Image Education and Citizenship: When Youth Professionals Rethink Their Practices

On December 2, 2025, around a hundred youth, animation, and culture professionals gathered at the MECA auditorium in Bordeaux to explore together the contemporary challenges of image education. I co-designed this day and facilitated its key moments: the opening lecture, the morning panel discussion, and the artificial intelligence workshop in the afternoon.

A day born from a committed territorial partnership

This professional day emerged from a collaboration between Pauline Lavallée, in charge of out-of-school image education and coordinator of “Passeurs d’images” and “Des cinés, la vie!” for ALCA, and Cécile Lucas from the Gironde Departmental Council. ALCA (Agence Livre, Cinéma, Audiovisuel en Nouvelle-Aquitaine), in partnership with the Departmental Council and with support from DRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine, wanted to highlight out-of-school image education projects. Together, we conceived an event that would fit into a broader reflection on supporting young people facing digital transformations, at a time when images and artificial intelligence occupy an ever-growing place in their daily lives.

The target audience was intentionally broad: youth, animation, and prevention professionals, but also image education, cinema, and audiovisual practitioners. This professional diversity was one of the day’s bets, based on the observation that silos between sectors often undermine the quality of projects carried out with young people.

An opening lecture to lay the foundations for collective reflection

I opened the morning with a lecture titled « Rethinking Image Education in the Digital Age: Between Innovation and Fundamentals ». I chose to begin with a participatory exercise that immediately revealed the assembly’s paradoxes: many distrusted social media while themselves spending several hours daily in front of screens. This situation created a climate of honesty conducive to collective reflection.

The first axis I addressed concerned the observation of a certain failure by French cultural institutions to reach young people. Despite the Malrucian ambition to “make the great works of humanity accessible to the greatest number,” the gap with teenagers’ actual practices continues to widen. I drew on the work of sociologist Camille Peugny, particularly his book « Pour une politique de la jeunesse » (2022), to deconstruct the illusion of a homogeneous youth with uniform cultural tastes. His research demonstrates, on the contrary, an extreme diversity of cultural practices, directly linked to each young person’s sociocultural context.

I then clarified two fundamental distinctions:

• On one hand, the difference between image education and media education: the former relates to film creation and artistic expression, the latter to a journalistic approach and critical content analysis.
• On the other hand, the distinction between cultural democratization, a top-down logic inherited from Malraux, and cultural democracy, which recognizes the plurality of cultures and promotes their horizontal dialogue.

Cultural rights as a compass for changing posture

A substantial part of my presentation was devoted to cultural rights, enshrined in French law since the NOTRe and LCAP laws of 2015-2016, but still unknown to many practitioners. These rights, structured by the 2007 Fribourg Declaration, concern culture in its anthropological sense: what constitutes us, our languages, our practices, our references, our ways of life. Respecting cultural rights means recognizing the value of each person’s own culture, without hierarchy or value judgment.

I presented the concept of “symbolic third” as a tool for moving beyond the traditional dual relationship between “knower” and “learner.” I illustrated this principle with a concrete example from my practice: using a drone in a neighborhood undergoing urban renewal. The mediating object, the drone, enables an authentic encounter where each person develops their own relationship with the tool before sharing their experience. This granted trust generates in return a remarkable sense of responsibility among participants.

I also proposed the notion of “governing for the 3%”: this tendency of institutions to create complex security measures to protect themselves against a tiny minority of problematic behaviors, to the detriment of the 97% who simply want to participate. Entrusting a 200-euro camera to a young person from a working-class neighborhood without guarantee of return, accepting that a drone might break, letting participants transform the initial project: these calculated risks build authentic relationships and much more open, appropriated, and creative projects.

Understanding young people’s digital practices: beyond preconceptions

I then invited the assembly to move beyond the sterile opposition between “real” and “virtual.” For generations born with the Internet, digital is not a separate space but a living environment, just like the air they breathe. Michel Serres, in his essay « Petite Poucette » (2012), analyzed the invention of SMS language not as cultural degradation but as the emergence of new cognitive skills.

The case of TikTok was developed in particular detail. The data I presented challenged certain representations: 95 minutes of daily use on average, an average user age of 27, a primary use of an educational nature in the broad sense. Above all, 83% of users have posted at least one video, making it a platform for massive creation rather than mere consumption. TikTok has simple and powerful creation tools that correspond to the “ideal editing table” once dreamed of by Jean-Luc Godard.

A historical parallel with the invention of printing helped put contemporary fears into perspective. Gutenberg was decried by the intellectual elites of his time who thought printing would debase culture and pervert religion. In reality, it primarily threatened their power. Yet printing had the beneficial democratic consequences we know, starting with the Renaissance.

The panel discussion: three field experiences in Gironde

I then facilitated the panel discussion that constituted the second part of the morning, allowing theoretical reflections to be confronted with concrete experiences carried out in the Gironde territory. Lauranne Simpere and Thomas De Almeida, from Douze Films, a collective of filmmakers based in Bordeaux, presented projects supported within the Passeurs d’images program.

The experience in Brazil, based on the “real,” illustrates an approach where it’s not so much the script or the team that makes the film, but what you capture from reality. This posture involves reproducing in France, with little budget, techniques that have proven fruitful elsewhere. The collective intervenes particularly in out-of-school projects, through the Passeurs d’images programs and Departmental support, working with young people from priority neighborhoods.

Lauranne Simpere testified to an approach where young people who know their neighborhood arrive in a position to speak. This inversion of the knower/learner relationship precisely echoed the principles I had mentioned in my lecture. Thomas De Almeida presented projects on identity topics, particularly around LGBTQIA+ issues, with a precise methodology: not positioning oneself as the knower but including oneself in the exchange of speech, favoring “telling one’s own story” rather than “being told about.”

The exchanges highlighted several points of convergence: the importance given to people’s lived experience, the transmission of techniques as means rather than ends, symbolization through objects and protocols, valuing the process as much as the result. A recurring question ran through the discussions: how to articulate short and long projects? How to move from “film to document” to “writing the project in cooperation”?

The afternoon: three workshops for experimentation

The afternoon offered participants the choice of two workshops among the three proposed.

The first, led by Douze Films, allowed concrete experimentation with the dubbing and foley methods mentioned in the morning. Participants worked notably on sequences from the animated film “Frozen,” wondering together: “Does a wolf growl? How do we do that?” or “We have a body falling in the snow, what sound does that make?” This playful and collective dimension characterizes the approach defended by the collective.

The second workshop, led by Pauline Lavallée, consisted of an exchange of practices among participants on the subject of organizing, developing, and participating in an image education project. This workshop was very constructive.

The third workshop, which I led, was a filmmaking workshop with artificial intelligence, which I wish to detail because it illustrates a reproducible methodology. The objective was to create a complete film in one hour and thirty minutes, using free smartphone applications – CapCut for editing and Poe.com for image generation.

I began with a brief historical and critical introduction to artificial intelligence, from the Pascaline to Ada Lovelace, from Turing to Asimov, from deep learning to copyright issues and ecological impact. A “sit-stand” icebreaker in questions helped map uses: who has already used ChatGPT? Who uses it for homework? Who has already generated images with AI?

Participants, organized in pairs, then went through all the stages of creation: scriptwriting with AI assistance, image generation to create a storyboard, animation and editing. The themes proposed for the films—the future, the risks of AI, its promises, future jobs—were crossed with formal approaches: character facing camera, talking objects, music video with lyrics, fiction with two characters. This creative constraint, characteristic of image education workshops, channels creative energy while leaving great freedom of expression.

The critical dimension of the workshop unfolded during the collective screening and the debate that followed. I invited participants to question the limits of these tools, their visual stereotypes, their ethical issues. Is it a good creative tool? Why? And why not? What formatting does it induce? And what possibilities does it open? This reflexivity is at the heart of my approach: mobilizing cinematic creativity to build critical thinking on the subject of AI.

This method, which I have tested with more than 350 young people in other contexts (Studio 13/16 at the Centre Pompidou, TUMO school at the Forum des images), requires no technical prerequisites. Participants leave with skills directly transferable to their structures. The objective is not to promote AI but to understand these tools to better support young people who are already confronted with them, in a contemporary and critical approach to image education.

Participant feedback: a garland of words

Throughout the day, illustrator Sarah Ayadi created sketches capturing the highlights of the exchanges. This real-time visual documentation, displayed at the end of the day, constituted a form of artistic restitution that moved the assembly. Participants were also invited to hang their impressions and reflections on a garland, creating a collective installation that made visible the diversity of concerns.

Among the words hung, one could read: “Beautiful encounters,” “Education THROUGH images,” “Value the process,” “Adapting, the key to inspiring young people,” “The importance of building bridges between projects in and out of school,” “Cultural dignity,” “Audiovisual brings together all the arts.” Questions too: “Ecological catastrophe: regulate AI?”, “Temporality = obstacle or beginning of a journey?”, a reference to Pierre Le Bret followed by a question mark.

Some messages testified to more structural concerns: “Budget cuts imposed by cultural policies undermine image education projects. Our professions are in DANGER.” Or: “A lot of € is earmarked for ONLY school time OR out-of-school time. Rarely both.” These remarks remind us that pedagogical reflection cannot be abstracted from the material conditions under which professionals work.

A change of posture to be built collectively

This day allowed several strong ideas to circulate. The first concerns the need to clearly distinguish image education from media education, while articulating them when projects allow. The second relates to moving from a logic of cultural democratization, top-down and prescriptive, to a logic of cultural democracy that recognizes the value of young people’s cultural practices.

The third idea, perhaps the most destabilizing for some participants, invites us to consider digital platforms as legitimate spaces for creation rather than threats to be fought. This position refuses both technophobia and naive enthusiasm: “It’s not artificial intelligence that’s the problem, it’s how we use it,” as Sarah Ayadi illustrated in one of her sketches.

The day concluded with a call for the transformation of institutional practices. Rather than producing content for social media with top-down communication that systematically fails, institutions could facilitate content creation by young people themselves. Making a filming studio available, offering technical support, providing royalty-free resources: so many concrete approaches that reverse the traditional logic.

Perspectives: toward a renewed image education

Participants left with documentary resources, professional contacts, and, for many, renewed questions about their practices.

This day will have contributed to the emergence of a community of practice in the Gironde territory. Informal exchanges during breaks, collaborations sketched between organizations, projects mentioned for the coming year all testify to a collective dynamic that we hope to see continue. As one participant wrote on the garland: “The desire to create by oneself. Give young people the opportunity to get involved.”

The question of cultural rights, the common thread of this day that I had the pleasure of co-designing and facilitating, offers a framework for thinking about these transformations. It’s not about applying recipes but about continually re-examining our postures. Democracy is conversation. It means accepting that dialogue transforms, that encounter changes, that exchange enriches. The professionals present on December 2, 2025, at the MECA experienced, for the space of a day, this conversation.

• Audio replay of the day available on ALCA’s website.
• Synthesis page on Imagi’na’s website.