The Student Voice Project
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:
$150,000Total cost of project including all sources of funding:
$200,000Expected amount of time to complete project:
1 Year - May '08-May '09The Student Voice Project identifies high poverty, overcrowded high schools with non-existing, or underfunded and supported journalism programs and provides three years of funding support in addition to teacher training to revitalize or create vibrant student media programs where all kids are given "a voice." Our goal is to create a vibrant school media program that engages self-selecting students in the writing process while also positively affecting the social cohesiveness of the larger school community (as measure by social network analysis). As part of our mission, we provide the basic technology to get these programs up and running, but are looking for help from the Knight News Challenge Grant to help us engagement students in a variety of ways by incorporate various media platforms including video on a modular technology we can offer to students to compliment our service offering. We are looking for money to build an exportable platform for online publishing to schools as well as funds for the purchase of hardware like cameras, video, etc that are various schools require.
0 commentsHow will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
The Student Voice Project
Our program directly impacts student culture, academic performance and the overall social cohesiveness of inner-city high schools. In the expansion of our pilot for which we are seeking funding in the fall, we will create 5 new journalism programs at high-poverty, inner city high schools in Los Angeles, and two high schools in Long Beach where they don't currently have programs. Research in scholastic journalism demonstrates that "Journalism Students Do Better" (Dvorak, 2008) than their peers in almost all academic content areas. We will also provide ongoing support for teachers/journalism advisers that receive little in the way of quality professional development in the inner-city's most underperforming high schools.
0 commentsHow is your idea innovative? (New or different from what already exists.)
The Student Voice Project - innovation
Our program is highly innovative because while programs in the past have support student media and/or training for journalism advisors, no program has offered ongoing support while targeting the highest need schools (based on extensive and difficult to acquire data). Additionally, our curriculum development agenda which is the subject of my doctoral research endeavors to make journalism a part of the normal English Langauge Arts curriculum for ALL KIDS to test the hypothesis that since journalism curriculum improves academic outcomes for self-selecting students, it would follow that it would also improve outcomes for students who don't self-select for journalism study. Finally, our program also addresses the enormous short-fall of minority journalists (Castenada, 2008) by exposing more inner-city kids to a potential career in journalism.
0 commentsWhat experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
The Student Voice Project
Our non-profit relies on a wealth of experience of our Board and Advisory Board members. We have several well known and/or Pulitzer-prize winning journalists and former editors on our advisory board including Corie Brown, Janet Clayton and Matt Miller. In terms of integration with schools we have several high-profile academics advising us as well including Dr. Patricia Gandara (of the UCLA Civil Rights Project - formerly Harvard), Dr. Laura Castenada (of USC Annenberg School of Journalism), Dr. Cornel West (of Princeton University), and Dr. Jack Dvorak (the nation's leading researcher in scholastic journalism at Indiana University) who are active in leading and advising our programs.
Our Board includes Roger Lowenstein who founded an inner-city high school where we are currently piloting one of our programs, Mark Cambell a journalism advisor, and Chris Fager, founder of the Student Press Rights Association in Washington.
Executive Director Johnny Duda also brings a wealth of non-profit and education experience to the project as founder and advisor to several non-profits.
