Abstract:

The ease with which today’s generation of youth are able to participate in the broader media landscape and even co-create their own media cultures means that educators are presented with a special opportunity to incorporate these skills and interests into a fresh approach to teaching critical thinking and media literacy in the 21st century classroom. In recent years, scholars have been paying particular attention to the increasingly popular practice of re-using, appropriating, and manipulating existing digital content to produce altered or new derivative works, now commonly referred to as remixes and mashups, respectively (Jenkins 2006; Ito 2006; Rheingold 2008; Lessig 2008). Drawn from the experience of designing and facilitating a project for students at a secondary school in Vancouver, Canada, this paper explores the possibilities of taking the remix or mashup beyond its artistic or entertainment value into a powerful pedagogical tool for challenging and subverting common narratives in the mainstream media.

Participants of the project were asked to produce a remix or mashup video with the aim of highlighting and critiquing messages they deemed to be both problematic and pervasive across various media platforms – news segments, films, television shows, music videos, commercials, video games, and so forth. Working in small groups, participants were guided in the process of researching, downloading, analyzing, and editing popular media via YouTube, Google, FinalCutPro, and Photoshop, in addition to creating their own original content. Through careful scripting and audio-visual arrangements, participants used their remix and mashup videos as a means to express their perspectives on the manner in which mainstream media promotes or deals with issues such as materialism, e-waste, gender stereotypes, poverty porn, and false advertising. I argue that remixes and mashups have serious potential to transform mass media in the service of critical inquiry, providing unconventional methods for comparing and deconstructing media products, investigating the political economy of the media industries, and imagining the possibilities of alternative and user-generated content. I also discuss further suggestions for collaborative learning and peer-to-peer sharing, as well as the use of open source software and Creative Commons licensed material for future remix and mashup educational endeavors.