12461 CE: Putting Youth, Community, and Learning at the Heart of Civic Technology
Organizer: Erhardt Graeff
Presenters: Erhardt Graeff, J. Natan Matias,Ruth Nicholls, Miriam Martinez
The rise of accessible open technology has led to growing excitement about the potential to unlock citizens’ creativity and growing interest in how technology can be harnessed for civic engagement. At the same time, communities and governments are committing to increasing young people’s digital skills through formal and informal technology learning. How can we bring together agendas for digital literacy, tech learning, and civic engagement?
Technology and data literacy efforts are accepted as important efforts in formal and informal learning settings: promoted and funded in connection with economic pressures calling for more graduates from STEM fields. However, despite an ongoing perception of crisis in civics, there is not the same kind of excitement for efforts that promote practical civic literacies such as critical media making and online and offline community organizing. Barriers to equity and empowerment in contemporary civic life—falling along race and gender, economic, and cultural lines—include both digital divides and “the participation gap” (Jenkins et al. 2006), whereby opportunities to practice using technology and media to shape civic and political realities are unequally distributed.
Youth deserve a full voice in civic life. Technology, like the “civic technology” proliferating around government services, is one path toward participation, but this approach needs to be embedded in a set of thoughtful social processes that youth should also have experience in designing. Creating technology is relatively easy once a context and problem is well-understood. The more difficult parts are understanding the context and problem in the first place and then working with a community to ensure technology is implemented as an appropriate and effective solution. Technology literacies ought to be developed alongside authentic civic engagement, exercising critical and systems thinking as well as engaging with communities to construct social processes that overcome real issues.
This panel will report on a series of workshops co-organized by the MIT Center for Civic Media that explore the social aspects of civic technology and learning. Over the past year, we have worked with high school students, social studies teachers, and community organizations to think about how civic technologies designed for empowerment might be incorporated in civic education curricula; we have been developing learning guides and a community of practice for youth-focused and community-based technology projects; and we have convened organizations like Mikva Challenge and Young Rewired State, who run innovative programs at the nexus of youth, community, and technology, in order to brainstorm and coordinate around shared agenda.
During the panel, we will also introduce a framework for thinking about the broader civic technology movement in terms of “youth + community + technology” and propose a research and practice agenda to develop, promote, and evaluate these efforts according to community-oriented social goals and core values of equity, empowerment, and efficacy.