Rural Youth Cinema

<< Background >>There is a need to think about youth art work in rural areas. Youth work organizations that focus on arts education are mostly absent in rural contexts. Those that are present are located in urban areas. We wanted to provide arts education activities to young people living in rural areas. All partners in this project are located in rural areas. Through this project the partners have organized art educational activities. The project outcomes can be a source of inspiration for other youth work organizations in rural areas who would also like to focus on arts education.We have focused on documentary making as an arts educative method that fosters a more sustainable world view. Through arts education, an ecological approach (within and outside of youth work) can be maintained and transferred to the youngsters. Throughout our activities we have developed a guide for ethnographic documentary making as an ecological, arts educative medium for youth workers without previous experience in the arts.We have applied for this project to address the need of better rural youth art work in a hands-on, practice based research that benefits both the participating partners and the community at large.<< Objectives >>The development of a qualitative and innovative methodology that can be used by youth work organizations was central to this project. Ethnographic documentaries, made by young people themselves, have been developed as a method within this project. We approached this step by step: (1) we researched, together with young people, the techniques that we need (2) we looked at how we could create interesting documentary material with our own mobile phones, in other words how we can record our activities (3) we realized documentaries (4) we showed the documentaries to other partners during 'rural youth cinemas'. Each step was taken in parallel at each partner. After each step there was a moment where the partners met. This is how we shared knowledge.By implementing the project, we have achieved a well-developed guide that was created and tested in practice within various youth work contexts. The documentaries serve as artefacts of this process.<< Implementation >>The main activities consisted of creating the documentaries in the youth groups at the various youth work partners organizations. Over the course of two years, each youth group met regularly and collectively went through the creative process of ethnographic documentary making. Most groups met on a weekly basis to work on this project.Furthermore, an important part of this project was the sharing of the documentaries to show the arts educative work done in youth work, to highlight the rural dimension of our project and to initiate debate. In each participating country, viewing sessions have been organized in which other local youth, youth workers, stakeholders, family and friends, and local inhabitants could watch the documentaries and participate in various discussions about the documentaries topics.There have been various transnational activities, including the kick-off meeting in Belgium, the transnational evaluation session in Ireland, and the final transnational dissemination event (in Romania and online), which involved various documentary-like activities such as a living library, interviews and debates with the documentary makers (the youngsters), and presentation and evaluation of the qualitative guide.<< Results >>The main result is the guide for ethnographic documentary making as an ecological and arts educative tool in youth work. Furthermore, a guide for sustainable youth work has been developed, 7 documentary videos with subtitles were created and shared, three viewing sessions have been organized, a final transnational dissemination event was held, a digital platform was created to share our work through social media and a website (with blog), the guide and film practices were implemented in the UCLL curriculum for students of youth art work, the guide has been implemented in each of the participating youth clubs, and finally there have been many, many hours of creative, documentary practice within the various youth groups of the various partners.The result is a well-developed and well-tested methodology for youth workers without previous experience in arts education, or documentary making, required, with the value of this methodology well highlighted and documented within the guide, the documentaries and the dissemination activities.