Engagement in Student Government: #ASPElect

This summer at St. Paul’s Advanced Studies Program, I taught a course on mass media that sought to teach students how to critique the media and create media. One of our projects was a collaboration with a colleague’s government class to help them host a campus election. My students covered the candidates in our campus blog, they helped the candidates shoot campaign ads, and they live-tweeted the presidential debate in anticipation of the campus-wide vote. This activity fit my goals perfectly—students critiqued candidates’ positions, created partisan and independent media, and voted as informed members of the community—most importantly, they cared; they engaged with local politics, something unheard of among 21st century teens.

In this project I discovered that when given a voice, students owned it: asking astute questions, disagreeing (sometimes vociferously and publicly) with candidates, and connecting with others around the community. This engagement, which began between the students of the media and government classes, blossomed across the community. My students learned iMovie and Garageband while the government students learned how to run a campaign, but students across the entire community collaborated, critiqued and created—exactly what I hoped for teaching a media class.

The students’ agency/ownership of the project manifested itself best in the presidential debate, which was under the lights in the campus auditorium. My colleagues were forward-thinking enough to allow a twitter hashtag to run on the projector on stage while the candidates answered questions down front. As a result, many of the questions asked of the candidates originated in the seats in front of them! This agency piqued the interest of the entire ASP community.

The Debate

Once engaged, students voiced their opinions through twitter, but also in whispers to their neighbors, and the next day, much more vocally at “fruit break.” When the students felt like they stumped the candidates with questions, they got into it and in turn got something out of it. They felt that they were contributing to something important even though the stakes were as low as student governance of a five-week summer enrichment program.

Debating the issues at Fruit Break

The activity encouraged students to use their social capital, and their social media pages for good. Some of my tweets on the evening of the debate garnered multiple retweets and favorites. This means that a number of students were willing to broadcast the fact that they were participating in #ASPElect to all of their friends back at home (during summer vacation!). Students lent legitimacy to student government (something that has traditionally been a popularity contest) and hopefully more broadly, to civic engagement as a whole

I learned two crucial lessons from this activity. First, we need to allow our students to have more agency in school activities. They need to be able to send out their own messages, answer each other’s questions, and sculpt their own campus (and online) profiles. Secondly, engagement comes from school events that students are interested in, but the events deliver more learning when we can ensure that they’re engaging enough to appear in students’ social feeds.

I hope that students enjoyed this activity enough to keep it going when they returned to their high schools for their senior year. It took creativity, collaboration and innovation—all 21st century skills—to succeed in all facets of this project. If students engage with these processes at their own schools--or even better, politically and journalistically on a local or national level--I’d be thrilled. Certainly at this program, students seized the opportunity we provided. They made it entertaining, informational and rewarding. As a result, this project helped build skills, build community, and build relationships that will go beyond the walls of our summer school