Supporting Youth Voice in the Digital Age: Preparing Oakland Youth to Blog

• In Event: Reclaiming and Remixing Their Stories: Amplifying Youth Literacies Through New Media Production, Distribution, and Invention

Abstract

The practice of politics has changed. The affordances of digital media have transformed the ways individuals get information, the ways they circulate their perspectives in an effort to shift broader narratives, the nature of political dialogue, and the ways that individuals are mobilized to act. Youth have been at the forefront of many of these changes.

Our paper begins by detailing the participatory politics framework as a means of conceptualizing these changed practices. The participatory politics framework draws on literature from the socio-cultural study of communications that describes such engagement as reflecting a participatory culture. Engagement within a participatory culture is peer-based, interactive, nonhierarchical, independent of elite-driven institutions, and social (Jenkins, et al., 2009). Accordingly, participatory politics are interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern (Kahne, Middaugh, and Allen, 2015). Examples of participatory political acts range from blogging and circulating political news, to starting a new political group, to creating petitions, to mobilizing one’s social network on behalf of a cause.

The next section of the paper makes the empirical case for the importance of these practices. We draw on the Youth and Participatory Politics Survey – a nationally representative three-wave panel survey that examines both general online practices and political ones. We use data from this survey to highlight the sizable and growing rates of youth engagement in online participatory politics, the fact that such engagement is distributed relatively equitably with respect to race and socioeconomic status, and some of the sizable challenges (such as judging the credibility of online information) that youth must confront when engaged online.

Our attention then turns to a case study of work being undertaken in Oakland, CA as a part of the Educating for Democracy in the Digital Age (EDDA) Initiative. A main goal of this project, now in its sixth year, is supporting teachers in their efforts to prepare youth to engage productively in participatory politics. In line with this goal, teachers are working to develop opportunities for students to better leverage the power of digital media to exert voice and influence with respect to issues that matter to them and their communities. This section of the paper focuses on a case study of a professional learning community of high school teachers and their efforts to integrate blogging as a vehicle for students to shape their stories for an authentic audience, raise their voices about issues that matter to them, and engage in dialogue with others. We will show video clips of teachers sharing their approaches to and reflections on integrating blogging into the core curriculum. Finally, we will share footage of students talking about their experiences publishing their perspectives online and engaging with known and unknown audiences. The study demonstrated that using a participatory medium like blogging provided youth with meaningful ways to tap into the power of digital media for civic and political purposes and to shape their civic and political voices.

Authors

• Erica Hodgin, University of California - Riverside

• Joseph E. Kahne, University of California - Riverside