WHYY: Wider Horizons for You and Yours
Why is it important to listen to students’ unique voices?
The student who produced this video was encouraged to create a video on a topic that they were personally interested in. The topic that they chose is one that affects them and their communities on a daily basis. By producing a story about someone who is trying to solve a problem in their own community, this student is involved in changing their world. It’s important for students to see themselves as active participants so that they can feel empowered to make a difference in the world.
Frontiers in Youth Media Work: Shawn’s Video, “Turning Guns into Garden Tools.”
This video was produced through WHYY’s Pathways to Media Careers program by Shawn McCarthy, a student at Kensington High School and a participant in WHYY’s Media Lab there. We’ve selected this video as exemplary of pushing frontiers in our field as it showcases three areas where WHYY is helping to drive the youth media field:
•Following students’ lead and listening to their voices: Youth voice has always been central to WHYY’s work with students. As a student in Kensington’s Media Lab, Shawn was deeply dedicated to completing a documentary on the opioid epidemic, the effects of which he witnessed every day on his way to school. Ultimately, the documentary proved too big and crisis too intractable for Shawn to effectively tackle. But there was something else in Shawn’s neighborhood that offered a different lens on neighborhood problems, a storefront where a man was decommissioning guns and turning them into garden tools. Shawn came to us completely energized by what he’d seen. Could he make a movie about this guy? With the help of WHYY’s Youth Employment program, Shawn created an Emmy-nominated documentary, not about a seemingly intractable and hopeless problem, but about people sowing hope and working toward solutions.
•Helping students connect their learning to career pathways. Shawn’s video represents the next step: connecting his experience in the Media Lab to real world work experiences. WHYY’s Pathways to Media Careers Program is a next step open to any graduate of our Media Labs program. Asa participant in this program, Shawn received additional mentoring and job skills training, work placement, and publication opportunities. Not only was he paid for his work, he had the opportunity to see the story he produced on TV, and was connected to further opportunities to help him envision a career in this field. This summer, in partnership with the School District of Philadelphia, WHYY will begin offering graduation credit to students in our Pathways program.
•Sharing youth voices with broad audiences: Shawn’s video was produced in a youth media program, but it aired in prime time, on WHYY’s You Oughta Know magazine show. It was further shared nationally by PBS News Hour Student Reporting Labs, who have invited Shawn to join their student reporting fellowship in Boston this summer. And ultimately, Shawn was nominated for a student Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Mid-Atlantic Chapter for his efforts. Through the work of students like Shawn and the mentorship, skills training, worksite placement, and distribution WHYY provides, we are emerging as youth media leaders in the public media sphere.
To learn more about WHYY’s Youth Media philosophy and our advice toother stations interested in launching similar programs, please check out our station toolkit.