Abstract
Youth reliance on social media platforms as their main source of media consumption presents an opportunity to increase their cultural knowledge through engaging them in digital storytelling of their village oral history. This paper examines the results of a pilot study conducted in Palestinian villages with youth who were trained on local interviewing village elders to create digital stories. The process was designed in a collaborative game-like environment to obtain maximum engagement, thus creating a state of flow as stipulated by Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory. The surveys conducted at the beginning and end of the project, combined with ethnographic action research, demonstrate that it is possible for the youths’ level of interest in the creation of the digital stories attains a state of flow when the process can be immersive and engaging such that a multi-phase plan that includes skilling then challenges at each phase – not unlike a game.
Youth in Palestine represent a very large segment of society and are considered one of the highest percentages of youth in the Arab World (Mirkin, 2013) and although living under occupation, Palestinian youth have access to digital media and are one of the highest consumers of social media in the Arab world (Arab Social Media Report, 2015). The nature of this consumption, however, is often either entertainment via directly re-versioned content from western countries where youth are often yearning to immigrate, or social in the form of sharing photos and jokes, or political: reflecting on the situation under occupation and the high level of unemployment (Asthana and Havandjian, 2016; Herrera, 2014; Mirkin, 2013). Thus, the re-versioned westerner content seems to function as light entertainment and a form of escapism from the daily hardships of occupation, while the politically charged messages are a reflection of the situation on the ground and way to use social media for digital activism. For example, it is not unusual when browsing the social media profile of a Palestinian youth to see a combination of Westerner memes, viral videos and influencers’ posts, all re-versioned and translated to Arabic without any modification, and at the same time on the same page an equal amount of local political content that calls for actions on the streets or condemns the occupation or the local Palestinian Authority for lack of action. As a result, youths’ consumption and sharing of content is always oscillating between the light international entertainment and the highly politically charged local content. The result is a very low consumption of local cultural content. This lack of exposure to cultural content on social media among Palestinian youth creates an estrangement and apathy towards their heritage and ultimately leads to an identity crisis (Asthana and Havandjian, 2016; Hammack, 2008, 2010). This paper, ethnographic in nature, presents the findings of a participatory action research project that aims to engage youth in documenting their oral history through digital storytelling in a collaborative game-like environment. Digital storytelling is an increasingly popular form of participatory media that provides the perfect platform for the workshop-based process of participatory media engagement (Dreher, 2012; Lambert, 2009; Salazar, 2010).
The Kan Yama Kan (KYK) project is partly research, partly educational youth engagement work, and partly an experimental digital media project. The authors of this paper are also the creators of the project. The value in this is that applying participatory action research method (Tacchi et al., 2003), the authors were able to observe the youth’s engagement and modify the project to improve this engagement based on the feedback and the observations of each phase. The unique position of the authors, as filmmakers of Palestinian heritage allowed for a closer relationship with the youth, but also as combined with their role as the creators of the projects, and outside not living in Palestine, allowed for an effective mix of being able to bond with the youth and observe their group dynamics but also were able to give instructions as the trainers and create a game-like competitive environment. The project relies on the flow theory that a state of total absorption, ‘flow’, can be attained in a game-like process where the youth engaged are highly skilled and the challenge matches their skill set (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, 1990, 2014). In order to create a game-like environment with the aim of engaging Palestinian youth in cultural content. KYM was devised in the form of a multi-phase competition where the youth are trained on a skill and then given game-like tasks to perform. The end game is to capture the best cultural stories. The youth were trained gradually and ultimately skilled to interview Palestinian elders from their villages. In order to fulfil the flow theory requirements, the process was split into three stages: game-like competition to join, training, and, finally, game-like competition to capture stories. Stage 1 was a call to engage in the KYK Project, which was initially promoted on the Sharek Youth Forum FB page. Sharek Youth Forum is a very respected local Palestinian youth organization with branches across Palestine (Sharek Youth Forum, 2017) and a very active social media presence (Sharek Youth Forum, 2017).
KYK project was initiated by the researcher and supported by Sharek both in endorsement but also in actual logistical support on the ground by (1) promoting the initial call up, (2) engaging their youth volunteers in the pre-selection process, (3) providing valuable logistic support to conduct the workshops, (4) providing access to the Youth Village in partnership with the UNFPA. The youth village is a purpose-built village on a hill near the village of Kafr Ni’meh and allowed us to conduct the workshop in a remote environment where we could present the training and the challenges without any external distractions, including no Wi-Fi access to the youth (Youth Village, 2017). This partnership with Sharek and the sponsorship of the workshops by the UNFPSA gave initial legitimacy to the project, which was very important, but also ensured that the project was supervised by a local reputable organization which in turn encouraged parents to send their children to participate in the workshop which included a sleep-over. As one female participant put it: ‘My Parents are very conservative and if this was not run by Sharek they would have never let me go’. The process required a small time investment from youth through an online application form and required the youth to write a statement on their reasons for wanting to join. Once the youth registered they went through a face-to-face interview with the aim of increasing the perceived challenge and preparing the youth for the commitment of the training (see online Appendix 1 form). Once in the village the youth were required to commit to a 3-day workshop where they would also spend the night. The idea of the youth staying overnight was especially effective in that we were able to (1) take the youth out of their environment to eliminate any possibilities of distraction, (2) create a controlled environment so the youth can stay in-game and not rely on external help to perform the tasks, and (3) allow for bonding among the youth which improved collaboration and ultimately engagement. The result of the observation showed that this has been a positive choice. Furthermore, the percentage of females applying, and selected were higher than those of males so the overnight stay didn’t have any negative effect on the females’ participation in the project. The program of the workshop was also designed in such a way as to include multi-level training, followed by competitive tasks so as to create flow. The final stage of the training required the youth to engage in recording cultural content via interviewing elders and asking them specific cultural stories from the old times. Those stories were then edited and shared on a Facebook closed group for all the applicants to engage with online as a further step to decide on the best stories. This approach of Gamification of the workshop was essential to engage the youth in the process of recording, editing, publishing and consuming cultural content. The multi-level design of skill and workshop creates a game-like environment that makes the experience more engaging (Deterding et al., 2011). The use of social media to publish this cultural content once it was edited was purposely chosen because the social media platforms are (1) the youth’s preferred media platform, (2) can serve to preserve this cultural heritage, and (3) can facilitate a cultural conversation among the youth to enhance engagement in this cultural content (Kalay et al., 2007).
The paper’s value is in the ethnographic nature of documenting the process of up-skilling and then executing tasks that required engagement with cultural content. The premise behind the project, and the resulting findings, is to examine whether this multi-phased game-like approach can generate engagement and interest among youth in cultural content. To measure this interest, the youth were surveyed before and after the completion of the project on their interest in specific cultural topics. Our approach to the research relied on participatory action research and ethnographic observation (Tacchi et al., 2003). The combination of the survey results and the ethnographic observations correlated positively and showed that the youth had engaged with cultural content during the phases of the KYK project and were significantly more interested after the completion of the project in relation to their initial interest in cultural content both in terms of creation and viewing on digital platforms. Furthermore, the youth were in a state of flow during the training and while performing the challenges at all phases of the process, including the collaborative group tasks that required the interviewing of elders to record their stories and then editing it and publishing on digital platforms. This state of flow was observed through each phase of the project with qualitative data to support our findings, including feedback from participants who specifically mentioned that the gaming of the process had a direct effect on their level of engagement. In addition to the feedback obtained from the youth in pre- and post-project interviews. Because of the controlled environment of being in the village, the researchers were able to monitor the youth’s attention and motivation to perform the task, even when the tasks constantly increased in difficulty, the motivation of the youth correlated positively. They showed increased motivation with every increased level of difficulty, thus they were constantly in a state of flow.
The Kan Yama Kan Project
Kan Yama Kan – once upon a time in Arabic language – is a multi-phased project aimed at engaging youth in cultural content through collaborative digital storytelling. The project is split into four phases: (1) recruiting youth, (2) engaging them in cultural dialogue, (3) training them on interviewing elders using mobile phones, and finally (4) a collaborative game-like process to engage youth in completing the task of recording stories from the past from elders across Palestinian villages. Palestinian villages have a rich history of oral storytelling. Villagers and especially the elders carry a valuable unwritten history about village origins, unique cooking styles, music, jokes, ‘Kharareef’ (yarns or urban myths), and micro-cultural habits. These stories are very specific to each village, therefore documenting them is important to the preservation of village histories, national identity and furthermore is an important exchange between the elders of a community and the younger generation providing social value (Thompson, 2017). Recording these stories is a monumental task but also essential for preserving the micro-cultures of various regions and localities. This project will train youth across selected Palestinian villages on video recording and interview techniques and then engage them in the process of interviewing Palestinian elders in their respective villages. The main aim of the project is to educate Palestinian youth about their culture via engaging them in the process of documenting Palestinian oral history and creating digital stories based on the collected interviews. The project also doubles as participatory action research in which the researcher is participating in the creative process while at the same time ethnographically observing the process (Tacchi et al., 2003) and the output, in this case, youth engagement. The research also involved conducting surveys before and after the commencement of the fieldwork measuring the youth’s interest in cultural content. This will be combined with ethnographic observation of the interview process and the animation creation to measure the state of flow while working on the project.
The first phase of the project was conducted via a social media campaign that resulted in 20,000 views, in addition, there was considerable media attention in Palestine with two major TV stations and five national radio stations interviewing the creator of the project. The combination of the Sharek Youth forum and the media exposure meant wide coverage of the call up and resulted in 369 applicants from across Palestine filling in the online application form, which required some time investment and an initial level of commitment, see online Appendix 1, application form. The second phase was a face-to-face interview with potential participants with the aim of shortlisting participants. The purpose of this process is: (1) to select youth that can be committed to the workshop and follow-up road trip across Palestinian villages, (2) to ensure gender balance and that the youth chosen are also geographically distributed, and (3) also, as part of creating a game-like environment, to serve as a level 1 entry into the project and give the youth selected a sense of advancement. Twenty youth were selected for the workshop. Those youth were given a survey at the start of the project to access their interest in making and watching stories from pre-1948 Palestine and another survey at the end of the last challenge phase to assess any changes in their interest – see online Appendix 2 for details of the two surveys. The third level of this project was the 3 days of training at the Youth village. The training was structured in such a way that youth were trained on an aspect of the project and then had to perform a challenge that utilized these newly acquired skills – see online Appendix 3 for a sample of challenges, and skills given in the training program slides, for example, youth were first trained on the nature of the stories needed and then they were asked to research and create a short story relating to the story recording training. Then they were trained on the use of mobile phones to interview (again they were asked to interview each other). Finally, participants were trained on the art of interviewing elders and then were sent to the village to interview elders. This served as the completion of this phase and the formation of teams for the fourth phase. The fourth phase included giving each team a task to interview elders from their own villages and nearby villages. Participants were told that once these interviews were conducted they would be put on social media, with the best interviews winning prizes and being turned into animated stories in collaboration with the youth who did the interviews under the mentorship of the trainers, giving the youth a final level of training and challenging tasks to perform. This further enforced the multi-level competition game-like environment. Finally, participants were surveyed again to assess their cultural interest – see online Appendix 2 for the second survey. The results of both surveys, and interview and workshop observations are discussed in detail in the Results section.
Literature review
The youth in Palestine take a bleak view of their situation and often look outward for relief (ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller, 2017; Norman, 2009). This outward look and the nature of content consumed leaves little room for local cultural content about the positive values of their culture. Stories from Palestinian tradition and culture that are an essential part in forming youth cultural identity are lost in the noise of digital media (Asthana and Havandjian, 2016). The fact that youth are more likely to engage on social media and are often reluctant to engage in conversation with their elders means that the tradition of oral storytelling is fast becoming extinct, which has further compounded the problem. The increased use of social media among Palestinian youth compounded with their lack of interest in digital cultural content or oral storytelling risks a loss of very valuable cultural identity. It also increases the risk of those youth’s radicalization as the cultural void provides an opening for extremists to develop their message (Thompson, 2011). Digital media penetration among youth in Palestine is very high, similar to elsewhere in the world, but is also magnified in Palestine because most youth have a restriction of movement imposed by the nature of occupation and Israel’s restriction of travel in Palestine and abroad (Arab Social Media Report, 2015). This means that digital content in Palestine provides an outlet for youth to access the outside world and decreases their consumption and interest in local cultural content (Hammack, 2010). The Kan Yama Kan project aims at directing youth’s attention to the importance of cultural content and specifically stories from pre-1948 Palestine that can empower those youth and help enrich their feeling of belonging and knowledge about their heritage. The importance of engaging youth with cultural content on digital platforms ensures that the youth are familiar with the content creation and delivery method, which will enhance their experience and allows for less up-skilling and more challenge because the medium is familiar. The term digital storytelling originated from a collaboration between Joe Lambert and Dana Atchley and is rooted in grassroots activism (Lambert, 2009; Robin, 2006). The term is somewhat expanded now to also include any digital stories that are published on the internet, but what makes digital storytelling especially effective with youth is that it empowers them to tell stories to a larger audience online using digital authoring technologies that are increasingly available to a growing number of people (Davis and Weinshenker, 2012: 47).
The project relies on the flow theory to generate engagement in the process of first creating cultural digital content in a collaborative environment and then consuming this content online on social media platforms. Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1982, 1990, 2014) argues, as the pillars of the flow theory, that in order for participants to achieve a state of flow or total absorption in any task, the task needs to be challenging but also the participants need to be skilled enough to perform the task. This equation of high skill and difficult challenges becomes even more effective when the process is game-like and performed collaboratively (Admiraal et al., 2011; Sa et al., 2007; Kaye, 2016). In order to place emphasis on the collaborative aspect of those challenges, participants were asked to team-up in groups after the completion of each up-skilling phase and then they were given the challenge. The importance of teamwork and collaborative group challenges is that the social interaction within a cooperative offline and online environment is enjoyable and therefore can increase the performance of the challenges and thus contribute to the state of flow (Kaye, 2016). The use of a multi-phased approach allows the researchers to constantly change the level of challenge and the level of activity based on the participants feedback, thus increasing the level of engagement by preserving the state of flow for participants (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, 2002: 90). Furthermore, measurement of this state of flow can be achieved through a combination of observations, interviews and questionnaires; the field observations are especially effective if the research is conducted as participatory action research (Csikszentmihalyi and Nakamura, 1989; Hearn et al., 2009).
Research method
The idea behind the Kan Yama Kan project is multi-phased skilling and challenges aimed at engaging youth in cultural content and at the same time observing youth engagement by measuring their flow in the process through observation and self-assessment of the interest in each phase (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, 2002: 94). This process requires the researchers to first be part of the process of skilling and providing challenges, in order to properly observe youth engagement in the challenges, and secondly to constantly modify the level of up-skilling and the level of challenge to ensure high skill, high challenge to satisfy the flow theory requirement. Working with youth in a capacity as a researcher, project curator and educator meant that the research aspect of this project needed to be Participatory Action Research (Clark et al., 2009; Hearn et al., 2009; Yin, 2011) in nature. Furthermore, working on a community-based project in collaboration with local youth institutions provided a unique opportunity to ethnographically document the process while at the same time be able to constantly adjust the training and challenges to ensure maximum engagement. Participatory Action Research allows for this dual role and is a good fit for projects that are based offline but also have an element of new media or digital presence, making Kan Yama Kan perfectly suited to this research method (Bradbury, 2015; Tacchi, 2006). Our approach to the research is to use ethnographic action research or EAR (Tacchi et al., 2003) which allows for a combination of observations and surveys to document the process while at the same time giving the research the flexibility to influence the project and participate by constantly monitoring each milestone and, based on observations, be able to modify the project for stronger impact. This research approach is also used for a combination of offline/online observation (Tacchi et al., 2009; Pace, 2004). The Ethnographic Action Research User’s Handbook (Tacchi, 2006; Tacchi et al., 2003) states that: ‘Ethnography fits very well with action research because it is all about understanding how your particular community and your particular project work together’. This fits perfectly with the Kan Yama Kan project and the objectives of the research to measure engagement of participants in the project in relation to individuals and the community at large.
The observation took two forms: offline on the ground during the intensive 3-day multi-phase workshop, and online on the FB Group afterwards. This online/offline combination was essential because some of the challenges involved actual physical tasks while others required the publishing of information on the FB page (Barab et al., 2004; Denzin and Lincoln, 2008). We opted to use a Facebook Closed Group for online communication with the youth because the closed group allowed for privacy and the data were not distorted by external interaction. In addition, FB is still the most popular platform used by youth in Palestine (Arab Social Media Report, 2015; ASDA'A Burson-Marsteller, 2017; Salem, 2017). We also conducted all of our communication, online and offline, in the Arabic language as it is still the language used most by Arab Youth (Salem, 2017).
It is important to note here that an essential aspect of this research is that the research relied on local expertise in partnering with Sharek Youth Forum (Salazar, 2010; Tacchi, 2006) as the local sponsor. They provided all of the logistics and were also part of the planning, observation and modification process that was used to constantly revise the challenges based on the youth’s feedback. This local expertise consultation was important in ensuring that the project and the researcher were not looked at as outsiders and the process was a cooperative participatory interaction between the researcher and the youth (Delaney, 1998; Ezeh, 2003; Stanton, 2014) In addition to this, we conducted an anonymous survey at the beginning of the project and after the conclusion of the last challenge to measure any change in the interest in cultural content after the engagement in a collaborative digital creation process (Admiraal et al., 2011). The conclusion that the collaborative game-like environment would create flow and thus elevate interest in the content and the process was mainly derived from ethnographic observations and the survey was only used as a validation method because of the small size of the sample (Denscombe, 2014). The participatory nature of this research and working with local organizations and the community both in the capacity as researchers, educators and project initiators provide an insight into the engagement of Palestinian youth with a project that is designed in a multi-phase skill and challenge structure to be able to both accommodate for ethnographic action research (Tacchi et al., 2003) and also create a game-like collaborative environment (Admiraal et al., 2011) inducive of engaging the youth by improving the chance that they attain a state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975).
Results
Engaging youth in cultural content in Palestine and measuring the effectiveness of the method through participatory action research was not an easy task. To start with the idea of using a game-like environment meant that the project needed to be devised in a non-traditional way that risked alienating some of the youth or, at worst, the youth organizations that we were partnering with. Furthermore, the researchers had to play two parts: being the creators of the project and at the same time, participants, observers and ethnographically documenting the process. Luckily, the concept of dividing the Kan Yama Kan project into phases with each phase split into a skill and a challenge proved to be both beneficial for increasing engagement and, at the same time, for measuring this engagement. The use of the words: ‘tahadi’ and ‘warsha’, meaning challenge and workshop, were carefully chosen to make the process game-like. This was received well by both the youth organization that sponsored the project and by the participants. With many participants even specifically commenting on the use of the word ‘challenge’ and how that improved their interest and encouraged more engagement. Out of 119 comments on the FB closed group, there were 61 comments that specifically used the word ‘tahadi’ which means challenge and was the exact word used in the project to signify each stage. Here are some examples of the comments by participants on the Facebook closed group: The activities were presented in phases in an excellent way starting with little challenges adding more as we go. I liked that when [the trainer] trained us in something we applied it immediately. I loved that tasks were called ‘challenges’; also it was great that we were in groups, which allowed us to exchange opinions and bounce back on each other, even collaborate with other groups. The choice of conducting the activity on the youth village was excellent because we had no Internet and were able to talk at night and dedicate time for the project. Amazing experience in all its details. The challenges we did broke all boundaries, this is only the beginning and we intend to continue with more challenges The best thing I love was the challenges, first time I take a training with challenges as part of it. It also had a feeling of positive competition among the groups. Especially after each skilling we take a challenge to apply straight away so we don’t forget it.
The level of engagement increased with every challenge: the harder the challenge the more engagement was observed among participants, with the final challenge taking participants to the surrounding villages to interview elders after an intensive skilling phase on the art of interviewing elders. The participants were taken by bus to three villages and were asked to enter the villages, try to find elders, and interview them as trained. The participants started the challenge feeling empowered with knowledge and were, in fact, able to find elders and apply the techniques learned, resulting in 14 interviews conducted by the six groups, an average of 2.3 elders interviewed by each group.
Many commented about how fulfilled they felt by this last challenge of the project, indicating a high level of flow with comments like: ‘I didn’t even feel the time pass and the night approach us’, ‘I could have done this all night’, ‘Best feeling ever’, Best day of my life’, ‘I know what you mean about the value of interviewing elders’ and many asking to stay longer. The content became a reward itself with many commenting on how interested they were in the answers of the elders. One of the repeated telling observations of this challenge was that at the end of each of the three village trips at least one of the groups wanted to stay behind to do more shooting and had to be found when they passed the deadline, with one group even offering to pay for a taxi and follow behind alone to the next village. Furthermore, the groups were competitive in a game-like manner in that they were friendly with other groups but also trying to the find the best elders first. One of the groups even resorted to persuading locals to drive them to elders before other groups reached them.
Another important finding in this research is related to the choice of topic of the documentary in this case the Kan Yama Kan project is addressing an issue that is both important to the Palestinian society but also to the creator of the project. Early on we noted that this participatory action research project was created with two main goals: one, to engage youth in cultural content and two, to determine whether gaming the process would increase this engagement. The researchers found that the youth’s interest in cultural content had markedly increased. This was confirmed with the interviews and surveys the youth took pre and post the workshop. At the beginning of the workshop, the participants were given a survey to measure their interest in the subject, and then given another survey after completing the workshop to measure any change in interest in cultural events. See online Appendix 2 for two surveys. With the 23 participants surveyed twice, first at the beginning of the project before any of the challenges and then after all the challenges were completed, the results, even though the sample was very small, were aligned with the observations during the challenges and showed that youth’s interest in cultural content, and specifically in cultural stories told by Palestinian elders, had significantly increased. There were 21 valid results.
The surveys asked participants to: (1) rate their interest in cultural stories from pre-1948 Palestine, (2) rate their interest in stories told by Palestinian elders, and (3) rate their interest in watching cultural stories on Social Media. The first survey also included an extra question of whether they had watched any similar stories on social media before. The surveys were intentionally designed with simple multiple-choice answers with each question having four possible answers: ‘Very Interested,’ ‘Interested,’ ‘Interested, but only a little,’ and ‘Not Interested at all’. This ensured that participants were able to answer the question using a common linguistic measure to avoid ambiguity (Fink, 2002; Fowler, 1995). The surveys were anonymous to ensure honest answers, as the participants would have been embarrassed to state a lack of interest when they were here to be trained on the subject matter. This simple uniform measure with direct and only a minimum number of questions allowed us to measure the change in interest before and after the workshop but was only used as supplementary data for the purposes of comparison with the observations during the project and online on the Facebook closed group immediately after the conclusion of the last challenge (Schensul et al., 1999).
The results of the first pre-challenge surveys showed that less than 50% of participants had been previously exposed to cultural content on social media, only 38% said they were interested (or very interested) in watching cultural content on Social Media platforms. In relation to activity that includes interviewing elders or physically seeking cultural content only 29% of participants indicated that they are not interested in interviewing elders or only a little interested. In addition, 19% of participants indicated that they were not interested or had very little interest in cultural content in general. This percentage of participants not interested, while not high, is still significant considering those participants are the top selected out of those who applied, and have been selected based on their interest in the project and cultural stories. The results of the second survey administered, also anonymously, after the completion of all challenges showed a significant increase in interest with 100% of participants indicating that they are interested or very interested in stories from pre-1948 Palestine compared to 81% in the first survey. In fact, 76% were ‘very interested’ as appose to only 43% before the beginning of the challenges. In relation to interest in watching cultural content on social media also 100% indicated they were now either interested or very interested in watching cultural content on social media, a very significant increase from 38% before the challenges. See online Appendix 4 for more details about the survey results. And while the data relied on a small sample of 23 participants with 21 valid entries, this data combined with the online and offline observations provides a significant indication that participants’ levels of interest in cultural content creation and consumption on social media platforms had significantly increased.
Discussion
The challenge of engaging Palestinian youth in cultural content, especially non-political and primarily oral histories of daily life of pre-1948 Palestine was always going to be a difficult challenge. This is because youth, generally, are primarily concerned with the difficulties of their daily life, unemployment, occupation, and relationships with the other sex. Youth in Palestine, like any other youth around the world, spend a lot of time on their mobile phone, but most of that time is communicating with friends, or participating in political campaigns against the occupation or looking outwards at the western culture with aspirations to travel abroad and/or improve their economical situation (Asthana and Havandjian, 2016; Herrera, 2014; Mirkin, 2013). This naturally puts the question of culture and identity at the lowest level of interest for youth and provides a significant challenge in engaging youth with cultural content offline and online on social media (Arab Social Media Report, 2015; ASDA'A Burson-Marsteller, 2017).
I had initially decided to take on this participatory action research, because of my convection that this lack of exposure to cultural content would have direct negative impact on their self-worth and pride in their heritage. I therefore was extremely pleased to see that the project, not only engaged the youth in cultural content, but also created a collaborative environment that continues well past this project. Both as the creator of the project and also as the researcher, I found that the process was very effective. Even though, I constantly tweaked the process at each phase based on the previous phase observations, the tweaks were minimal, and the initial premise held through and showed positive results. It’s also worth noting that gaming the process was not only stimulating and engaging for the youth but also for the trainers. The challenge with Kan Yama Kan project was that naturally the idea of documenting non-political stories from pre-1948 was at the bottom of Palestinian youth interest, as evident from early discussions with the 400 applicants who were interviewed initially to short-list the participants, with many commenting that there are more important things to document, for example some of the typical responses were: ‘why not document the occupation’, ‘I want to ask elders about how we lost Palestine’, ‘isn’t it more important to ask them about the war’ and so forth. Even after selecting the participants who showed the most interest in the project, during the first phase which was aimed at defining the nature of the question to ask elders, most participants found it ‘unnatural’ to not include political questions in the interviews with some voicing concern that it would be difficult to talk about pre-1948 with elders where what happened in 1948 really is key to the Palestinian narrative. However, the change observed through the subsequent phases and challenges showed a steady but gradual increase in interest among participants in cultural non-political content, so much so that at the beginning of the last challenge—going to the villages—many participants commented about the importance of those micro stories about daily life with some commenting directly after the interview on how enriching and interesting they found the stories told by elders about how life was then. One participant commented: ‘It’s amazing that there is so much I didn’t know about my culture, I feel like I was [blind] and just saw the light’.
It is important to note here that part of this interest might be temporary and a result of group dynamics, but equally important to note is that from the survey results and the observations of the researcher there is a clearer understanding of the importance of those cultural stories among participants. Furthermore, all participants commented that they learnt new cultural information via engaging with the content of the other interviews that were put online on the Facebook closed group by changing the context of those videos from just interviews with elders to actual stories from the past that need to be preserved. It’s important to note here that while the Facebook group creates a gathering place where the youth are able to interact and reflect, this communication is a form of contact that is virtual and thus, alone, will not create strong bonds (Pratt, 1991; Veronis et al., 2018; Weenig, 1993). Also, worth noting here that the offline workshops helped strengthen the ties of the online Facebook group and the conversation. As an example of those conversations: one participant described the process as follows: ‘I feel like those stories are like treasures and we are on a treasure hunt’. Needless to say, this project and its participatory action research is only a small experiment that relies on a small sample of data; the value of this research is not in the quantitative surveys but in the combination of online and offline observations by the researcher who was in the field observing and also participating in the project in such a way that the observations were of the youth in their own local environment participating in a project specifically devised to generate engagement in cultural content (Salazar, 2010; Tacchi, 2006). The key observation in this project is directly related to the nature of the process being game-like with skills and challenges. Also, the way participants related positively to the word ‘challenge’ and showed increased engagement with each challenge cumulating with the final village visits to interview elders where participants showed high levels of engagement and total absorption. Another observation is that this state of flow continued long after the conclusion of the training. In this case, the participants used the FB closed group to coordinate further interviews with elders around their area and all across Palestine. For example, in a Facebook post on the closed group, one of the participants who lives in Jerusalem posts about an elder in Hebron has interesting stories and should be interviewed; in the post the participant is calling on participants in Hebron to pick up the task as it is hard for the poster to reach Hebron from Jerusalem. This post and other shows continued engagement and interest in collaboration online using social media platforms and offline by travelling to interview elders, which is a high level of engagement showing time and physical effort investment. More research needs to be done with larger numbers of participants both in Palestine and elsewhere around the world. The model of skill and challenge can be further tested online by continuing the process of giving the participants tasks that they need to perform then asking them to upload the results online, this would serve as both content for other participants to engage with and at the same time as an extra level in the game.
Conclusion
This paper concludes that by slightly tweaking the process of creating cultural content, we were able to alter the nature of the project to a game-like process by including micro challenges preceded by up-skilling. This game-like process increased the youth’s engagement in creating cultural content in a collaborative environment. The elevated levels of engagement, evident in the observations of youth especially when they were performing the highest level most difficult task of going to villages and interviewing elders, showed that this method produced flow and that while the youth were performing the task they showed total absorption in the task. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the project, the participants continued to show interest in the process and in the content and in fact were still collaborating online on the next challenge. It is important to note here that participants at the beginning of the project were naturally reluctant to create cultural content with many noting that it might be more worthwhile to create political content about the occupation. Those same participants at the end of the last challenge were very motivated to create cultural content that is not political in nature and in fact many commented about how difficult the task is, akin to finding treasure: cultural treasure. And that while the challenge is difficult they now feel empowered to take on the challenge and motivated to continue after the conclusion of the project. This paper in no way concludes the research on youth engagement in cultural content, but rather is a small participatory action research experiment based on the observations of the researcher. These observations suggest that by introducing a gaming aspect to the environment youth showed a high level of engagement and total flow in the last challenge. This experiment could serve as a starting point for a larger project that could be run across more geographical areas, perhaps online using similar methods of skills/challenges to engage youth in culture and other topics they otherwise would not be interested in; the importance of such methods being that the digital sphere could be utilized to engage youth in important content that they would not otherwise casually be interested in creating or consuming.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.