{"id":10696,"date":"2016-03-19T16:20:09","date_gmt":"2016-03-19T23:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/?p=10696"},"modified":"2016-03-20T05:55:14","modified_gmt":"2016-03-20T12:55:14","slug":"dear-next-president-young-people-have-something-to-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/dear-next-president-young-people-have-something-to-say\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear Next President, Young People Have Something to Say"},"content":{"rendered":"

Students and educators embrace digital writing and media-making as chance to be heard in an election year.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"l2p2_logo_600\"<\/a>Before 2008, Anna Patterson never paid much attention to politics. She was 16 back then and didn\u2019t see how actions in Washington affected her life in Tupelo, Mississippi.<\/p>\n

That all changed when she was in 11th<\/sup> grade. The economy was in shambles, gas prices were through the roof, the country was fighting two wars, and a little-known senator from Illinois named Barack Obama was running against Senator John McCain for the presidency.<\/p>\n

Patterson\u2019s English teacher, Ellen Shelton, started guiding her class through a project\u00a0from the National Writing Project called Letters to the Next President<\/a>. They analyzed the candidates\u2019 speeches and debates, parsing out what was fact and fiction, and eventually published their own letters to the next president using a then-new\u00a0collaborative writing platform called GoogleDocs. Patterson and her classmates published letters about the healthcare system, marriage equality, and the recession\u2014joining with hundreds of students around the country.<\/p>\n

Today, Patterson is an 11th<\/sup> grade English teacher herself during an election year filled with surprises and high stakes. She is planning to take her students through the same process, and hopes to use the election as a platform to help her students understand the power of words, facts, and argument in a democratic society.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like I owe it to my classroom to do this again,\u201d Patterson said. \u201cThe experience really changed my perspective on argumentative writing, and about how politics woks in this country as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

This time around, a few things are different. Letters to the Next President 2.0\u2014or L2P 2.0\u2014is a product of 2016 through-and-through, with KQED as a co-host and many other connected learning and media partners<\/a> in the mix. In late summer, y<\/span>oung people will be invited to formally publish their letters, in text and\/or multimedia, to the \u00a0L2P 2.0 website<\/span>. In the lead up to that time, the\u00a0L2P 2.0 website<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>focuses<\/span> on bringing together a range of resources and opportunities for educators and mentors, meant to support creating opportunities and capacity for this work in classrooms across the country. Some of these opportunities are offered so that educators themselves, with or without their students, can try new things such as <\/span>collectively annotating<\/span><\/a>\u00a0historic speeches <\/span>online. Other <\/span>opportunities<\/span> are meant explicitly to support classrooms in trying their hand at some multimodal making, such as<\/span> \u201c<\/span>Media Makes<\/span><\/a>\u201d organized by KQED and various partners.\u00a0The L2P 2.0 website<\/span><\/a> also features resources that range from helping students analyze candidates\u2019 arguments to developing their own.<\/span> A shared twitter handle, #2nextprez, allows for sharing of work, ideas and resources via social media.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Ellen<\/a>

Ellen Shelton’s\u00a02008 class used the election and Letters to the Next President as a platform to learn about argumentative writing.<\/p><\/div>\n

Even though the circumstances surrounding the election and some of the resources are new, the heart of the project is the same. When young people write to the future president, they are in many ways writing to themselves and their community about the kind of society they envision for the future.<\/p>\n

Michael Thompson, the National Writing Project site director at the Bisti Writing Project at San Juan College in northwestern New Mexico, said some writers dive easily into the issues but others have more difficulty because they do not see their lives reflected in political discussions.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike many rural places that are isolated, it\u2019s very hard for my students to feel like they\u2019re part of the national conversation,\u201d Thompson said in a recent webinar about L2P 2.0. \u201cThey feel marginalized. Much of what they see in media or on TV is not about them, or people like them. It\u2019s hard for them to feel like they\u2019re being heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Thompson said the idea of having a national audience on GoogleDocs helped students become excited about expressing their views in 2008. They wrote about siblings deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, or about family members with illnesses who could not get insurance coverage.<\/p>\n

\u201cI watched them grapple with everything one does in argument writing,\u201d he said. \u201cBut in the end, I saw them find their voice by finding what personally mattered the most to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patterson said it\u2019s not easy for a teacher to navigate tense political issues in a classroom and ensure all students feel respected. But during this election year, she said, she is taking advice from her own 11th<\/sup> grade teacher, Ellen Shelton, who reminded her students the classroom was home to the \u201cpurple party.\u201d Instead of debating which ideas were right or wrong, Shelton focused her lessons on effective, fact-based argumentative writing.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy hope for 2016 is that teachers use this as a jumping-off point to think about where their kids are in this universe,\u201d said Shelton, who also took part in the webinar. She said it\u2019s easy for adults to assume young people are not interested in politics, but in 2008 she found that couldn\u2019t be further from the truth when she read her students\u2019 letters. \u201cThey felt like people cared about what some kids from Mississippi had to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

Feature Photo\/ Rocky T<\/a><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Through the Letters to the Next President 2.0 project, students and educators embrace digital writing and media-making as chance to be heard in an election year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":10998,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[659,48,580,486],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10696"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10696"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11057,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10696\/revisions\/11057"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}