Young people want to be heard. They want adults to hear their stories, consider their ideas, and value them as partners in finding solutions for issues facing their communities.

Youth Collective Advisory Board December 2019 Meeting

The WNET Group is listening.

Started in 2018, Youth Collective is the WNET Group’s Generation Z media and education initiative that provides a space for young people to discuss issues they care about. Through youth media and convenings like an annual youth summit, we aim to amplify youth voice and ground our work in ethics education, with support from the Prindle Institute for Ethics.

One of our goals is to prioritize Next Gen Public Media’s “By/With/For Youth” principles. In an effort to give youth more direct input into our initiatives, we have partnered with consulting firms and media agencies who specialize in reaching the elusive 13-24-year-old community. At an even more participatory level, in 2019 we established a youth advisory board to help build and steer our annual Youth Collective summit.

Advisory Board

Our first Youth Advisory Board included 12 high school students from across the New York metro area, who met regularly for pizza, discussion, and constructive input.

Advisor Nicolette Carrion leads the Mental Health Activation Station at the Beyond the Vote Summit.

The board’s main task? Helping to shape our second annual summit. The March 2020 convening brought together 200 NYC, Long Island, and New Jersey high school students for a day of workshops, speakers, and conversation about what it means to be civically engaged.

Our advisors were an integral part of the summit planning process. They helped us to select the theme—“Beyond the Vote”—and develop the structure of the summit.

Inspired by our friends at YVote, a part of Next Gen Politics, our advisors researched, planned, and led “activation stations” designed to spark thoughtful conversations about four election year issues: Immigration, Climate Change, Gender Rights, and Mental Health. For example, at the immigration station, students played a Jeopardy-style game using questions from the U.S. citizenship test, then discussed barriers to citizenship and what it means to be “American.”

Advisors (l-r) Taiye Simmons, Georgia Rabin, Christian Charles, Nicolette Carrion, Raymond Fernandez, and Julia Mechner at the Beyond the Vote Summit

Our advisors guided big decisions as well as finer points. (Are water bottles a cool giveaway? Do people like hoodies or zip-up sweatshirts more? The answers: Yes, and hoodies, please.) This year, we look forward to letting them take an even larger lead in the year’s activities and planning process.

JUV Consulting, a professional firm run completely by Gen Z consultants age 25 and younger, was our thought partner when it came to summit planning. Most significantly, they connected us with incredible youth leaders, many of whom were not on our radar—enabling us to bring in panelists and speakers who could relate authentically to the Youth Collective community (including the inspiring and influential Ziad Ahmed, Deja Foxx, Chelsea Miller, and Matt Post).

Youth Collective Instagram (@theyouthcollect)

We also collaborated closely with Adolescent Content, a media agency that specializes in reaching Gen Z through marketing, advertising, and original content. Adolescent helped develop a fresh brand for Youth Collective, bringing in their Gen Z network to test for branding appeal.

Adolescent’s network of Gen Z creators have pitched and produced content designed for our audience on social media. They’ve been invaluable as we work to feature diverse voices and content, as well as authentically growing our network and audience of young people.

In addition, we work with young people to create videos that capture Youth Collective’s mission and work through our partnership with Reel Works, a Brooklyn-based organization that trains teens in media production, then hires them to create media for clients. Reel Works has been our go-to crew to cover our annual summit and produce videos for our YouTube channel.

Actively collaborating with Gen Z to create media “by/with/for youth” guides all of our work with Youth Collective. We continue to learn from young people as we expand our audience and our own work in new, exciting ways.

Kristina Kirtley is a Senior Producer for Content and Youth Engagement, Kids’ Media and Education at WNET, New York’s flagship public media company. As a former high school English teacher, she spent years working directly with students and was thrilled to help create Youth Collective, WNET’s Gen Z media and engagement initiative, to again work directly with young people. In addition to Youth Collective, she also develops meaningful education resources and professional development for various productions like American Masters, Great Performances, and the history gaming series Mission US. Kristina graduated from Stanford University and City College as part of the New York City Teaching Fellows Program.   

Michelle Chen is Senior Producer, Kids Media and Education at WNET, where she has been creating content for public television and digital platforms since 2004. She has received Emmy awards for her work as a producer on the PBS KIDS series Cyberchase and the multiplatform project, Get the Math. She serves as senior producer onMission US, which received the Japan Prize for Educational Media and the Games for Change Award for Most Significant Impact, and has worked on a variety of other kids’ media and education projects for WNET, including Youth Collective, the PBS KIDS video and gaming series Oh Noah!, and Parenting Minutes. Michelle graduated from Harvard University. 

Hannah Dawe is the Learning Partnerships and Engagement Specialist in Kids’ Media and Education at WNET. She works to connect and support educators through media projects, community engagement, and professional development. She was the education project lead for NJTV Learning Live, WNET’s instructional series to help kids learn remotely, created in spring 2020 in response to COVID-19. She works on a variety of other projects, including producing content for PBS LearningMedia and Youth Collective. Before WNET, Hannah worked as a professional actor, director, and teaching artist in Chicago and New York City. She graduated from Northwestern University and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

Launching on World Children’s Day 2020, the Digital Futures Commission invites innovators, policymakers, researchers, and civil society to unlock digital innovation in the interests of children and young people. The work will be informed throughout by insights from children and young people themselves, and is geared toward real-world change for children, guided by the Commissioners and supported by 5Rights Foundation.

Children and Young People’s Voices

The work has begun by listening to what children and young people value about the digital world and the changes they call for. They have a lot to say, often thinking of the digital as ‘their domain’ and showing enthusiasm for the internet. But they also express frustration over their lack of agency regarding digital design, provision, regulation, and redress.

Our research agenda is organized around a series of problems linked to positive propositions. While the media, and many policy debates, are – rightly – full of concerns about what’s going wrong for children online, our aim in the Digital Futures Commission is to figure out what good looks like for children in a digital world and to develop inspiring yet practical ways of bringing this to fruition.

It seems deeply problematic to us that children get marginalized conceptually and practically when digital services are designed for the “general population” or “household.” The typical focus on the misleadingly-generic “internet user” renders children invisible in practical terms, including in “smart home” or “smart city” contexts, and in big data collected by the State or businesses. Insofar as services fail to address the needs and rights of their child users, child rights and safety advocates find themselves effortfully trying to retrofit finished products, child-blind regulations, and practices to address the worst problems.

By contrast, we seek to imagine digital futures (plural) for a public that includes children and does not bracket them off as an exception, problem, or afterthought. At the heart of the project is the ambition of embedding the best interests of children upstream in processes of innovation and design.

What do we mean by the best interests of the child? According to UNICEF:

“Best interests of the child—this applies to all actions and decisions concerning children and calls for active measures to respect their rights and promote their survival, growth, and well-being as children, as well as measures to support and assist parents and others who have day-to-day responsibility for realizing children’s rights.”

This quote comes from UNICEF’s Children’s Rights and Business Principles (2013), a document that brings together the best interests principle (article 3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) with the UN Framework and Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011) which sets out States’ obligations to ensure that business meets its human rights responsibilities, including to children and young people.

Photo: A. Sabat

It’s fascinating to reflect that none of these documents makes any mention of digital technology, notwithstanding their recency. Ensuring children’s best interests are met in a digital world therefore poses considerable challenges of understanding, expertise, and implementation.

Nonetheless, the core idea is simple: States, businesses, civil society must anticipate and address the needs and rights of children insofar as they might be affected by decisions being taken. However, the practice is far from simple. How can children’s best interests be taken into account by designers, providers, or processes of internet governance when it is often unknown whether a service user is a child, let alone their age or circumstances?  Also, if society hasn’t managed to embed children’s best interests in the offline world, as the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child requires, how will it do so in a fast-evolving and highly diversified and unequal digital world?

Traditionally, decisions about children’s best interests are made for individual cases, knowing the circumstances. But digital service providers address users collectively, so systemic solutions are needed. To advance from problems towards solutions, the Digital Futures Commission will need to think carefully about children’s needs and rights, about digital innovation and associated business models, about processes of regulation and guidance for innovators. We are focusing on three areas – play in a digital world, beneficial uses of education data, and guidance for innovators – and engaging children and young people, stakeholders, and the public to reimagine the digital world that better serves children’s interests through processes of design-led, deliberative consultation.

We’re grounding our inquiry on the situation for children in the UK, so as to make our evidence and recommendations specific and actionable for particular stakeholders and circumstances. Our hope is that principles and recommendations will emerge of wider value, and we look forward to engaging with you. While the work will be child-centered and tech-focused, that’s not to say that we will necessarily prioritize the digital over the alternatives, nor position children and technology in a specialist silo. Rather, we aim to put child rights firmly on the agenda of the technologists, and children’s positive digital engagement on the agenda of regulators, the children’s workforce, and the public. After all, the digital world is the world, and children are its future.

Sonia Livingstone DPhil (Oxon), FBA, FBPS, FAcSS, FRSA, OBE is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of 20 books on children’s online opportunities and risks, including “The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age”. Sonia has advised the UK government, European Commission, European Parliament, Council of Europe, and other national and international organisations on children’s rights, risks, and safety in the digital age.

Dr. Kruakae Pothong is a Researcher at 5Rights and visiting research fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research spans the areas of human-computer interaction, digital ethics, data protection, internet, and other related policies. She specializes in designing social-technical research, using deliberative methods to elicit human values and expectations of technological advances, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and distributed ledgers.

For more, read Michael Preston’s statement about the Digital Futures Commission. »

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is thrilled to be part of the Digital Futures Commission, an exciting new initiative that launches this week. The Commission’s goals amplify our own efforts here at the Cooney Center, and we are proud to be part of an international effort to put children’s needs at the center of our increasingly digital world.

Why a Digital Futures Commission?

Like most transformative innovations, from television to the internet, new digital spaces and tools tend to be developed with adults in mind. This phenomenon extends across everything we use today, including video platforms, social media, and smartphones. But we know that children are early and enthusiastic adopters of technology, and develop their own ways of engaging with media and each other. In fact, four years ago, Professor Sonia Livingstone estimated that one in three internet users is under 18 years old—a number that may be conservative today. Yet children’s voices are rarely included in the development of new innovations, research, or practice, and they are seldom considered in the design process or policy debates.

Flickr: Howard County Library System

How can we better safeguard children and protect them from potential risks and harms, but also ensure that they have access to the tools and knowledge they need to thrive and are equipped to accomplish what they want? Here at the Cooney Center, we know that producers want to do what’s best for children—how can we make sure that they have the support and guidance they need? We already know a great deal about how children learn and grow, but there are significant gaps in how we bridge this knowledge across disparate sectors. The answers should be generated cooperatively, starting with the establishment of common understandings about children and shared visions for the future we want them to have.

What the Commission will do

The Digital Futures Commission aims to accomplish the above via a research collaboration of “innovators, policy makers, regulators, academics and civil society, to unlock digital innovation in the interests of children and young people.” The Commission is led by 5Rights Foundation founder Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE and child online expert Professor Sonia Livingstone OBE of the London School of Economics, who will oversee a team of researchers and staff. It is advised by commissioners dedicated to ensuring that children and young people’s interests are prioritized in the development and innovation of digital products, services, and research.

Over a three-year period, the Commission will develop research and guidance in three areas: play in a digital world, beneficial uses of education data, and guidance for innovators. The work will be informed by research and the active inclusion of children’s voices, and the outputs will be designed to generate real-world change for children.

 A brief summary of each area follows:

• Play in a digital world: Work in this area seeks to understand “what good looks like” for children’s play in a digital world. The Commission will examine the concept of free play, what makes free play integral and valuable to childhood, barriers and enablers, and how it might be translated to and enhanced in the digital world. The Commission’s first report, A Panorama of Play, reviews the history of ideas about free play and proposes the qualities of play that matter in a digital world.
• Beneficial uses of education data: Work in this area seeks to leverage the massive amount of data collected about children, learning analytics, and AI innovations in order to benefit children’s education. The Commission will review existing policy and practice and conduct new research in order to develop a framework for the beneficial use of children’s educational data with recommendations for child-rights-respecting data governance mechanisms.
• Guidance for innovators: Work in this area seeks to shape guidance for designers and developers so they can prioritize the interests of children and young people. The Commission will map existing and emerging frameworks that incorporate ethics, rights, and values in order to develop practical child rights-respecting and child-centered methods for digital innovators.

A Panorama of Play is a new report from the Digital Futures Commission

I am proud to be among the commissioners, alongside representatives from the LEGO Group, BBC Research and Development North Lab, Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, EY, Technological University Dublin, the Alan Turing Institute, the Behavioural Insights Team, University of Leeds, London School of Economics and Political Science, Erase All Kittens, Leeds Beckett University, and the Shirkat Gah Women’s Resource Centre. Currently, the Commission’s work is centered on children in Europe, but because our children are growing up in a world that is globally connected, we are honored to represent the United States. We are looking forward to helping to shape the work that will take place over the next few years, and are eager to share what we learn.

This Friday, November 20, please join the Digital Futures Commission for a free webinar to mark World Children’s Day and the release of a new report, A Panorama of Play. Sonia Livingstone will lead a conversation with Ann Phoenix, Kate Cowan, and Chris Bateman exploring the future of free play in the digital world.

Register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gxTYaQ-3TPiUsaLHX37-GQ

It’s that time of year again – time to vote for your favorite SXSW EDU 2021 panels. We’re disappointed not to be able to share tacos with you in Austin, but we’re very excited to talk about why tweens and teens are public media’s “missing middle” audience, the challenges of reaching these kids, and potential opportunities for public media. And, as if that weren’t enough for you, we’re having this conversation with public media luminaries Deb Sanchez, Senior Vice President, Education and Children’s Content at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Milton Chen, Senior Fellow and Executive Director, Emeritus of the George Lucas Educational Foundation.

The SXSW EDU panel selection process relies on input from the community – that’s where you come in! To vote, please visit panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote and log in or create an account. You can find our proposal here.

TWEENS, TEENS, AND PUBLIC MEDIA: THE MISSING MIDDLE

Vote for our panel at https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/108103

While most young kids watch PBS, they leave public media behind in their tween and teen years. But youth still need engaging and educational content as they form their identities, opinions, and sense of purpose. With its mission to inform and educate, public media must envision a future in which young people are equipped with the knowledge and skills to build the world they want to live in. We’ll discuss our latest research and how public media can serve this “missing middle” audience

1. Attendees will learn about the landscape of youth media practices based on new research from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center
2. We will discuss emerging opportunities for public media to reach young audiences that have been uncovered through the research
3. We will share some of the innovative projects that public media organizations have been doing to create media by, with, and for tween & teen audiences

Speakers:

We hope that you will vote for our proposal—please spread the word! And please let us know if you’ve got a panel proposal that we can support too by sharing a comment here or reaching out via Twitter or Facebook.

Unlike kids in the 70s, tweens and teens today are posting, dancing, and streaming across platforms from TikTok to Twitch. They have no interest in being corralled to discrete brands or destinations. They enjoy a banquet of high-quality digital offerings that are ready when and where they are. And they’re always one step ahead of us.

While just about everything has changed in terms of media consumption, something essential has not: kids’ curiosity and desire for agency. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) has recently re-committed itself—and challenged public media to create—content “by, with, and for” tweens and teens. At GBH, we have been doubling down on and exploring new platform opportunities including YouTube, Twitch, and Alexa Skills for our long-standing televised High School Quiz Show academic competition and digital-first projects including Career Hacks, a YouTube series that provides advice to young people entering the workforce. But to consistently get it right, we’d all do well to turn around and look back. The approach of the 1970s blockbuster show ZOOM hints at a successful path.

ZOOM was produced by GBH from 1972-1978.

The threads we can continue to pull on, regardless of the platform and in spite of the challenges, are those that inspired the producers of ZOOM: meet young people where they are, create space for their voices to be uplifted and heard, and ensure that we stay true to the inclusive principles and mission of public media.

A weekly series for 7—12-year-olds, ZOOM was created by GBH in Boston and broadcast weekly on PBS. Its innovative and improvisational format, keen sensitivity to the needs of the underserved, and exuberant embrace of diversity and inclusion made it a media sensation. ZOOM had done something truly novel—it gave a cast of real kids (not actors) and viewers unprecedented agency to mold and shape content to match their interests, meet their needs, and to celebrate their stage and place in life.

As Chris Sarson, the creator and executive producer of the series, says, creating high-quality media for kids means the same thing today as it did then: providing an environment to learn rather than designing explicitly to teach.

ZOOM viewers saw themselves and their lives reflected through cast members and content. They became devoted fans and idea generators, sending thousands of letters a week to GBH. Many of those fans, even today, passionately recall the impact ZOOM had on their lives.

Why? Because the program was theirs. Before the first broadcast, producers had spent more than a year watching, talking with, and learning from kids about what they wanted the show to be. GBH asked kids across the country for ideas, and they poured into the station: Experiments, physical challenges, activities, plays, and jokes. The producers assembled a homegrown, diverse, enthusiastic cast and let the cameras roll. As Sarson explains, they were provided with direction—but not a script. Using prompts like, “Here’s where you should ideally start and end… how you get there is up to you,” the young people learned while they created. And their audience was with them at every step.

Ultimately, the series was not able to overcome the familiar obstacles in the public media system: a weakened federal funding stream, lean economic times, and competing local and national priorities. ZOOM was canceled at the height of its popularity.

Public media can have renewed success with this audience if we (1) shift the power dynamic from adult to kid to ensure young people have agency, and (2) develop the capacity to unlearn what we know (or think we know) so we can hear and respond to the audience’s authentic needs and opinions. It’s all there in the ZOOM formula:  take the time to watch, listen to, and learn from kids of all ages, circumstances, and abilities about what they want the media to be.

Hillary Wells, WGBH Executive Producer and Director of Youth Media has over 30 years of experience amplifying the youth voice through the creation, development and production of multi-platform, multi-partner local and national media series and events. Hillary is currently focused on general audience short form video and podcast content creation for youth and young adults with a particular focus on civil discourse, civic engagement and career readiness.