By/With/For Youth Workshops: Promoting Teen and Tween Collaboration with Public Media

As part of our By/ With/ For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences initiative, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop invites you to mark your calendars for an upcoming series of capacity-building workshops about collaborating with youth in public media. Designed for producers, directors, and others committed to growing youth participation in public media, the workshops will highlight research-backed best practices for engaging tweens and teens. Attendees will leave each virtual workshop with examples of youth engagement work from outside of the public media ecosystem and will hear from program leaders and youth about impactful approaches. 

Each workshop will be 90 minutes long. During the first 30 minutes, researchers from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and panel guests will share research and related program examples. Participants will then take part in working sessions with break-out groups to reflect and consider how to apply insights to their contexts. 

Please join us.  More details regarding speakers will be announced in the coming weeks. 

• Workshop III: Content and Platform Innovation with Youth /July 13, 2022, 1:00 pm EST 
  Now more than ever, youth are looking for opportunities to use media in creative, interactive ways. Whether creating videos, spearheading social media campaigns, or sharing original artwork, today’s youth are proficient content creators and sharers. In order to reach youth audiences, public media creators are finding innovative ways to engage youth as not only viewers, but as co-creators as well.Drawing on research about youth-adult collaboration, and insights from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Next Gen research, this workshop will provide content creators with effective strategies for engaging in collaborative projects with youth.Dr. Yalda T. Uhls, professor at UCLA and founder of The Center for Scholars and Storytellers, will join as a featured speaker, along with members of the Center’s youth engagement team. They will share insights about ways in which adults and youth can co-design innovative media projects.

  The Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s youth fellows will also share their areas of expertise, providing creators with ideas for ways in which they can engage with youth who have diverse technical and creative skillsets.

Previous Workshops:

• Models of Youth-Adult Collaboration for Public Media / April 26, 2022

  Ben Kirshner, Professor of Learning Sciences and Human Development at the University of Colorado Boulder, will discuss his work with CU Engage, a center at the University of Colorado that works with community groups to address complex public challenges through academic courses, research projects, and creative work. Ben will discuss his experiences developing equity-oriented partnerships with youth organizations and his approach to youth-adult partnerships.

  We’ll also hear from Molly Josephs, the founder of This Teenage Life podcast, and youth crew members about what it takes to create an authentically collaborative experience for young contributors.

•  Understanding Youth: A Prerequisite for Creating Programs By/For/With Tweens and Teens /May 26, 1:00 pm EST
  Public media stations know young children well, informed by decades of work and research. Work with tweens and teens, on the other hand, is new for most. Learning about this Next Gen audience requires relationships and connections– with youth themselves, with others doing this work, and with research– in order to generate insights that inspire experimentation and innovation.  Drawing from the Cooney Center’s upcoming research brief, Understanding Youth: A Prerequisite for Creating Programs By/For/With Tweens and Teens, this workshop will help stations consider strategies for deepening understanding about youth. Dr. Jason Yip, associate professor of digital youth at The Information School at the University of Washington and Director of KidsTeam UW, will join as a featured speaker. Dr. Yip will share insights on participatory co-design of new technologies with youth, including equity-based strategies for relationship-building and adult roles of facilitation and support. Participants will engage in small-group breakout sessions to share approaches for centering youth needs and building connections with t(w)eens, partners, and research in order to strengthen work and innovate new approaches.