The fact that a stack of newspapers was sitting in the center of my classroom wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that I was sitting there, too.
When my high school journalism students walked into class on that cold November morning, they found our desks pushed against the walls and their teacher sitting on the floor. I invited them to join me. They sat down and greeted me with the same quizzical looks I had seen throughout the semester when they realized we'd be doing something a little bit untraditional. I passed around the newspapers and issued a challenge: Pull out all the articles that are about someone who looks like you. Several months' worth of newspapers lay in front of them. Articles about black and Latino teenagers shouldn't have been hard to find, but as the students flipped through the pages and made piles of papers about adults, about white people, and about little kids, they noticed a trend.
That year, four teenagers—all young men of color—were murdered in our city. Those stories rightfully made the news. But what about positive stories? Stories about young people's successes and achievements? Where was the story about Kenny, whose straight As dated back to elementary school? Or about Eric, whose poetry was worthy of publication? Or about Marquell, whose athletic prowess was drawing attention from college scouts? Those stories rarely got covered, we agreed. That's when we decided that if the traditional news wasn't going to tell those stories, we would tell them ourselves.
We sought out stories about teenagers who were making a difference in our community, including Kenny, Eric, and Marquell. But that wasn't all. The voices of teenagers needed to be heard on all kinds of issues, we argued, not just those explicitly about young people. When the traditional media covered city budget cuts, we wrote op-eds about what ought to be funded. We shared well-researched perspectives on gun violence and proposed solutions that we felt would work.
First, we published our stories on a website that we created for teens by teens. We even enlisted peers at other high schools in our city to write for our website. Then, we got in touch with our city's daily newspaper to share what we wrote. Editors were impressed. Our writing was polished and introduced sometimes unheard perspectives. After conferring, they decided they wanted to publish my students' writing in one of their editions. Sure enough, weeks later, when my students pulled copies off the towers of newspapers in our classroom, they noticed familiar bylines: their own.
Erica wrote a story about students who work hard to succeed in school. Asia's article about social media examined some of its potential dangers. And Amy conducted interviews with experts and wrestled with complicated data to explore how to reduce inmate recidivism. Each of their articles featured interviews with other teenagers—people who looked like them. Each of their articles made the case that they have valuable, thoughtful perspectives that their peers and the public needed to hear.
But the impact on those who would now hear their stories was only half of the victory; the impact on my student-writers was remarkable, too. My students began walking into my classroom not as students, but as journalists. They came into class talking about the news, saying "We need to cover that!" when a topic of interest came up. Before long, using their voices became a habit, a necessity.
One day, we headed downtown to practice conducting interviews with strangers. Jaylen, one of my most reluctant writers, hung back. As I prepared to encourage him, he pulled out his phone and showed me an article he was reading. "Do you think," he asked, "this would make for a good story?"