For 10 years News Decoder has engaged teens through experiential learning and connecting them with people who have been eyewitnesses to world events.
Students from schools in two different countries share their thoughts on the U.S. presidency and the rise of white supremacy in the United States in in a student-led News Decoder cross-border webinar in 2021.
Back in 2019, students at La Jolla Country Day School in California interviewed a citizen of Beirut who had spent years imprisoned in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba, through a live zoom webinar arranged by News Decoder.
In 2022, News Decoder brought war correspondent Bernd Debusmann into a classroom, through a live feed to the Tatnall School in the U.S. state of Delaware where students were able to ask him what it was like getting shot in the back while covering Beirut.
My memory of high school is the challenge I had keeping my eyes open and my head vertical. I can describe falling in love with a metallic blue Mercedes in the parking lot below the window in my trigonometry class but I can’t tell you what a cotangent is.
The students in math and history and language classes today will inherit not just the world we live in but the power to shape it. And the years they spend in school are supposed to prepare them for that awesome responsibility.
But can we keep them awake and aware after they’ve stayed up half the night binging Apple TV or playing PUBG, fueled by orange Fanta and Hot Cheetos?
Feeding curiosity
It is News Decoder’s deep belief that most students are curious and want to learn but that they need to connect to the material they are supposed to study.
For 10 years we’ve helped teachers and schools engage teens through experiential learning and by connecting them with people who have been eyewitnesses to world events. At News Decoder, we bring the world into the classroom and take students out into the world around them.
We do this through storytelling. We don’t tell them stories, we have them tell stories to us and the world and interview people who have stories to tell. We show them the power of telling other people’s stories through journalism and in the process exploring other people’s perspectives and learning about their experiences.
Two ways we do this is through cross border webinars and through our signature Pitch, Report, Draft and Revise process that we call PRDR. In cross border webinars we put students from different countries and across different time zones together in live video sessions to share problems in their communities and compare the conclusions they reached after researching the same important topic.
This past year we did that through our monthly “Decoder Dialogues.” Students from countries including Colombia, India, Belgium, France, Rwanda and the United States shared their research and views about topics as important as the role of the press in journalism, what good and bad leadership looks like, and where responsibility for climate change lies.
Through the PRDR process, we encourage students to identify a problem in their community, research it, and find and interview an expert — someone who had directly experienced the problem, or someone working to solve it and then see whether and how that same problem exists in other countries and how people in those countries tackle it.
Building human connections across borders
Ultimately, we guide them through the process of turning their findings into engaging stories — articles or podcasts or videos and publishing those stories to the world.
In a world where so many of us spend so much time looking at screens, we want students to realize that knowledge can begin online, but the most powerful information comes from finding and interviewing people who are knowledgeable and that conversation with an interesting person is so much more engaging than words on a screen.
Interviews are transformative. In conducting them, students find themselves at the same level as the people they interview no matter how important that person is. An insightful question asked by a 16-year-old to say, famed U.S. constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrahms, which Lucy Jaffee did back in 2020, commands respect.
“I just loved being able to talk to people and hear their stories,” Jaffee said at the time.
It is that love for human connection in an increasingly robotic world that News Decoder is committed to fostering. We’ve done it for 10 years and we plan to do it for another decade.
Marcy Burstiner is the educational news director for News Decoder. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the California Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California. She is the author of the book Investigative Reporting: From premise to publication.
