices associated with the media emerge.

5.1 Media and Young People as Commoners

During the previously described rounds, we could observe how the participants constituted themselves as commoners, constructing practices associated with collectivity and awareness of social reality, based on the audiovisual creation projects.

One of the observed practices was the evolution of the young people’s relationship with the media throughout the workshops, as they talked collectively and worked on what they themselves had decided. At first, they focused more on the individual and instrumental use of the media, highlighting those aspects in which the media, and especially social networks, help them in their daily lives.

R1 asks ‘What did you learn about through the audiovisual products?’

—P4: ‘About how dresses are made’

—P3: ‘Car mechanics’

—P2: ‘About natural cosmetics, trade, Ernesto Castro’s philosophy’ (Round 1, observation of workshop 4, G1).Footnote 1

In addition, they are not interested in the more traditional media, highlighting how they tend to get their information from social media. This goes hand in hand with the fact that many of them do not express any knowledge or interest in certain current issues that are more popular in traditional media, or if they do know about them, it is because this is an obligatory requirement at school.

It is generally observed that young people do not have a close relationship with television and radio. Likewise, neither do they identify any closeness with the national current affairs commonly addressed by the media described above (Round 2, observation of workshop 4).

P1: ‘I found out about Ukraine and Russia because they gave me a history assignment at school, so I watched videos from El País and The Guardian.’ (Round 1, observation of workshop 4, G1).

However, when digging deeper into the role of the media in society, the young people seem very aware of the way it is used to raise awareness of certain issues, showing an understanding of the role of information and communication technologies and even their effects. They are also aware of the risks involved, as they do not think that everything that gets shown in the media is true.

R1: ‘Do you agree that audiovisual products can raise awareness?’

—P5: ‘Yes, very much. For example, when you talk about taboo subjects, it’s not so taboo any more, so it becomes normalised’ (Round 1, transcript of workshop 5, G1).

R1: ‘Last week we were talking about the function of audiovisual products. What do you think they are for?’

—P1: ‘To get to know different versions of realities’.

—P2: ‘To make you believe lies, for example, those anti-vaccine videos that said that Covid didn’t exist’ (Round 1, transcript of workshop 5, G1).

This shows that although these young people have a good understanding of media-related practices and to a certain extent express awareness of other possible uses and even view these alternative approaches to the media as necessary, they do not necessarily have the experience of using them for more reflective and socially-aware purposes.

They also mistrust certain media contents, as reflected in the previous quote. Hence the relationship between adolescents and the media is full of contradictions such as, for example, how when they make instrumental use of media, they are very aware of the different kinds of content they are exposed to in their daily lives and a variety of possible media uses.

This leads us to believe that they are probably not capable enough of making more reflective use of the media, and it is only instrumental use that is normalised and widespread among their peers.

In this context, the participatory audiovisual methodology encouraged the young people to experience making more reflective use of the media. Moreover, with the educational commons component, this reflective use also took place collectively and from a critical perspective, which helped to develop new ways of relating to the media.

From the moment the audiovisual work began, the participants had the space and the tools to discuss issues collectively and make their views more complex. Initially, in both rounds, despite exchanging opinions as a group, the interventions and ideas tended to come from highly individualistic views marked by a very neoliberal vision. This occurred both in the first round on the future, and in the second round on mental health; for example, when they were asked to choose a picture (from a number of photos) that illustrates their perspective on each topic, they expressed ideas like these:

P2: ‘My future step by step, I drew a family, study, look for a job in nursing or a company, earn money and have an iPhone. To always be happy’ (Round 1, transcript of workshop 1, G2).

P3: ‘Only you matter, okay, it doesn’t matter what other people say about you, what they say, those criticisms, it’s only you’.

P8: ‘But you also need the support of other people’ (Round 2, transcript of workshop 2).

Although the aim of the proposed activities was to generate a collective dynamic, the participants tended to intervene with individual ideas. It was not possible to generate a conversation based on other people’s ideas.

Following the introduction of audiovisual material, they began to express themselves from a collective, community perspective. For example, in the first round, they were able to build a collective critical discourse around the future that focused on the deficiencies of the education system. Similarly, in the second round, they were able to build a social approach to problems in relation to mental health. In both cases, they discussed issues that they are currently experiencing or know about.

P4: ‘Well, I do, about the education system, when it comes to studying, looking for a job... And about the Raval neighbourhood, why everything is easier here, for studying…’

P5: ‘I think that... once you finish high school you don’t know what to do. I think there should be someone to tell you what to do. For example, I’m studying health emergencies and I didn’t know it existed and I like it. The thing is, you don’t know what to study, because basically you don’t know what’s out there’ (Round 1, transcript of workshop 5, G1).

P7: ‘The issue I like is that of minors; minors who are not accompanied by an adult who migrate and come without papers... What strikes me about that is what they feel when they arrive here’.

P13: ‘It’s interesting. It’s a great umbrella for mental health’ (Round 2, transcript of workshop 4).

This shows that these young people are interested in social issues and are able to express their opinions about them with a special sense of social justice. But they approach them from their own experiences, which is why we can observe their disaffection and lack of interest in current issues defined by the political and media agenda as set according to adult-centric patterns.

On the other hand, creating audiovisual pieces led to the complexification of their views when it came to organising the production, choosing who to interview, or deciding where to record and how, which also implied a deeper reflection process than at first.

This is directly related to the ideological dimension described by Ferrés and Piscitelli [15], as they construct knowledge and practices around the use of communication tools. They question the different perspectives of the problem they are working on, identify and challenge stereotypes and define realities, while also thinking about the audience that was going to consume their audiovisual products in order to generate as much influence as they could and transmit messages that could help to transform society.

In round 1, we observed how the adolescents, when talking about the podcast that criticises the education system, considered putting themselves in the position of a young person who had gone through the experience of paying for their education alone.

P10 talks about the opportunities in the education system, an adult, a young person and the host, ‘the adult could be someone from the UPF itself. Hopefully, someone can speak about their experience of paying for their studies etc.’ (Round 1, observation of workshop 13, G1).

In round 2, the approach was made more complex by talking about the different perspectives of bullying, but not only including people who have suffered bullying but also people who have perpetuated it. Emphasis was also placed on the inclusion of an expert to validate what they were doing.

P7 intervenes by taking P6’s words, expanding the explanation of the topic and addressing ideas that had emerged about what to do in the podcast (survey, debate, expert interview, experience of being a bully and experience of being a victim of bullying). Bullying is raised as a central theme, associated with situations of racism and depression (Round 2, observation of workshop 5).

This shows how collective discussion and teamwork enable young people to explore different perspectives that they did not necessarily consider at the beginning of the process. Audiovisual production, based on their own practices, knowledge and interests, is shown to be a key process that promotes more profound critical reflection, favouring the construction of social awareness. This occurs through the practical exercise of self-organisation, contrasting perspectives and questioning the status quo, making young people commoners through collective work with the media.

5.2 Media and Commoning Practices

Although the previous section showed the process of collective construction of reflections and discourses among young people, the construction processes of other elements could also be observed to be associated with collective practices, such as group interaction and self-management.

In relation to group interaction, we identified a relevant transformation of practices throughout the audiovisual creation process. Initially, we observed how the participants focused on their own activities, generally preferring individual spaces to group ones, showing major difficulties with the development of conversation and collective debate. Likewise, we identified dynamics that tended to be competitive, with associations that were mainly based on previous affinities. One example occurred when playing the game of musical chairs adapted to the commonsFootnote 2 in which, despite the community sense of the game, competition between genders could be observed:

P1: ‘The girls did what they wanted’

P8: ‘We were more cooperative than you, okay?’

P1: ‘They didn’t want to adapt. We boys can’t do the same’.

P4: ‘Yes, we did a lot of things much better than you because you were fighting for the chair’ (Round 2, transcript of workshop 1).

Once the process of audiovisual creation had begun, we identified the young people’s knowledge and practices related to the generation of audiovisual content, which is commonly used for entertainment and socialisation. Some of these practices are defined by Ferrés and Piscitelli [15] as competences in the technology dimension (specifically, those related to their ability to adapt technological tools to the communicative objectives set by the project group, broadening and deepening collaborative practices).

P12 explains: ‘We are going to start by recording the space, then the introduction, faces of different people, then a voice with the questions, a young person and an adult, they answer only once and then the advice, show the older people and then the young people, like a collage and zoom in on the advice. At the end, there is a question for reflection by those who watched the video’. (Round 1, observation of workshop 13, G2).

There are discussions about how the podcasts work: for example, whether to invite people or not, and if so, who. They take into consideration the ages of the people to be invited and the possible things they might do (Round 1, observation of workshop 12, G1).

By working from a common language for the construction of the audiovisual piece, we observed the development and/or empowerment of their capacities to interact at a group level, thus promoting cooperation between peers. Linking this to the production dimension [15], we observe the presence of practices such as the selection of significant messages and the search for new meanings, based on collaborative work.

They are happy, they seem comfortable working in groups and with us. They laugh, make jokes, and at the same time they are very connected with the objective of the activity (Round 1, observation of workshop 11, G2).

The TikTok group refers to the choice of ‘mobile phone addiction’ as a theme, seeing the situation as a cross-cutting issue (Round 2, observation of workshop 5).

The Podcast group has divided the roles between them, between who interviews, who takes photographs and who records (Round 2, observation of workshop 7).

The process of transformation of group dynamics, which considers the capacity for collective and cooperative creation, is encouraged by the construction of the audiovisual project from their interests and motivations. The emergence of individual and group creativity and the capacity for self-management do not suddenly emerge in a generalised manner. Although we identified young people with capacities associated with the construction and expression of ideas or decision-making, a large part of them developed and/or strengthened these progressively throughout the creative process.

The TikTok group maintains the discussion and organisation of their project, P4 can be seen actively participating in delivering ideas, as can P7. Both maintain active participation, much more than previously seen (Round 2, observation of workshop 8).

This stronger group self-management by the participants is not only related to the creation of the audiovisual piece but also to their relationships with the adult moderators of the space. The participation of adults (R1, R2 and E1) as facilitators of group dynamics and not as direct interveners is fundamental for the promotion of such self-management, as it generates tools that will foster the collective construction of new knowledge. This occurs from a facilitating role, reinforcing ideas, asking questions and clearing up doubts.

They start to laugh while they speak, R1 and R2 moderate, they remember the ideas to start choosing and why (Round 1, observation of workshop 11, G2).

Greater participation by the girls is identified. The two boys in the group do not further develop their ideas with regard to what is raised in the conversation. E1 keeps her distance, staying on the sidelines of both groups (Round 2, observation of workshop 5)

This reveals the different components of the participants’ experiences during the project. In the workshop, being a relational space, various elements of collective creativity are combined, including their prior knowledge, their practices during the process of audiovisual creation and their capacity to create non-adult centric spaces.

6 Conclusions

As Anyiwo et al. [18] mention, when it comes to action research and media education with young people, our starting point is the idea of them as valuable subjects in the construction of media content and in the discussion of media issues, as well as in the questioning of social structures. In both rounds, we could see how the participants formed a shared vision of the world inspired by their different experiences and, at the same time, we could observe how working together encouraged them to question different aspects of themselves and their context.

This goes hand in hand with the educational commons, which states that children should manage their own learning autonomously and that adults should be facilitators of this [19]. By combining the educational commons with media practices, it is assumed that young people already have some of these practices that emerge during the process of generating the audiovisual piece, which are thus further enhanced and deepened, while new ones are built through discussion and collective work. At the same time, these practices also progressively generate collectivity in the group, with collective work being not only a means but also an end.

Based on the transmedia literacy approach, we took advantage of the media practices that the participants already had in order to use the media in a reflexive and collective way at the same time. This enabled them to enhance and construct, above all, the practices associated with the dimensions of technology, production and ideology mentioned by Ferrés and Piscitelli [15].

The educational commons thus broaden the horizon of media education by making peer-governance a central tool for young people to acquire certain skills and practices when using media. This means that by constructing and proposing media content from a critical perspective they get to experience teamwork, dialogue, exchange of opinions, community building, and so on. At the same time, the educational commons paradigm also feeds on media education by using the media as a tool to apply peer-governance, thus generating a symbiotic relationship between the two concepts.

On the one hand, this symbiotic relationship enables young people to develop in an environment that they know and handle well and that, above all, interests them. Audiovisual media are the everyday environment of the youth of today and it is there that narratives and information about the issues that concern them converge. On the other hand, working as a community makes them build from a collective point of view, identifying themselves as a social group and working as equals.

This process that these young people went through is closely related to civic engagement, which might not have been explicitly generated, but the results show that the process of constructing the audiovisual piece promoted an initial approach to it. In both the first round, linked to criticising the education system, and in the second round, to the vision of mental health, they went from an individual vision to one linked to social engagement and to questioning the messages that are generally heard in society.

From the whole process across both rounds, the audiovisual realm could be viewed as a space of interest and, therefore, of the confluence of diverse perspectives and experiences. It is a place that facilitates collective practices and the emergence of questions about what is established by a system that is, among many things, adult-centric. As Carpentier [20] mentions, this type of media is closer to young people, and offers spaces where citizenship and the right to communication are built. Therefore, given the lack of space in traditional media, it is important to find a space for young people in alternative media where their voices can be heard as communities that are capable of contributing to the transformation of dominant logics and practices.