‘I’ve taken confidence away from this’: The experiences and impact of moving image education with young people who require more choices,more chances

Abstract

This article provides an overview of Reel to Real, a Moving Image Education project undertaken with groups of young people who require More Choices, More Chances, the overarching policy context in Scotland which aims to provide support for those young people aged 16–19 years who have completed compulsory education but find themselves not in employment, education or training. Supported by Skills Development Scotland, Scottish Screen (now Creative Scotland) and Urban Learning Space, Reel to Real aimed to promote learning with and through digital media. The overall project evaluation was to determine the benefits of learning and preparation for work in such a project as well as the experiences of the participants. This article focuses specifically on the perceptions and experiences of the young people involved in the project in order to understand what they felt they had gained from the project and how they perceived this may have helped them as they prepare to embark on employment. Data were gathered through observation and focus group interviews with groups of young people aged 16–19 years undertaking the Reel to Real project.

More choices, more chances

To varying degrees, young people can have lives which adults frequently describe in negative terms such as ‘traumatic’ (McGregor and Mills, 2012). Provision to support significant life events such as the transition from school to work must have the capacity to respond to the complexity of factors impacting young people’s lives (e.g. family, social and economic circumstances), including intensive approaches deploying appropriately skilled teachers, lecturers or trainers. Bynner and Parsons (2002) and Blake Stevenson (2011) identify common factors among this group that can increase the risk of young people requiring additional support or more choices and more chances. McGregor and Mills (2012) believe that these lie in two areas: socio-economic factors (socio-economic status, family relationships, gender, language, cultural, ethnicity, poor achievement and desire to earn a wage) and school-related issues (school policies, pedagogies and relationships within the school). While these factors overlap and are somewhat inter-related, they include poverty, dissatisfaction with education and educational underachievement. In addition to those with low socio-economic status and those having low educational attainment, certain groups identified as being particularly at risk also include those whose life circumstances entail certain barriers to accessing opportunities, for example, care leavers, young carers, teenage parents, offenders, those with physical and mental health problems and those with complex lifestyles, such as drug and alcohol abusers. Therefore, while these young people grouped together are requiring more choices and more chances, the form and nature of their needs are by no means homogeneous (Blake Stevenson, 2011; Bynner and Parsons, 2002; Furlong, 2006;). Indeed, in order to address and support these sometimes difficult and multifarious needs, there is a requirement for co-ordinating support, time and innovative provision particularly suited to addressing and overcoming these difficulties. Provision is often undertaken by agencies whose organisational protocols and ethos can be considered as different to those of schools and local authorities, engaging in a more informal model that places an emphasis on the young person’s agenda rather than on the demands of a curriculum or examination system (see McGregor and Mills, 2012; Nind et al., 2012; Vadeboncoeur, 2006). McGregor and Mills (2012) also make reference to these noting that there are a number of reasons why children disengage from mainstream schooling, including the rigidity of school not acknowledging and responding/working with their complex and traumatic lives, the authoritarian nature of schooling and the perceived irrelevance of schooling.

The More Choices, More Chances Strategy (Scottish Executive (now Scottish Government) 2006) is the overarching policy context in Scotland which aims to provide support for those young people aged 16–19 years who find themselves not in employment, education or training. Examples of More Choices, More Chances projects typically include community-based learning centres, arts projects and programmes provided by private training agencies, commissioned by Skills Development Scotland. The strategy does not exist in isolation, however, and should be seen in light of its own subset of approaches such as Get Ready for Work and other wider initiatives such as Getting it Right for Every Child. More recently, additional provisions have been developed for what is considered to be this vulnerable group of young people including 16+ Learning Choices Policy and Practice Framework (Scottish Government, 2010) as well as a number of Activity Agreement Pilots set up with training providers and subjected to evaluation (Blake Stevens, 2011). The principal aim of these initiatives is to provide a pathway towards education or employment for those young people who are disaffected with school or have left mandatory education with little or no qualifications and for whom traditional routes to more positive destinations are not available. Young people’s engagement in these projects is voluntary, but a small amount of money is made available to participants by way of incentive.

The More Choices, More Chances Strategy stresses that action is needed over the range of children’s and young people’s services in order to ensure that those young people who have become estranged, disengaged or excluded from ‘traditional’ education and training are offered the chance to construct life courses other than those leading to unemployment, marginalised low income or leaving the labour market altogether (Bynner, 1998; Bynner and Parsons, 2002). The strategic aims of More Choices, More Chances are as follows:

• Increase retention in education and training post 16 to ensure young people move towards sustainable employment;

• Ensuring that employment, education and training are financially viable options for young people;

• Removing barriers to opportunities by providing the right support … (Blake Stevenson, 2011, executive summary)

The overarching aim of More Choices, More Chances is, therefore, to help prepare all young people in Scotland to take their place in a modern society and economy.

Challenges of supporting young people who require More Choices, More Chances

Promoting progression and positive transitions and destinations is extremely important, but there can be challenges. At the time of the introduction of the More Choices, More Chances Strategy, there were around 35,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 19 years in Scotland who were not in education, employment or training. A proportion of these would have been able to access opportunities and positive destinations such as employment, training or further education without a great deal of support. However, Skills Development Scotland statistics indicate that around 10,000 of these young people required additional support to access and sustain opportunities in the labour market and play a positive role in society through joining the Get Ready for Work programme (Blake Stevenson, 2011). Moreover, Scottish Government (2015) statistics indicate that at the 2013–2014 school-leaving point, around 8% of school leavers did not move to a positive destination; 6.5% were unemployed and seeking work, but 1.5% were unemployed and not seeking work.

In order to address the needs of these young people, Fergusson (2004) argues that effective intervention, which aims to achieve a goal of social inclusion, has to go beyond provision of a context which allows participation. In other words, it is not enough for a project such as Reel to Real simply to allow the participants to become involved; it has to be effective in breaking the vicious circle of reinforcement of aspects of identity related to being ‘different’ through low attainment and being in a different place educationally, often both physically and metaphorically, from many of their peers (Bynner, 1998). Such initiatives can allow young people who may be disadvantaged the opportunity to engage in more abstract concepts of forethought and planning than could ‘traditional’ learning (Anderson et al., 2002).

Reel to Real

The changing nature of society, with the development of new technologies and industries, the role of globalisation and so on, means that there is a need to revise and develop new learning structures which support young people in preparation for life in the twenty-first century (Scholes and Nagel, 2012). Scholes and Nagel (2012) note that there is a demand globally for innovation and creativity, with some debate on how far school can promote the required preparation. The authors point to a host of research which details evidence on the role of the arts in promoting learner success and engagement in underachieving and disengaged students. The authors make no specific claims for the Moving Image Education project beyond those for arts and media-based programmes generally (Sefton-Green, 2006).

As part of their activities within the City of Glasgow, Skills Development Scotland and its predecessor, Scottish Enterprise, have responsibility for the development of young people who are currently not in education, employment or training and who consequently require more choices and more chances. In order to fulfil this responsibility, Skills Development Scotland subcontracts training of young people to a network of Training Providers who deliver the Get Ready for Work programme (available at http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Education/skills-strategy/making-skills-work/ntp/GRfWPolicy). This programme is made up of three strands – Vocational, Personal Development, and Life-skills, with the latter aiming to engage with young people and help them discover their own abilities and raise confidence, self-esteem and self-efficacy.

In order to ensure a high quality of provision for young people, Skills Development Scotland seeks to develop the skills and abilities of trainers employed by the subcontracted providers. Following the success of previous experiences of Moving Image Education with this group, Urban Learning Space at The Lighthouse, Glasgow, applied to Scottish Screen for joint funding to set up a new initiative, Reel to Real. The purpose of this initiative was to offer training in Moving Image Education for training agency staff in the 17 providers funded by Skills Development Scotland. In addition to training trainers to provide Moving Image Education for their client groups, the initiative also aimed to create a cohort of trainers who could, in effect, become lead practitioners, able to take on the role of training colleagues. The initiative ran from May 2008 until December 2008.

The training was organised in two blocks as follows:

• Block A: 9 × input sessions for trainers at Digital Media Academy and Lighthouse Education Workshop followed by on-site workshops at training provider premises.

• Block B: 9 × input sessions for a second group of trainers at Digital Media Academy and Lighthouse Education Workshop followed by on-site workshops at training provider premises.

Each block consisted of three phases: Learn, in which trainers and mentors engaged with the basics of film; Teach, in which trainers and mentors practised, developed and built on what they had learned during the Learn phase; and Embed, in which trainers used Moving Image Education with their young people, both supported by mentors and on their own.

Research design and methodology

Informal contexts invite researchers to explore non-academic and academic outcomes and the relationships between them by analysing the social origins of inequality, to consider non-academic outcomes (in this case ‘confidence’) and explore how they might lead to better ‘conventional’ outcomes and, finally, to evaluate the programme in terms of its distinct non-academic outcomes in its own right (Ladwig, 2010: 121–122).

The focus on non-academic outcomes in this article is not to eschew those outcomes that could be considered as academic (such as competence in filming, editing, acting or animation) but to follow a logic that for this group of young people the value of the project does not lie in exploring how non-academic outcomes might lead to greater academic attainment as this would relate to the formal context of schooling which has not proven successful for the young people and which implies that academic learning is more important than successful attainment of non-academic outcomes. Rather, this article starts from a premise that the relationship between academic and non-academic outcomes is one of at least equivalence and not hierarchical. Consequently, whatever the young people meant by ‘confidence’ was reinforced by, and perhaps born out of, their lived experiences of competence and attainment in the knowledge, skills and dispositions required to analyse and create moving images. To paraphrase Ladwig’s argument,

… the extent to which students [engage with film and moving images] can be understood as a manifestation of their commitment to the [cultural] concerns … [and that] … an individual sense of efficacy would be necessary for these commitments. (Ladwig, 2010: 124)

The purpose of the research was to evaluate the efficacy of the Reel to Real initiative and to assess the impact on training provider staff and the young people with whom they work. In order to judge the efficacy of the Moving Image Education initiative Scottish Screen, Skills Development Scotland and Urban Learning Space had four issues that formed the basis of the research, namely:

• The benefits, if any, for trainers and learners (including any impact on trainers’ pedagogies);

• Participants’ experiences of the various stages of the initiative (including the young people involved);

• Sustainability of the initiative and any impact beyond the period of the input;

• The effectiveness of this initiative as a model for the introduction, development and sustainability of Moving Image Education in this context.

While data were gathered from a number of different sources (including lead practitioner, mentors and trainers), this article focuses solely on the perspectives of the young people from both Blocks (A and B). As this research aimed to explore the young people’s perspectives on the Moving Image Education project, it was felt that a qualitative approach, specifically a grounded theory approach, to gathering data was most appropriate. In both Blocks, data were gathered in two ways: first through observations of the Embed phase with the young people and the their trainers at their respective training centres and second through short, follow-up focus group interviews of the young people involved in the activities approximately 6 weeks after the final observation.

Findings: Young people’s perspectives

The final stage of the Reel to Real programme was the Embed phase and was the only phase in the project which involved the young people. This entailed the trainers, with the support of their mentor(s), replicating their experiences of the Learn and Teach phases and their understanding of digital media, at their training centres with the young people. The aim was to create a short film which would be screened at a showcase at the end of the programme. The data discussed below are primarily from the focus group responses of the young people. There are some brief notes on the observations during the Embed phase although the majority of this section is centred on the responses from the focus groups conducted after the Embed phase.

Response to the project

On the whole, the young people engaged in every element of the project at their training centre. This was confirmed by the trainers who were impressed at how the young people immersed themselves in the project. While the groups at some training centres afforded more time to film analysis than others, all centres engaged in producing a film. All young people interviewed in the focus groups had participated and been involved in their digital projects and had undertaken different roles, for example, acting, directing or script writing. These roles were self-selected by the young people as opposed to being delegated by the trainer. Some centres had used analytical exercises with some short films with their trainees prior to the practical project, whereas others had simply introduced the recording project. While the content and theme of each film were different, the young people felt that they were involved across the project and had the opportunity to experience most of the tasks involved in recording a film. The first focus group conducted at the end of Block A created a film about work. The two films from Block B focus groups were a documentary and a drama-music video. The theme of the film was largely left to the discretion of the young people or the idea was conceived through brainstorming ideas with the trainer and Moving Image Education mentor.

The project had allowed some of the young people to learn about the different tasks involved in making a film with support from the trainer(s) and mentor(s). Whereas the young people from focus group in Block A (focus group 1) were largely acting, a wider variety of roles were taken up in Block B (focus groups 2 and 3). Each film required the young people to learn different skills and techniques that they would not have had access to within the usual practices of their training centre:

[we] learned how to use things like cameras and green screens … we made costumes, make up, scenes. We were all involved in editing [and] everyone got a chance to use the cameras. (Focus group 3)

Common across all focus groups was an initial feeling of nerves and embarrassment, especially regarding being on camera. Understanding the different tasks involved, however, allowed them to contribute and participate in other ways. One participant in focus group 3 felt that he was nervous in front of the camera, but being involved in the recording process and learning about other tasks needed for filming had helped alleviate his nerves. A similar view was shared in focus groups 1 and 2:

I was nervous as I was going to be on a TV. I just had a laugh. It was funny at the GFT. I wasn’t that embarrassed there … I was frightened in case they tried to point me out. I was quite happy with it [the final film]. (Focus group 1)

I really liked the experience. It was a bit embarrassing to start off with, but once I got into it, it became easier. I had the starring role, I didn’t do any of the other stuff [filming, planning, editing] as I was mostly acting. There wasn’t anything that I didn’t like … perhaps the zoom up at the end! (Focus group 2)

The young people involved in the focus groups reported a positive response by the end of the project. Young people in focus group 3 in particular were beginning to plan their next film and could identify how they would improve upon their previous recording.

Impact of the experience on young people

From their involvement in the Moving Image Education project and including overcoming their initial embarrassment and nerves, the young people could identify what they had learned from their experience. They saw this as lying within two main areas: support, and ownership and confidence.

The young people felt that they were supported by their trainers and that their voices and opinions were heard regarding the project. Many of the young people not only noticed a difference in themselves during the project, but two groups (one in Block A and one in Block B) also noticed a change in their trainers:

I liked working with [trainer] and [mentor] on the project. It wasn’t bad. He [trainer] didn’t shout at me as much. I liked how they listened to my ideas and took them on board … I felt supported. My ideas went in. I did my own thing rather than being told what to do. (Focus group 2)

A similar view was expressed by focus group 3:

Enjoyed it. They encouraged you to get on. Rounded us up and told us we’re doing it all. They treated us like pals. (Focus group 3)

Ownership of the project was an important aspect of the experience. Consequently, across all three groups an increase in confidence was felt, be this for interviews, for working with the equipment or for working with others. The young people believed that their involvement in the programme had contributed to this greatly. When asked about what they had taken from the project, a participant from focus group 1 (Block A) felt,

[I] didn’t learn anything much from the film but did get confident. I wasn’t really confident when I came in [to the centre]. [I] hadn’t done it [recording] before … more confidence to do something I hadn’t done before … (Focus group 1)

This young person continued to relate how this boost in confidence could be used in other areas, for example, in interviewing as ‘the filming helped [me] talk to other people’ or activities within the centre, for example, singing without being embarrassed (focus group 2). Confidence was a significant factor for the other two focus groups held in Block B. One participant (focus group 2) supported this view, but also highlighted teamwork as another quality which she gained from being involved in the project:

I’ve taken confidence away from this. It was shown in front of everyone. I was a bit embarrassed. Team work is another thing, getting on with people. I’d definitely use confidence and team work in future. You need confidence for interviews and participating in projects, team work shows that you’re working with other people. (Focus group 2)

Interestingly, the development of confidence was not only recognised by the young people but also by their trainers who noted that after the screening of the film at the theatre, the young people had gained confidence and had gained a sense of achievement from the screening. There was also a view that the young people had now felt a realisation that they are more capable of learning and undertaking a greater range of activities than they had previously thought.

Discussion

Education is multidisciplinary in nature. In order to understand how education generally and the process of learning works, it is necessary to draw on a range of perspectives, principally psychology, philosophy and sociology. In addition, within the narrower focus of learning, the literature has tended to compartmentalise around perceived distinct interest groups such as gifted and talented learners, special education and the range of subject specialisms that form typical curricula in Western schools. One of the challenges to formal education presented by learning in non-formal contexts relates to how it is conceptualised and framed.

The evidence from observations, and the views expressed by trainers, mentors, young people and project managers, confirms that there have been, at least in the short term, benefits for learners (and their trainers) as a result of their engagement with Moving Image Education. The major benefit reported by young people and verified in observations and reports from their trainers and other members of the project is increased confidence. Second, and related to developing confidence, an increase in the ability to work together, negotiate, plan and participate in a creative process was reported as a valuable and enriching experience for young people. The culmination of events in a public screening was reported as providing a unique experience for participants with resultant improvements in confidence, self-esteem and pride in their achievement. This is noticeable in other research with similar groups, for example, Furlong and Cartmel (2007) highlight young people’s confidence as linked to cognitive ability and/or self-belief in one’s cognitive ability in addition to issues associated with identity and social acceptance within one’s peer group. In other words, the social dimension and the notion of identity and belonging are important factors in terms of central components of confidence to these groups. It is this mixture of confidence, born out of self-efficacy as a result of enriching experiences and the complex relationships among them, that provides a starting point for theorising, from a pedagogical perspective, the young people’s engagement with Moving Image Education in order to understand the nature and development of what they have termed ‘confidence’.

This major outcome of ‘confidence’, rather than, say, competence in analysis and creation of moving images, was particularly intriguing to the researchers. This can be considered as an equivalent to the relationships between academic and non-academic outcomes as discussed by Ladwig (2010) whereby non-academic outcomes, he argues, are ‘ambiguous’ for those educators whose work entails engagement with or addressing inequalities, in this instance, to those related to what might be considered as social class.

Within school contexts, the young people involved in this project have historically been described as underachieving, disaffected and disengaged. As such, they have been considered as problematic for schools and teachers as a consequence of an assumed deficit or deficits in their abilities to learn or cope with the demands of school. Schools, therefore, have adopted approaches to compensate for perceived deficits as a means of supporting pupils to remain within the education system (Head, 2011). Historically, compensatory approaches have been of a ‘remedial’ nature that has served to reinforce an identity of ‘poor learner’ (Jackson, 2011).

By way of contrast, Moving Image Education as it was experienced by the participants in the Reel to Real project provides an enriching experience that starts from an assumption of ability and efficacy on the part of the learner - an assumption normally made for highly able or ‘gifted’ learners (Renzulli, 1976). In order to understand why this was the case entails a consideration of the nature and place of the moving image in young people’s lives and how that, in turn, affects how they engage with it in a learning context. Buckingham (2007) argues,

… contemporary childhoods are now permeated, even in some respects defined, by the modern media – by television, video, computer games, the internet, mobile phones and popular music, and by the enormous range of media related commodities that make up contemporary consumer culture. (p. 75)

Moreover, Buckingham (2007) goes on to argue that young people today may, in fact, spend more time engaging with media than they do with any other activity other than sleeping. This has led some sections of adult society to argue that the media, and television in particular, have ‘destroyed’ childhood. The nature of television programmes and DVDs aimed at children and young people and the ability of children to access a range of materials on the Internet have resulted in adults’ concerns regarding the need to protect young people from possible corruption and exploitation. Richards (2011) argues that this desire to protect is a direct consequence of what he terms a Romantic view of childhood as a time of innocence and vulnerability and in which adults, therefore, are obliged to take control on their behalf. Such a perspective would also explain a compensatory pedagogical approach to learning, in which adults make decisions regarding young people as learners in order to control the context, materials and provision in which learning takes place (Head, 2011). Teachers’ and schools’ approaches to supporting learning difficulties have tended to identify learners’ areas of weakness and to provide materials and employ teaching techniques that are designed to address those weaknesses. Jackson (2011) argues that focussing on weaknesses leads to a perpetuation of a deficit identity on the part of the learner, thereby reinforcing low self-esteem and lack of confidence as the young person experiences only low-grade, ‘remedial’ and often not age-appropriate work (Head, 2007). Nind et al. (2012) note that young people with moderate learning difficulties and social and emotional and behavioural difficulties are those who are ‘the most “feared” and least likely to be listened to with respect’, continuing that it is easier ‘not to hear than to hear the voices’ of these children and young people ‘because their communication is frequently unconventional and their social status marginal’ (p. 644). The ways in which these children and young people communicate are unconventional for schooling, leading them to be negatively labelled once again, ‘expanding their deficits and reducing their capacity’ (Nind et al., 2012: 644).

On the other hand, a counter-argument exists: namely, that the media, and television and the internet, have served to liberate and empower children and young people, including those who have turbulent life experiences. Most young people have the ability to access materials relatively free of adult supervision; they are encouraged through gaming and advertising to behave as autonomous decision makers and consumers and, through their own and others’ interactive websites, express views and opinions on any topic that they and other young people consider worthy (Buckingham, 2007). Moreover, one of the major factors of youth cultures is the rate at which cultural objects and ideas are transmitted throughout the world. Young people produce their identities and cultures, at least in significant part, from images and ideas they receive from the media. One of the effects of Moving Image Education is greater connectedness with the world and current ideas and issues. Through engaging with the Reel to Real project, therefore, the young people found themselves in familiar territory which challenged deficit-laden identities through experiences that led to feelings of competence and worthwhileness which Miller and Moran (2012) argue provides a two-dimensional, dynamic model of self-esteem that leads to increased confidence.

In pedagogical terms, the young people’s experience of Reel to Real can be understood as one of self-directed learning and self-actualisation (Jackson, 2011). This is redolent of pedagogical approaches more normally associated with more able learners where their capacity to address problematic learning is presumed. In other words, instead of compensating for inability or disability, engagement in the analysis and creation of moving images are seen as complementing and building on current learning as it is understood by the learner. This approach represents a shift in the relationships among learners and their trainers away from deterministic presumptions of limited ability and (un-)reliability towards a complexity orientation that entails learner agency, creativity and becoming in which young people have the ability to create a future built on emerging identities related to that of the effective learner (Head, 2011; I’Anson, 2011).

Cremin et al. (2011) identify that rethinking teaching and learning is vital to instigating change among disaffected young people. Furthermore, Giroux (2011) argues that if knowledge is to be made a transformative experience, it must engage with those modes of learning that are not confined to formal learning sites such as school but that inform, educate and shape identities in non-formal contexts. The moving image, in film, television and DVD, provides exactly this context. Through connecting with young people’s experiences beyond the training provider context, learning opens the potential to challenge hegemonic identities and cultural practices that otherwise condemn young people to a life of disadvantage (Giroux, 2011).

In addition, evidence from Maida’s (2011) work with dental students characterises the kind of project-based, collaborative enterprise inherent in Moving Image Education as ‘disruptive’ in the sense that it challenges traditional learning models and, as a consequence of offering the young people the opportunity to express their talents through the generation of the knowledge skills and abilities they require to analyse and create moving images, has the ‘potential for personal development, creativity and transformation’ (Maida, 2011: 759). Crucially, in the Reel to Real project, learning was a function of the activity rather than something that had to take place before young people were able to participate, a view similar to enrichment-type learning described by Renzulli (1976) whereby learners engage in activities aimed to develop, enhance and refine personal interest by progressing through three levels (exploratory, skill development and finally investigation and problem solving). The enrichment model could claim to be a more inclusive means of learning as it is able to reach a much wider range of abilities and support development (Renzulli, 1976). Both enrichment and learning as function of the activity represent the nature of change necessary for the positive social and cultural outcomes, including confidence, identified by Anderson et al. (2002) and Bynner and Parsons (2002) discussed in this article.

Within the context of this project, the development of confidence can be related to the acquisition of voice. Film and other moving images present young people with a context in which they can have ‘conversations’ related to the cultural and political events that concern them, thereby enabling them to develop more critical and expansive views on topics that they consider meaningful (Giroux, 2011). Thus, the development of confidence and acquisition of the voice with which to express it provide the experiences and opportunities that could allow young people to move from being the disadvantaged individual who underachieves and performs poorly at job interviews, for example, to become more self-aware, self-confident and self-efficacious (Bynner, 1998; Miller and Moran, 2012).

The authors argue that to consider Reel to Real only in the context of research on special, informal or whatever kind of education would be to miss the point. Whatever the young people meant by ‘confidence’, its manifestation occurred in a social and discursive context – in the discussions and interactions among young people and between young people and the caring adults who work with them regarding their moving image projects (Vadeboncoeur, 2006). The Reel to Real context can be considered as representing a complex, unpredictable context (Biesta, 2010), and in order to understand it, we need to be aware of the various factors involved and, more importantly, the relationships among them. In order to understand the conditions that led to increased ‘confidence’, therefore, it is necessary to explore it from multiple perspectives (Vadeboncoeur, 2006).

A direct consequence for young people of engaging with Moving Image Education was the development of the ability to negotiate and plan and the ability to envisage and create a future that was argued by Anderson et al. (2002) as being crucial to creating a sense of oneself in the world. Nowadays, so much communication is of an audio-visual nature that Selfe and Selfe (2008) argue that to be effective in the twenty-first century, our young people must confront and create avenues of communication that are not confined to the written word. Specifically, workplaces now demand not just technical skills but the personal attributes that will allow young people to be considered literate in an increasingly technological environment. They argue that the demands of an ever changing context of global communication:

… employees must be educated deeply and widely, and prepared to function effectively and critically in digital and transnational communication environments. They must also be able and willing to work across conventional linguistic and geographical borders, to compose not only with words, but also with still and moving images, sound and music, animation and multimedia texts. (Selfe and Selfe, 2008: 86)

It is this aspect of the Reel to Real project that perhaps offers the greatest hope to the young people who participated in the project.

Confidence, context, pedagogy and sustainability

Confidence, as it was constructed by the young people in this project, is a social construct. It is related to competent performance in a collaborative activity. The young people gained a sense of being able to undertake tasks related to the analysis and creation of moving images. In addition, the activities performed had a clear sense of value in that they contributed to the overall success of their projects. Some of these tasks were physical, such as filming, editing and acting, while others could be considered as more metaphysical, such as decision making, collaboration and evaluating. The model of confidence, therefore, as articulated by the young people in this project is consistent with the two-dimensional model argued by Miller and Moran (2012) which is about competence and worthwhileness. Competence relates to the activities described; worthwhileness relates to both the value of the tasks performed and a sense of the young people’s own agency within the project.

The context of the project can be considered as a ‘structured informal context’ as described by Vadeboncoeur (2006: 240) in which she posits five factors that help characterise formality/informality: location, relationships, content, pedagogy and assessment. In the case of Real to Reel, the locations were training providers’ premises, in other words, not school. The relationships and pedagogy were collaborative and more equitable as is described below. The content was related to the young people’s lived cultural experiences rather than ‘school subjects’ and assessment related to their own evaluations of the moving images which they created. For the young people in Real to Reel, the Moving Image Education experience gave them an opportunity to explore in an environment which was ‘safe’, allowing them to make mistakes and revise their ideas.

Pedagogy in the context of the project can be considered as interactive, multidisciplinary and learner led. The success reported by the young people was associated with the changing relationships between the young people and the trainers. Prior to (and possibly still beyond) the Moving Image Education project, the relationship was conventional in the sense that the trainers were ‘experts’, instructing young people in the skills required to prepare them for work. Within the project, however, the multifaceted nature of the learning led to the relationship shifting to one of trainers and young people becoming co-learners. While this was partly a consequence of young people being at least as audiovisually literate as the adults, it was at least in part dependent on the willingness of the trainers to accept a role or a more equitable relationship in which leadership of the project was shared between young people and adults. In this instance, the adult enthusiasm and curiosity reinforced that of the young people.

While it was evident from the various observations and interviews with all stakeholders in Real to Reel that the project had been a valuable experience for participants, the sustainability of such a project is questionable. Despite its gains, it would appear that Real to Reel may in fact have a lack of sustainability, not only for financial reasons but because a great deal of the momentum for the project relied on the creativity of the mentors. These creative specialists were the main drivers of support for young people in articulating their ideas while also aiding the training providers. Without such specialist support it may be unlikely that the project would be sustainable in its current form. In terms of the training providers, we are unsure as to how far these groups fully understood the nature of the project, the aims and purposes, and resultantly, this led to a lack of understanding of the success of the project in supporting the young people’s development. There are implicit, bittersweet examples where Real to Reel was acknowledged as being a positive experience with one training provider stating that the experience had given her ideas of other ways to work with her group, yet these new activities were not necessarily Moving Image Education–related.

The authors wish to avoid making any exaggerated claims for the uniqueness of Moving Image Education. It was the case, however, that within this project Moving Image Education provided the conditions in which the factors that led to shifting relationships and changing identities occurred spontaneously. This is replicated in other Moving Image Education projects (see www.scottishscreen.com). Since Real to Reel was a local, narrowly focussed project, it makes it difficult to compare with other projects/programmes which might be similar. Real to Reel might be considered as an arts-based programme which has aspirations to affect the wider social issue of social inclusion (Sefton-Green, 2007). Evaluating the extent of the learning would require further detailed longitudinal studies.