Engaged Youth » Public voice: age and sustainability issues

Public voice: age and sustainability issues

April 24th, 2008 at 05:13pm Deen Freelon Permalink

When discussing how digital media can best support civic engagement among youth, it is important to distinguish between the technical capacities necessary to navigate and manipulate various forms of digital media and the civic skills that allow young people to connect with shared issues. Howard Rheingold offers a helpful starting point with his digital skills curriculum, which attempts to demonstrate how technology can serve as an attractive vehicle for what he calls “public voice.” Public voice, as distinct from private voice, comprises all communicative acts that seek to “inform publics, advocate positions, contest claims, and organize action around issues that [young people] truly care about” (Rheingold, 2008). Positioning public voice within the context of digital media harnesses the latter as a tool to teach young people about the former. Because this specific form of communication does not come naturally to most youth, learning it is presumed to require some direct instruction.

We on the CLO team believe that Howard’s approach shows much promise, but wonder if many of its recommendations are more suited for college students than for teens in high school. For example, might the concept of a “public” be too subtle for some teens to grasp, particularly if said public does not immediately emerge to respond to their attempts to address it? Further, given the undifferentiated epistemological landscape of the internet, in which Google results place paranoid cranks shoulder to shoulder with accredited experts, might some digital natives experience difficulty in critically analyzing web content? How often are these young people asked to articulate and defend their own opinions? The answers to these questions may recommend that the public voice curriculum be revised somewhat for younger learners.

How could the public voice curriculum for a high-school age demographic? What is it reasonable for youth of that age to be able to understand and accomplish, civically speaking?

A second question that has arisen for us relates to the long-term sustainability of the skills learned in these types of curricula. Decades of education research has concluded that students retain only a small fraction of what they learn, particularly if the lessons are not practiced. Therefore, we are strongly interested in suggestions regarding ways to ensure that the civic skills we teach “stick,” as it were, as opposed to beginning and ending in the classroom.

What can be done to ensure that the skills that youth learn in your curriculum become self-sustained habits, rather than one-time lessons?

Entry Filed under: adviser conversations, civic learning goals, digital learning skills

3 Comments Add your own

1. Howard Rheingold | April 26th, 2008 at 3:34 pm

Forget, for the moment, about the terminology of public voice. To me, the key seems to be — issues that young people care about. Certainly there are issues that high school students care about, whether or not they are what adults commonly regard to be “civic engagement.” I use the example of “they won’t let us skateboard downtown” but there must be many issues that high school students personally care about. So all the prescriptive elements of my proposed curriculum have to come second. First is to somehow elicit authentic issues that the students care about. Given that, I would show how RSS and news searches could be used to learn about the issue, discover what other young people in other places might be doing about the issue, then move to using blogs to advocate. The tools have to be in service of causes that matter, that come from the young people’s experiences and passions — not prescribed by elders. This is, of course, courting subversion. But I would contend that subversion is a Jeffersonian civic virtue.
2. Howard Rheingold | April 26th, 2008 at 3:37 pm

Critically analyzing content: I’d start with a couple of shocking examples like martinlutherking.org. Then I’d show how to search for an author — and to talk about what it means when you can’t find an author for a truth claim online — then suggest putting the author’s name through a search engine to see what others say. Again, it’s subversive, but I can’t see how it is possible to teach anyone to find their way on the Internet without practical training in critical thinking about what they find — which means assuming that it’s possible that someone might be either putting one over on them or passing along bad information.
3. Lance Bennett | June 29th, 2008 at 8:16 am

I agree that finding things that matter is the motivational key. And that skills training goes right along with that. In developing participatory media curriculum for our Puget Sound Off youth commons, it is challenging to find formats that are at once entertaining, useful, and interesting for different audiences. We will post some of the beta modules on the site for critical comment.

One issue in particular is the degree to which we try to introduce some civic values into the media skills training (e.g., does this video invite participation or involvement in an issue?). It may be that young people who want to learn media production will learn just fine from their friends. But what kinds of social or civic values will the results achieve?