Youth Media Workshop
Empowering economically diverse African-American youth from public schools to make media and social change
Inspiration Radio: Relationships That Sustain Youth
New Series Premieres on WILL-AM 580 on Monday, Sept. 1
Students in WILL’s Youth Media Workshop give listeners a fly-on-the-wall perspective of the relationships that sustain young people.
Airing in September on:
Mondays and Wednesdays: 4:45 pm and 6:45 pm
Saturdays and Sundays: 8:34 am
Students from Urbana High and Edison Middle School in Champaign spent the last school year interviewing the people closest to them, including siblings, teachers and parents. They edited those interviews into the series.
For Urbana High School student Jason Knight, the act of recording an interview was the inspiration to find out more about someone he’d known for years – his saxophone teacher.
“Media. That’s what it took to really get me to ask questions and get to really know other people and what they’re all about,” said Knight, whose interview is included in a the series.
Keri Carpenter, a journalism major at the University of Illinois who worked closely all year with the students, said the project gave the students permission to talk to adults in their community in new ways. “Jason interviewed his saxophone teacher and normally he just goes there to have his lesson for a half hour or an hour,” Carpenter said. “Asking teachers about their personal lives, and what they are doing and how they got to be where they are, lets young people connect with teachers they see every day.”
Teacher Mevanee Parmer and YMW intern Morgan Martin directed the project at Edison Middle School, and teacher Mark Foley and YMW intern Carpenter directed the project at Urbana High School.
The Youth Media Workshop started in 2000 as a program of the Street Media Center, an indigenously inspired, youth development drop-in center developed by Dr. William Patterson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who engages young people of Hip Hop generations to use media to make social change in their communities.
