One YPP initiative is Educating for Democracy in the Digital Age, a partnership between Mills College and the Oakland Unified School District. Two years ago, the initiative’s leaders convinced Oakland Unified to change its mission statement to say that high school graduates should not just be college and career ready, but “community ready†as well. To that end, education researchers and school administrators teamed up with teachers to weave new media literacy into their lesson plans: skills such as fact-checking information and searching for multiple viewpoints online, using digital media to speak out on issues, and engaging in respectful online debates. These lessons build to a senior-year community-oriented capstone project.
Next week, the district will honor several high school seniors with community ready awards for extracurricular efforts on behalf of their classmates and their city. The honorees will include Ronye Cooper of Castlemont High School in East Oakland, a school with mostly Hispanic and African American students. A year ago, after Cooper’s computer science teacher persuaded her to attend her first hackathon – a marathon coding session where teams build software and hardware products – she realized that code could make tools to help her school and community. But she didn’t see many people like her, especially other women of color, who could code. So Cooper started a girls coding club at Castlemont.
Last December, the coding club ventured to Palo Alto for a public safety hackathon. It was just weeks after protests and rioting swept through Ferguson, Missouri, following the police shooting death of an unarmed black teenager, and days after other protests erupted over police killing unarmed black men in New York City and Phoenix. The girls from Castlemont programmed an app called Copwatch, that Cooper describes as “a Yelp for cops†with which people can post details of their interactions with police via smartphone, and link those stories to digital pins on a city map.
Similar efforts to plug students into digital citizenship are happening in several other cities. In Boston, for instance, law professors and students at Northeastern University’s NuLawLab are working with high school bicycle advocates to digitally map the city from a cyclist’s point of view. This summer, the high school cyclers will fan out across the city uploading text, video, and other media to NuLawLab’s mapping app to document things like dangerous traffic and potholed bike lanes, which could later be used to lobby city officials about bike-related policies.
“It’s a lot easier to advocate for something when you have evidence,†said Neil Leifer, a Northeastern law professor facilitating the project.
Also this summer, political science professors and graduate students at the University of Chicago who curate the Black Youth Project, an online clearinghouse of research, blogs, and media postings by young African Americans, will partner with the city’s schools to train a couple dozen high school students in survey methods, digital literacy and production, and organizing via social media. The same partnership is also weaving new media skills into a pilot civics curriculum linked with a service-learning requirement in Chicago Public Schools, just as the Illinois state legislature is poised to make civics a high school graduation requirement.
Of course, Kahne and the other YPP researchers know online political participation is often dismissed as lazy, knee-jerk, and ineffectual “slacktivism.†But they point out that offline civic engagement also leads to its share of dead ends, and that many online efforts have shown real-world muscle. For instance, crowdfunding sites have raised millions of dollars for civic-minded nonprofits. The online petition site change.org claims victories ranging from the release of political prisoners to the cancellation of banks debit-card user fees. And the recent, nationwide protests over police killings have been sparked by circulated smartphone videos and sustained by live tweets from the street, with mobilizing hashtags such as #blacklivesmatter.
“Nobody thinks you can bring real social change just by clicking ‘Like’,†Kahne said. Nevertheless, YPP research suggests that people who “Like†a political blog post, post a topical article, sign an online petition, or make any other low-effort online participation are also far more likely to take on higher-demand civic engagement, such as volunteering for a political campaign or organizing a protest.
“All those activities give kids a chance to be active,†Kahne said, “and to see themselves as people who can speak out and make a difference on issues they care about.â€