The class:
This summer, I taught a course called Mass Media in which we critiqued and created the media at a 6-week summer program. We kept a campus Instagram, Twitter and Wordpress. We worked hard to find efficient ways to keep up with the news and find media outlets where students could follow their individual passions. The students thrived. They transformed themselves into avid news consumers: critiquing, analyzing, offering opinions, and questioning the media and the news.
In one project, I asked students to record a podcast for our campus blog with the intention of telling the whole story, in laymen's terms, of something newsworthy that we had been following in our media course. One group chose to record a podcast about the presidential race (wordpress). We sensed an interest in the ASP community and followed up with a "community discussion" at lunch where those community members who were interested arrived to discuss the 2016 race (twitter). They came in large numbers!
The lifelong learning:
Unfortunately, this short program concluded a week ago today, but the learning did not stop. I had set up a GroupMe with my class when we were working on our final video project (lots of moving parts!). That GroupMe has buzzed everyday since, almost always with educational content. On Wednesday, one student posted a quiz that gauged which politician best suits the quiz-taker. When most of us in the group received Bernie Sanders, another student suggested we all travel to Manchester, NH to hear him in a town-hall meeting (it's a New Hampshire summer program). So, not only did my students continue to talk news/politics beyond the program, they organized a get-together at Bernie Sanders's version of our "community discussion." One third of the class attended.
As if attending a political rally wasn't enough, the four students who attended back-channeled it for the rest of us. Below are a few screenshots from their discussion.
One of my students even asked Mr. Sanders a question! Imagine that--a junior in high-school asking Bernie Sanders about his stance on ISIS and Iran-Israel.
The significance:
Obviously, I was overjoyed with my students' academic interest. I felt I had ignited this learning, this civic engagement, and this community where intellectual conversation is the norm, which is the opposite of how teenagers use new media these days.
I had a "If you build it, they will come" moment in which I realized that 16-17 year-old kids really do want to learn. They care about news and politics. And they want to talk to each other about it. They needed a place where they felt comfortable doing just that. And it turned out to be a GroupMe from a class that I thought had already come and gone.
I'll let their messages speak for themselves:
