Letters to the Next President: Youth Civic Engagement and Writing Practices in an Online Network

• In Event: 43.052 - Politics in the Foreground and Background of Learning: Analyses of Power and Learning Across Settings

Abstract

During the 2016 presidential election season, Letters to the Next President, a project led by the National Writing Project and PBS affiliate KQED, launched an online platform that collected 11,000 letters, written by students from 325 schools in 47 states. This paper investigates what and how students communicated about the civic issues that were of most interest to them. In the face of an ongoing school-based “civic opportunity gap” (Kahne & Middaugh, 2008) compounded by today’s fractured political climate, it is crucial to understand what civic engagement means to youth from varied contexts across the United States. Looking across the full corpus of letters, we sought to understand how students defined what they believe “counts” as civically crucial to their lives and how they expected the 45th U.S. president to respond to their needs. Findings show how students’ topics of concern varied across school sites. A deeper analysis of letters from a sample of schools in underserved communities examines how students called for civic change.

This study is informed by research on civic engagement and particularly how designed learning environments shape how students civically participate through writing. Our understanding of civics and its enactment in U.S. schools frames it as a “productive and generative” activity that builds connections across individuals of differing backgrounds (Boyte, 2003). Our approach to a new civics is built around an expansion of the historic “characteristics of citizenship” (Flanagan & Levine, 2010) typically tied to practices such as voting and volunteering. We consider how Letters to the Next President, as a virtual community, may be demonstrative of a civics of “participatory politics” (Cohen, Kahne, Bowyer, Middaugh, & Rogowski, 2012).

Through a quantitative analysis of the entire set of letters, we explored dominant themes based on tags that students applied to their own letters. Findings revealed significant differences in topics based on geography, partisan demographics, racial, and socioeconomic indicators at the school level. A qualitative analysis of writing practices examined a smaller set of letters (n=138) written by students from five schools in ‘swing states’ that served majority students of color. Students framed their concerns, argued their causes, used evidence, and made calls for action in manners both shared and divergent across the five schools.

This study of civic learning contributes to existing scholarship by expanding on a framework of “connected learning” that has explored youth participation practices that are “socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward educational, economic, or political opportunity” (Ito et al., 2013, p. 6). Positioning Letters to the Next President as a sociocultural site of youth civic engagement and learning, and analyzing student interests, expertise, and multimodal literacy practices in this context, contributes to our understanding of both connected learning and youth civic engagement, drawing the links between the two.

Authors

• Amber Maria Levinson, Stanford University

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University

• Emma Carene Gargroetzi, Stanford University