YOST1001: Seeing Youth, Thinking Youth: Media, Popular Media, and Scholarship

This course is an invitation to meet and engage with the field of Youth Studies. This is an introductory course to a subject you already know about – you’ve lived its content; thought about it; you may even written poems, made a video or posted a meme about this life-moment. Since you know this so well, why take a university course on it? You will leave this course better able to notice the young people around you; wonder about them and their lives; name, describe and analyze what you see and hear and read about youth. This course is about all young people. This means that we are attentive to including material about youth from diverse backgrounds, many ethnic/racial, social class, linguistic, and geographic locations or those who have a variety of physical and mental capacities, those who are “normal” and “typical” and those who are “not”. Together, we will examine myths and stereotypes about youth, where they come from, and how to deconstruct them using a variety of lenses-- social, popular and news media, young adult novels, academic articles, biographies, and more. We will do this through engaging class discussions and activities. You will learn how to use critical ethnography “in the field” where you will observe and write about youth in a variety of settings including malls, sporting events, busses, coffee shops, and music venues. We believe that an introductory college course is a space and time to reflect, analyze, and learn about what matters to you, about who you are and about the work others have done and what you want to do. In these ways, this course introduces ways of being an engaged and thoughtful student, citizen and professional, all of which require critical thinking skills and an ability to work across difference and diversity. In this course, students will develop skills in assessment, reflection/reflexivity, deconstruction, empathy and judgement; all precursors for professional decision-making in careers like youth work, policy, public health, education, communications, and other fields. We hope this course may lead to reflecting on your occupational future and vocational call.

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