Letters to the Next President: Youth Civic Identity and Writing in a National Online Network

• In Event: From Connected Learning to Connected Teaching: Toward a New Vision of Digital Literacy Teacher Education

Abstract

During the 2016 presidential election season, the Letters to the Next President project, led by the National Writing Project and PBS affiliate KQED, used an online platform to collect 13,000 letters to the next U.S. president, written by students from 350 schools in 47 states.
In this two-fold investigation we will study the rich trove of student writing to explore how students’ topics of concern vary across diverse school sites and geographical areas as well as deeper analysis of letters from a smaller sample of schools in underserved communities. The study also explores how teachers elicited and scaffolded student voice via an online initiative, what aspects of their professional trajectories contributed to their interpretation of the project, and how their participation contributed, if at all, to teacher professional learning. The study seeks to answer the questions:

1. For the 13,000 student writers, what issues were most salient, how did students frame contemporary civic issues in their writing, and how did these vary across regional, socio-economic, and other factors across school sites?
2. Focusing purposefully on the letters from a set of schools serving largely low-income youth and youth of color in swing-states, what were the central concerns and civic beliefs of student writers?
3. How did participation in this national project shape the identities and trajectories of teachers?

Considering the pressing need of expanding civic education opportunities and the possibilities of participatory forms of politics and writing, this study is designed around a conceptual framework that defined “connected” learning” as youth participation in practices that are “socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward educational, economic, or political opportunity” (Ito et al., 2013, p. 6). Conceptually, connected learning can sustain what Jenkins, Ito, and boyd (2016) have noted as connected civics: “a form of learning fostered via participatory politics that emerges when young people achieve civic agency linked to their deeply felt interests, identities, and affinities” (p. 17). Considering how student interests, expertise, and multimodal literacy practices shape their learning experiences, connected learning positions Letters to the Next President as a sociocultural site of youth civic engagement. The overlapping of interests of students, too, offer a methodological framework for considering youth civic identity that aligns with the social and cultural interactions of civic identity that Nasir and Kirshner (2003) argue must be explored.

The study combines quantitative methods—to analyze thematic differences in letters across different regions of the country and school demographics—and qualitative methods, which enable a deeper, textual analysis of a subset of letters, as well as interviews conducted with teachers and qualitative items on surveys that teachers completed after implementing the project.

Particularly after the current election and fractured partisan debate, understanding what civics means to youth and what are the hopes, desires, and fears they look toward the national government to act upon, this study centers student voice to further contextualize current explorations of youth civic identity in America (e.g. Hess & McAvoy, 2015, Kahne & Bowyer, 2017).

Authors

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University

• Amber Maria Levinson, Stanford University