Texas Student Voices
INTRODUCTION
Texas Student Voices is part of the National Student Voices Project, an initiative of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania with funding from the Annenberg Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts. Over the next five years, the National Student Voices Project will support local civic education projects in 22 cities throughout the country. In San Antonio, during the 2000 mayoral election, the project involved the participation of 29 schools at all of the area school districts.
The primary goal of the Student Voices Project is to encourage the active civic and political engagement of students. It is intended to increase students' knowledge and understanding of political processes and institutions, as well as their ability to find information and make use of it to participate in the public sphere.
PROJECT FEATURES
Candidate Interaction
Participating students are given opportunities to interact with mayoral candidates during campus visits, a city-wide forum, and in an internet question-and-answer dialogue. Candidates addressed student concerns, listened to their suggestions, and asked for the youth vote. This interaction helped students realize the accessibility of politics and the potential impact of their participation in the political process.
Getting Voices Heard
As the name implies, one of the main goals of Texas Student Voices was to help students learn how to make their voices heard within their communities. Students were challenged to engage the media by writing op-ed pieces, letters to the editor, and by hosting events that would attract media attention. As a result, students were heard on five different networks, including a Spanish Language channel, in the cities primary news paper, on National Public Radio, and through web sties of their own design.
Student Projects
Participating civics classes created projects designed to help students, their peers, and their community learn more about the mayoral race and its issues. These projects were judged at the end of the semester for their impact and creativity. Some of the activities included:
Surveys: Many of the classes started out the project by conducting surveys of residents of their community or students in their schools
Interviews with Family and Community Members: Some students interviewed community members and business leaders about issues they felt were most important to the city
Neighborhood Walks: Many classes took walks around the neighborhood of their schools to assess both local assets and problems that the candidates needed to address
Photojournalism: Some students chose to use photography to point up issues facing the next mayor
Youth Issues Agenda-Setting: Based on their research, students put together lists of the issues they felt were most important for candidates to address<
Op-Eds and Essays: Many students were assigned to write op-eds for local newspapers or to generate essays about the issues and candidates
Voter Registration Drives: Several classes organized voter registration drives both within their schools and in the community
Web Sites: Several classes created web-pages to follow the election and the issues that most impacted their neighborhoods
Voters Guides: Several schools created Voters' Guides, listing each candidate's answers to a wide range of issue-based questions
Candidate Forums: Many schools encouraged candidates to speak to their neighborhoods in forums hosted at the school
Brochures: Classes created magazine-style brochures addressing what they felt to be the top issues for the mayoral candidates
Mock Elections: All classes held mock elections on Election Day, so that all students could register their preferences
Student Voices Web Site
The Student Voices Web Site provides students with a one-stop site for news, student discussions, candidate profiles, candidate Q&A forums, on-line opinion polls, and community links. Students can ask questions of the candidates, look at candidate profiles, or debate the issues with other students across the city. With the help of the San Antonio Express News, students have access to daily updates on the mayoral race and other important community issues. Please visit http://student-voices.org/.
The Justice Talking Program
During the semester prior to the race, participating students examine controversial legal issues with the addition of the program Justice Talking into their civics curricula. Justice Talking is a National Public Radio program which takes an in-depth look at the cases and controversies that come before our nation's courts. The one-hour program helps listeners better understand the differing values that lie at the heart of our democracy. Students use these programs as a springboard for debates, essay-writing, and class discussions. By providing these materials to classes, we hope to give students and teachers real world examples to use in exploring U.S. Government.
RESEARCH
As a part of the project, both participating and an equal number of non-participating classes filled out surveys asking about their political awareness and interests. These surveys allow us to track changes in student awareness over the course of the year, as well as compare the knowledge and interests of students exposed to the project with the levels of those who are not. Survey responses indicate a 12 percent increase in voting for students who participated in the project compared to those who did not. Overall, student responses showed increases in awareness and interest in local, state, and national political happenings.
