“We used to love playing Xbox all day. That used to be great. But now that it’s all we really do or have to do, they’re always like, ‘Oh, I’m so bored of Xbox. I just wanna do something else.’”

(Boy, Age 17 / Pasco County, Florida)

Last year the Joan Ganz Cooney Center launched the By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences initiative. Next Gen Public Media aims to “understand the media habits of tweens and teens and to envision a future of public media that equips young people to participate and thrive in today’s complex world.” While it is explicitly designed to support and instigate the public media sector to develop innovative and unique strategies to better engage young audiences, their research is open to all. It can serve as a source of inspiration for anyone working with youth.

They recently released The Missing Middle: Reimagining a Future for Tweens, Teens, and Public Media. This is an exciting report. Their team spoke with 50 tweens and teens across the U.S. about how they spend their time with media, what issues are important to them, and more. This is the “missing middle” for public television – the viewers aged between those watching Sesame Street and Downton Abbey. They asked these youth for “advice about what media producers should do if they want to engage with people their age” and then spoke with them about how their lives have changed during the pandemic.

I came to this report with a very particular lens. Since December of last year, I have been exploring what role video games play in the lives of today’s youth. That led me to the report with a particular question: How can institutions of higher learning build pathways for high school students based on their deep interest in video games? In fact, during my own research this past winter – focus groups, 1:1 interviews, and surveys with NYC students, college students, and educators – I realized I had been framing it all wrong.

Rather than just ask about the roles played by games in the lives of today’s youth, I began asking them how games help them to be who they want to be in the world. This shifts the focus from games as discrete products to games as portals into rich ecosystems – such as YouTube and Twitch videos, Discord community chats, modding sites, game servers, and more. This shifts the agency from the gaming company (how games impact youth) to the youth (how youth use games). And it frames the question around how youth are making decisions every day – navigating and managing their feelings, pursing their interests, strategizing their lives – and how they are using games as one of many tools to construct their identity and engage the world.

One young man spoke to me about how playing games develops his capacity for learning in school: “Games help us be who we want to be in the world. ‘Cuz when you play your video games, that feeling when you do really good, it’s real motivating. It makes you feel really good about yourself and it makes you want to keep going, like in Apex [Legends], right? Let’s say you’ve been having a bunch of good games lately, you want to keep the streak going, even for days. That can relate to real life. It can be something small, like you’re struggling in math, but you’re starting to get a hang of it, you know, you finally feel like you caught up with everyone, that rewarding feeling – you can kind of trace those two together.”

Another teen, a young woman, spoke about how playing games has prepared her for her planned career in the health professions: “[Games] could have an impact on what you want to do in your future. Because I personally want to work in the emergency room. I want to be a PA [physician’s assistant]. So I feel like when you play games, you need like critical thinking, you need to think fast. And those are some of the things that you need as a PA… to memorize things like when you go to nursing school… They have some factors that have to do with you developing skills for the future.”

Responses like these and others focused on how games themselves helped teens to shape their lives, but usually glossed over or ignored games’ broader ecosystem. To make their journey through the broader world of games and their game communities visible, we came up with a different approach. We started with a sort of mind-map template. In the middle they put in the name of one game. Then, in the surrounding constellations, they described all the different things they did related to that game when they were NOT playing it, who it connected them with (directly or through things they created), and what roles it allowed them to enact.

In the example below, this student chose Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. LoZ helps this student be an artist (drawing LoZ-related art) and a singer (of LoZ melodies), a consumer of LoZ gameplay videos and LoZ-music, and a “learner” of videos that use LoZ to teach game design. The final step in this process is to explore all those roles to look for a unifying narrative, to highlight how the player is using the game’s broader ecosystem to be who them want in the world. In this case: someone who can take inspiration, wonder and learning from one source then apply it somewhere else in order to better themselves and others.

The mind map described in the previous paragraph.

This process allowed me to shift from: How can institutions of higher learning build pathways for high school students based on their deep interest in video games?” to “How can institutions of higher learning build pathways for high school students based on the interests generated through their love of games.” The key shift here is away from fetishizing games themselves, and re-focusing on the broad areas impacted by gaming. So yes, games might inspire youth to go into STEM. But I also heard from youth about how it inspired them or informed their efforts to go into sociology, toy design, event planning and, as noted above, to work in an emergency room.

The new report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is not ABOUT games. It is about the broader topic of media. But as they demonstrated, you can’t talk with youth about media without talking about games. In the executive summary, the first of their ten key takeways is:

Video dominates media experiences for youth and is the lifeblood for social media and gaming… We were surprised by the frequency with which tweens and teens rely on how-to videos to support their school work, gaming, creativity, and development of life skills.

The report discusses how games drive video engagement across a wide range of platforms and formats, how the “exceptionally uneven nature of device and console ownership” is having “a profound impact” on their “inclusion or exclusion from social groups,” and the importance of how-to videos.

And when it came to recommendations, there is something here as well for those beyond public media. “When we ask youth for their advice on how public media could create more appealing content for kids their age, the issue of representation is paramount: they want to see kids like them, as well as others who reflect the diversity they see in their generation.” In addition, “Our method of talking to tweens and teens, asking for their opinions, informing what is possible and what might help to fill some of these gaps in commercial media is a model moving forward for public media to consider.” In my design practice, speaking with end users is just good user-based design, which is why both high school and college students are part of my research to inform new pathways to college. But this recommendation can serve as a helpful reminder to us all. Especially when serving youth. As they wrote, “Kids are grateful for a chance to be heard, and they were surprised that we were taking their opinions seriously.”

The report spends a good amount of time addressing youth’s interests in not just consuming something of value but creating something of value, explaining why they spend so much time in social media dialogues (text chats on YouTube, video exchanges on TikTok, photo play on Instagram, etc.). This is framed as speaking to youth interest in representation, in personalization, in peer-produced content. Critics see this “abundance of content and personalization … [as] more noise than promise,” akin to the label applied to television 60 years ago when it was famously called the “vast wasteland”. We all know today how Sesame Street’s founder, Joan Ganz Cooney, responded. The report suggests this is a similar moment, a time that calls for vision to “create a trusted space for learning and growing as youth transition from childhood to adulthood and develop identities deeply intertwined with the media ecosystem.”

I look forward to watching as others respond to that call and participating in projects like this, which are engaging youth in building that bridge to their future.

 

In Spring 2020, as schools around the United States were forced to turn to remote learning methods, a number of research teams around the country mobilized to study how families were adjusting to the pandemic. In July 2020, Dr. Brigid Barron and her team at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center convened a virtual workshop with research teams from Stanford, University of Washington, and the University of Michigan to explore innovative methods for studying family and community learning while sheltering at home. Here, Angela Calabrese Barton and Day Greenberg from the University of Michigan describe their team’s collaboration with youth to understand the way young people used and analyzed data in order to make sense of the world around them.

 

This year, youth have consistently engaged in learning about scientific, technological, social, racial, and economic dimensions of public health and disease. They have also learned about how these dimensions shape each other, such as how the pandemic has amplified racial and economic inequalities (leading them, us, and many others to adopt the term “multi-pandemic”). For example, many of the parents of youth in our study are essential workers, and some have lost their jobs. In Michigan, they’ve seen White supremacists protest at their state’s capitol and block access to the city’s main hospital with vehicles and guns, all in the name of freedom to disregard COVID-19 restrictions. Across the US, they have gone online to learn how to make masks and hand sanitizer when those were hoarded by others, and they have sought to provide each other help and solace in the struggles of online schooling and social isolation associated with their lives in a pandemic. One could argue that elementary- to college-aged youth have been doing more out-of-school learning than ever.

Since March 2020, we have been collaborating with youth in the Midwest and West Coast of the US to hear how they have experienced the multi-pandemic from a learning perspective.

One thing we learned is that youth navigation of COVID-19 has involved sophisticated action-taking with data and data infrastructures. They’ve curated and co-opted wide-ranging forms of data from different knowledge and value systems, such as local COVID-19 dashboards for their schools and cities, visualizations of viral spread, and TikTok videos describing mental health strategies for coping with long-term isolation. Youth continue to access, analyze, and apply data to learn about their world and solve new problems. They also critically examine how power shapes and uses data to surveil and direct them and the people they care about, just as it shapes and limits how different youth can access data. In response, youth have created new ways of engaging with data to transform the world as they navigate it.

First, youth are expert users of big data.

Youth in our study searched for and accessed data such as large-scale data sets and symptom tracker apps in response to personal and family needs, paying attention to data origins and purposes. All youth in our study mentioned visiting the CDC or the WHO online. Twelve-year-old Prez explained, “I looked at its spread-per-day worldwide. What I figured out really scared me.” Youth also tried to connect national data with local data, like 14-year-old Ivy who searched by zip code in her county’s dashboard to see where cases clustered, and how that compared to broader trends: “Since corona was coming here, I wanted to know exactly how it was hitting us. I looked in the CDC but it just showed the state [infection rates]. What about [my city]? That is what I was searching.”

Youth also cared about data credibility, as 17-year-old Bella explained: “I trust the CDC way more than the president and the White House press briefings because they know what they are talking about. It’s their job. It’s what they studied. . . They have procedures they follow. They check their findings. They are way more credible. Way more credible. Trump has no background in science or medicine.” Credibility-checking often led to critiquing politicized information, such as when 17-year-old Arim shared frustration with how participation in peaceful protests was criticized while other social gatherings were not.

Second, they are critics, co-opters, and counter-narrators of big data. Youth were critical of the limits of big data and responding with critical data practices and challenged and re-made the big/small divide. For example, while youth by-and-large trusted some central sources of big data (e.g., the CDC) due to their scientific origins, they also were clear about their limits, as Ivy points out, “they don’t actually know anything about me.” While big data offered statistical power, it still reflected the people who generated it. Jazmyn was critical of the lack of representation of the Black community. She stated, “I don’t see myself in [these data].” Similarly, Bella stated, “It’s not numbers that will solve the pandemic, but the stories people tell with numbers. . . If we don’t have different perspectives on the numbers, it will only offer one story. That won’t help everyone.”

Third, youth are using the phenomenon of data as sites of struggle for justice. For example, 14-year-old Jazmyn clicked through YouTube to access CDC data on COVID-19, but she also searched TikTok for risk mitigation protocols directly from Black nurses, a perspective she trusted the most. The events of 2020 had, according to Jazmyn, quickly repositioned TikTok as a connector to medical experts on the front lines of the pandemic. This new process of coming-to-know and coming-to-act with data via TikTok was especially important in order to ensure she was doing all she could to protect her younger brother, whom she described as being in a high-risk category.

Central to the struggle for justice, youth challenged the dehumanization of impersonal data narratives. One youth, 13-year-old Tianna, challenged the implied narrative that people can navigate and absorb pandemic facts while maintaining their mental well-being. Initially, Tianna invested significantly in learning about the new virus: “When I found out about it, I was like, okay. I looked it up to see what it was. I looked up the symptoms. I looked up everything.” Her data-gathering investment changed over time as she began to learn how the virus impacted her loved ones: “Cause my grandma’s elderly, and I love my grandma.” Engaging with data as fully human meant acknowledging that her reaction to data mattered. When learning about symptoms and “unjust deaths” became overwhelming, Tianna also sought alternative narratives about the pandemic, such as how it was “reducing pollution,” leading to more of a “love/hate relationship” with it: “People are dying… But then there’s good things, like about the oceans clearing up, the dolphins coming back, and everything being more cleaner.” Taking her research and her experience of mental/emotional overload into account, she wanted to “know why the government isn’t helping… ease the burden” of public learning demands. She offered, for example, that the CDC could share memes with “proven facts inside the meme.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has datafied youths’ lives on broader scales than ever before. Datafication has occurred as an institutional confiscation of youths’ ideas, experiences, challenges, and hopes, rendering them anonymous. As acts of care for themselves and their communities, youth have critically reimagined data and data uses to work towards new futures where their lives are not taken out of their and their communities’ hands.

The implications of these youth efforts call for more collective space for understanding data, for welcoming new combinations of “big” and “small” data, for centering the voices of people society has marginalized, and for recognizing more dimensions of youth data engagement.

 

This work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, DRL #2028370

 

Angela Calabrese Barton, PhD, a professor of the learning sciences and science education at the University of Michigan School of Education, studies justice-oriented participatory STEM teaching, learning, and engagement in schools and communities.

 

Day Greenberg, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan School of Education and an after-school mentor at the Boys and Girls Club of Lansing, Michigan, focuses on critical participatory STEM and maker research and design with youth, their families, and community organizations.

After two tough years of pandemic disruption, young people have a lot to say about their experiences, struggles, and hopes for the future. And we as educators and public media creators have a unique opportunity to help students reconnect with their schools and communities–and reenergize our airwaves and digital channels with Gen Z voices. 

This is one reason we’re excited about KQED’s seven Youth Media Challenges (YMCs). Valuable learning and powerful mediamaking arise when we give young people space to share their voice beyond the classroom. YMCs are media projects that help students make their voices heard, and their learning visible. Grounded in student choice and deeper learning best practices, Youth Media Challenges ask students to read, write, design, research, rehearse, refine, perform, then record and edit a digital creation. And finally, to share their work on KQED’s online youth media showcase with their peers and community. Select submissions are aired on KQED broadcasts and shared with PBS and NPR member stations to reach an even wider public media audience. 

Youth Media Challenges are not contests. KQED wants to elevate all youth voices on the showcase, including beginning mediamakers or those without access to pro tools. At the same time, YMCs are challenges. Asking students to seek solutions, tell their stories, share their views, or express their creativity isn’t easy. But doing so creates impacts that last well beyond the project or school year, especially those pieces that reach a wider audience over the air and through KQED’s digital channels. 

Over the coming year, KQED will be running seven Youth Media Challenges. Although storytelling with media is at the heart of all of the challenges, some YMCs may appeal more to science classrooms, while others align more closely with English, social studies, or arts curricula. This is because media literacy—the ability to analyze, evaluate and create media—doesn’t happen in one class, subject area or unit, but across disciplines and media formats. Each YMC has a distinct focus, prompt, or media type. After all, Gen Z isn’t a monolith, and young people have a powerfully diverse range of stories to tell. To learn how your station can distribute this exciting youth content, sign up to be notified about our upcoming webinars, co-hosted by NETA.

Here’s a rundown of all seven challenges: 

Our Rethink School with Mindshift Youth Media Challenge goes right to the heart of the present moment and asks: Now that schools are getting back to “normal,” should they? Or do we need a “new normal” for school? Students are invited to create an audio or video commentary about anything they think should change (or stay the same) about school. Our challenge partner is KQED’s Mindshift, an education podcast and blog with a broad national audience. Mindshift will feature youth voices from this challenge on their channels, and we are partnering with stations excited to include local Gen Z voices about what schools could be in a post-Covid world.  

Two YMCs focus on audio storytelling, grounded in students’ experiences and views on a topic of their choice. Perspectives is a voice-only audio essay about a life-changing moment, learning experience, or important issue. Podcasting with the California Report opens the door to short podcasts, also on any topic. Past entries have included sound-rich reflections on family, friendships, and favorite hobbies, as well as reporting on aquaponics, body image, and beliefs about masculinity. 

Communicating ideas through dance or art is the focus of an additional two challenges. If Schools Could Dance calls on students to choreograph and film an original dance that reflects the spirit and story of their school. Political Cartooning with Mark Fiore asks students to draw an original, one-panel political cartoon about a local, national or global issue they care about. 

Last but not least, the two YMCs geared toward STEM classrooms invite students to design, explain, create, and share using video or graphics. For the Engineering for Good challenge, students go through the engineering design process to come up with a solution for a problem, then share their prototype in an infographic or short video. The Science Documentary challenge asks students to explain a scientific phenomenon, concept, observation, or issue and how it connects to their lives.

What stands out when you think back on your classes in middle or high school? Most likely you remember the times you could express yourself or your views, connect with peers on a deeper level, and share your work with someone other than just the teacher. In this moment, public media has a chance to support Gen Z in raising their voices and connecting with their communities. KQED’s Youth Media Challenges are one place to start. 

To learn more about how to get involved with Youth Media Challenges and support the elevation of youth voice at your station, contact Almetria Vaba, director of education partnerships at avaba[at]KQED.org.

“While new technology is connecting us to each other in different and much faster ways, these changes will necessarily have a knock-on effect to how we interact with one another, how younger generations open up to new cultures and ideas, and how we interpret this cultural Tower of Babel from one era to the next.”
–Julian Vigo (Forbes, 2019)

Generation Z, born mainly between 1997 and 2010, inhabit a world with 24/7/365 access to on-demand media, social media, mobile devices, voice assistants, and Google.

But what makes them tick? And how can public media get them to tune in? These are just some of the questions addressed in the Joan Ganz Cooney Center report, The Missing Middle: Reimagining a Future for Tweens, Teens, and Public Media.

To understand what Gen Z wants to stream, content creators and public media must first gain a deeper proficiency of the cultural, political, and social forces shaping and influencing the worldviews of tweens and teens.

Inclusion is Everything

For Gen Z, diversity is more than a buzzword. It is their reality. The 2010 US Census noted that there had been a 50% increase in biracial youth since 2000, up to nearly 4.5 million. According to Pew Research (2020), roughly half (48%) of Gen Z identifies as racially or ethnically diverse.

“There’s this show called Euphoria and they include…a lot of like diverse communities. There’s Black people, White people, Spanish people, like there’s a lot of diversity in the show and not only within, like skin colors and, like races, but also the include LGBTQ+ people in the show.”
—Girl, 17 (Missing Middle, 2021)

The most significant influence on their attitudes towards race was the election of Barack Obama as the President of the United States. For Gen Z, Barack Obama’s election set a precedent and shaped their expectations for both representation and equality.

The Rainbow Connection

As the first generation to grow up in an era when same-sex marriage was considered the norm, equality for their LGBTQ+ friends and family is expected.

“I’d love to see more representations, like with all the LGBTQ community, in children’s media or overall, because I don’t think there’s enough. Also, I think people of color…should be represented more in cartoons.”
—Girl, 13 (Missing Middle, 2021)

Social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have also provided teens and tweens with access to communities where they share, learn, support, and connect with other LGBTQ+ youth and allies outside their immediate circle of friends and family. It’s a new reality that would have been unimaginable to older generations.

Ending Mental Health Stigma

Another trait that sets Gen Z tweens and teens apart from previous generations is their willingness to normalize the narrative and end stigma around discussing mental health issues.

“And I also feel like our generation is more open about having mental health issues, and that doesn’t mean you’re a terrible person if you have depression or something. It’s pretty normal.”
—Girl, 15 (Missing Middle, 2021)

Thanks mainly to having access to information, awareness, and mental health professionals creating content on social media platforms like TikTok, Gen Z is more open to acknowledging and talking about their mental health issues, advocating for their friends, and reducing stigma.

Media for the Missing Middle

The key to earning the trust of Gen Z audiences is rooted in listening, acknowledging their life experiences, sharing stories that mirror their lived reality, and creating content that widens the welcome to public media through representation and inclusion to viewers of all races, abilities, genders, ethnicities, and orientations.

One of the primary lessons from The Missing Middle: Reimagining a Future for Tweens, Teens, and Public Media report is that public media can look to the content created by Gen Z, streaming networks, and commercial media as examples of how to connect with the missing middle. For example, streaming networks like Netflix are making diversity and inclusion a priority. The streaming giant recently announced that they are focused on creating content inclusive of people with disabilities (Heasley, 2020).

HBO’s Euphoria attempts to give a realistic look into what it means to be a Gen Z teen. TikTok has created a Black Creatives incubator program designed to bring more diverse voices to the platform. The non-profit Rattlestick created Pride Plays’ Youth Write Now, a two-week free virtual playwriting intensive for LGBTQ youth.

A Roadmap for Public Media

Road Trip Nation and Above the Noise are two PBS programs that already incorporate many of the best practices outlined in the Missing Middle report and provide tangible examples for other public media creators on how to gain the attention of Gen Z and, soon, Gen Alpha viewers.

Road Trip Nation is an excellent example of a program airing on PBS that understands teen and young adult audiences. What makes the program relatable to Gen Z is that it not only features a diverse cast, but they can use the show as an authentic mirror for their own anxieties around figuring out a path in life. The show also distributes bite-sized remixes of their content on Gen Z-centric platforms like Instagram and YouTube to reach their target audience.

Above the Noise is a current event show produced by KQED and PBS Digital Studios geared towards Gen Z audiences. The topics featured on the program reflect teens’ real issues and aren’t afraid to tackle difficult and complex problems. The show takes its short-form video content to where Gen Z audiences are on Instagram and TikTok.

One of the most famous sayings about internet culture is “Don’t read the comments.” But as the tweens and teens interviewed in the Missing Middle study point out, your community is what happens in the comment section. The comment section is an opportunity for public media and content creators to listen and learn from tweens and teens. Both Road Trip Nation and Above the Noise use the comment section to their advantage, using it as a way to open a two-way dialogue between their content and their community.

The Missing Middle: Reimagining a Future for Tweens, Teens, and Public Media is a landmark study that will help public media better understand how to widen the welcome to next-generation public media viewers. The report is a powerful guide that will help creators better understand new youth cultures and assist them in creating more inclusive media that better reflects 21st-century teen life.

 

 

Derek E. Baird is an expert in kids’ content, community, and culture. He currently leads an independent kids media consultancy, working with a global roster of kids media and kid tech companies. He is also an independent research and evaluation consultant focusing on youth cultures and is the author of The Gen Z Frequency: How Brands Tune in & Build Credibility.