A Reflection on a Participatory Video Project: Possibilities and Challenges for Promoting Participatory Cultures among Adult Learners

The recent media environment offers a great opportunity for people to create and share messages through ubiquitous connections. In doing so, they may be participating in shaping their cultures. This potential, however, is crippled for some because not everyone has proper media production skills, especially those who may need the skills most to bring out their experiences and perspectives through media. Therefore, it is necessary to provide people with educational opportunities to develop their media production skills. Within this context, I conducted a video project with a group of adults for 5 weeks in order to offer them an opportunity to develop their video production skills and express their common concerns through video, in hopes of promoting participatory cultures. In this article, I reflect on the processes and outcomes of the project and elucidate the challenges that I encountered.