To our digital thriving community,
Today is the day that we can officially share with you…
✨ The Youth Voice Playbook ✨
We’ve been working this year behind the scenes to bring it to life: a free, interactive resource collaboratively produced by Hopelab, Character Lab, In Tandem, and our team at the Center for Digital Thriving.
We created it because we want to help build a future where all young people can thrive — and to make that happen, young people need their voices heard, their experiences understood, and their ideas elevated.
We also know that a lot of people who share this core belief aren’t sure where to start or how to meaningfully build youth voice into their work.
This Playbook is an all-in-one guide to everything from planning and recruitment to our favorite activities (don’t miss Chapter 5!) for exploring young people’s perspectives and then making sense of what they’ve shared. The Playbook features a collection of usable resources, honest insights, and real stories from various projects. Alongside it, our colleagues at Hopelab are releasing today case studies that feature step-by-step examples of how Hopelab and the Center for Digital Thriving partnered with young people to understand and elevate their perspectives on technology use and mental health.
Here's a 3-min Loom with a quick tour of the Playbook:
In the spirit of our Commi'grees, we embrace the principle of “together we are more” in this digital thriving community. The Playbook is just one contribution to a rapidly growing ecosystem that recognizes the necessity of youth voice in our field.
We’ve been so inspired by the ways other researchers and organizations are helping to elevate young people’s perspectives about tech and well-being. Just a few recent examples:
- A preprint of this insightful journal article on youth digital well-being research highlights “the value of including young people’s voices in research on youth digital well-being” (by Katie Davis, Morgan Anderson, Chia-chen Yang, Sophia Choukas-Bradley, Beth T. Bell, and Petr Slovak)
- A new essay by Katie Salen Tekinbaş et al. describes the qualities of “care(full) online communities for youth” and how “youth thrive online when the communities they inhabit are welcoming, support their agency and belonging, include peers and mentors who share an interest, and provide access to engaging activities.”
- #HalfTheStory continues to amplify youth voices on digital well-being. Here’s just one example: teens submit videos about their digital wellbeing to Teen Talk, a teen-led video series that promotes authentic conversations around digital wellbeing.
- Common Sense just updated their report on Generative AI in K-12 Education, which they workshopped with teens in different parts of the country. A student from Virginia cut right to the heart of what researchers, educators, and parents are also grappling with. She asked, “What is the purpose of education? Because if it’s to learn, then you want to probably minimize AI. But if it’s to prepare you for the workforce, then maybe you want to maximize it to improve your efficiency, because that might be what certain employers want in the future.”
We’d love to hear from you at: digitalthriving@gse.harvard.edu.
Until next month,
The Center for Digital Thriving
P.S. We have an upcoming online course about game-changing pivots every educator needs to know to support youth digital well-being. Sign up for more information here.
