Denver Student Voices

The National Civic League has initiated "Denver Student Voices," a project designed to encourage the civic engagement of young people by bringing the study of a local political campaign into the classroom. The project was created by Dr. Phyllis Kaniss, director at the Annenberg School for Communication, and was first implemented in Philadelphia in 1999. In this excerpted article featured in The Pennsylvania Gazette, Dr. Kaniss describes first what prompted her to develop the program, and then how the response of Philadelphia public school students far exceeded everyone's - including her own - expectations.

…. the old ways of learning about campaigns were not working. Eight years ago, I wrote a book describing the dismal media coverage of Philadelphia's 1991 mayoral campaign: the seven-second sound bites on TV with one candidate calling another a drunk, the newspaper stories that focused almost completely on strategy and the "horse race." And I knew that with commercial pressures tightening, it was unlikely to be better this year. I also understood the effects of such coverage. Research by Dean Jamieson and Dr. Joseph Cappella, professor of communication, has shown that news focused on strategy raises the level of public cynicism and hampers the ability to learn about issues.

It was bad enough that adults were getting turned off to politics, but watching my own two kids, I began to worry more about the future generation. At ages 10 and 12, my sons were getting most of what they called "news" from ESPN's SportsCenter. How were they ever going to learn to be good citizens? That concern only deepened when I read a survey by the National Association of Secretaries of State showing that only about a third of young people between the ages of 18 and 24 had voted in the 1996 presidential election, compared to 50 percent in 1972-and the figure was down to 15 percent in the 1998 congressional elections. According to the survey, young people weren't voting because they didn't feel they knew enough about the issues. They weren't learning about civics in school, or discussing politics with their parents, or keeping up with the news. What's more, they didn't feel that candidates were listening to their concerns. The report warned that we might be losing democracy's next generation.

And that's when the idea came to me. Maybe there was a way to get young people excited about politics and the news and, in the process, change the way all of us learn about campaigns. What if you encouraged high-school students, as a class project, to study campaigns, and used computers and the Internet to make it as much fun as playing a videogame? Newspapers and newscasts might be wedded to the old ways, but the World Wide Web was terra nova. Not only could the Web carry much more information on candidates and positions, but there were all kinds of possibilities for chat rooms and click-polls and surfing through archives and talking back through e-mail-things that might make civic participation really fun for kids….

…It was not until the WPVI Candidates Forum, taped on March 27, that I realized just how much teachers at the neighborhood high schools had managed to accomplish. Each class sent us questions for the candidates. Not only were they good, they were dramatically different from those journalists tend to ask at such debates. "What do you think distinguishes you from Mayor Rendell?" one asked, while another wanted to know: "How can recreation centers be used to improve neighborhoods?"

But it was after the formal question-and-answer session was taped that the real spectacle began. Candidates Happy Fernandez and Dwight Evans stayed to answer more questions and found the students bubbling over with issues they wanted to discuss, and opinions they wanted to offer. I watched as the producer, Linda Munich, looked on, obviously impressed. "They're really interested, aren't they?" she said. "And they know more than anybody gives them credit for." She was so struck with this impromptu interchange that she invited six students to come back to the studio a few days later to tape an additional half hour for the program.

I began to see the process repeated. Neighborhood-newspaper reporters would agree to do a story on the project and come back blown away by the students. "They interviewed me," said a 25-year-old reporter for the Chestnut Hill Local, who visited Roxborough High. "They knew so much about the campaign-more than a lot of my friends do," he said. A WPVI producer who went to Germantown High to shoot a story was so impressed by how well the students navigated the candidates' Web sites that he and his cameraman wound up spending an hour and a half at the school. Usually, the TV cameras only came to interview students when one of their fellow teens had been shot or stabbed.

The journalists were beginning to discover that young people-even from the poorest neighborhoods and the most troubled public schools-cared deeply about the problems facing their neighborhoods and the city. And, with the help of their teachers, they were jumping at the chance to make their voices heard.

By April, I had figured out a way for other people to witness candidates coming into classrooms and answering students' questions. I got the Pennsylvania Cable Network to agree to tape each candidate visiting one of my classes and then talked all six candidates into coming to be taped. The programs were aired the nights of the appearances and repeated regularly afterwards.

Those who watched saw a very different image of inner-city youths and political candidates from the ones they were used to on the evening news. The teens were articulate and informed, and the candidates passionate about the city. And it was not just the students doing the learning. In a campaign in which public education was taking center stage, the candidates were seeing firsthand what was going on inside city schools. And learning to speak to a whole new constituency.

I thought back to the survey I had read last fall, where young people said politicians weren't listening to their concerns. In the 1999 Philadelphia primary campaign, candidates were listening to young people's voices.

For complete text of Dr. Kaniss' article, visit www.upenn.edu/gazette/0999/kaniss.html.

Go to the Student Voices Website