Through storytelling, we challenge students to discover their connections to the world around them and to each other, whether across town or across countries.
News Decoder founder Nelson Graves talks with a group of students from Westover School in the U.S. state of Connecticut.
Back in 2020, during the height of the Covid epidemic, high school students in the U.S. state of Connecticut sat down with News Decoder founder Nelson Graves to explore a number of thorny topics that ranged from the death penalty to whether animals should be kept in zoos.
The students in “American Voices & Choices: Ethics in Modern Society” at Westover School had been working with News Decoder since the start of that academic year, mastering the process we call Pitch, Report, Draft and Revise — or PRDR — to identify topical issues at the intersection of ethics and public policy.
They pitched ideas they wanted to report on: teen health; police brutality; abortion; economic privilege in the environmental movement; the risks of experimental vaccines; the impact of alcohol on youth.
Later, each student received detailed feedback from a News Decoder editor, aimed at helping them narrow their research and produce original reporting.
Westover was an early News Decoder school partner. Since our founding 10 years ago, News Decoder has worked with high school and university students in 89 schools across 26 countries.
Decoding news in school
Teachers have used us as part of their course curricula, as extra credit assignments and as standalone learning opportunities for their students.
At Realgymnasium Rämibühl Zürich in Switzerland, teacher Martin Bott brings News Decoder in each year. In one weeklong workshop, students produced podcasts. Over five days, they pitched News Decoder stories about a problem they identified in their local communities, identified an expert to interview, found how that problem was relevant to people in other countries and then wrote a podcast script, revised it and recorded it. “[News Decoder] enabled me to do a few projects which really open up perspectives for the students, give them a taste of life beyond the classroom and of the world of journalism,” Bott said.
In another workshop for RGZH, News Decoder turned students into “foreign correspondents.” They were tasked with finding stories in Zurich that people in other countries would find interesting. Like the students in the podcasting workshop, they then found an expert to interview, wrote a draft and revised it with the goal of publishing it on News Decoder.
One student in the workshop noticed a demonstration of people with dogs and got up the nerve to talk to one of them. They were from an organization that rescued Spanish greyhounds and she decided it would be a good idea for a News Decoder story. The story she wrote ended up as one of News Decoder’s most-read stories of all time.
Not only have Bott’s students been able to publish stories on News Decoder, many of these stories, including the article about the greyhounds, have won awards in our twice yearly global storytelling competition.
“We’ve been delighted to get so many of those stories published on News Decoder,” Bott said. “That’s very, very motivating for the students. And it’s a wonderful learning process for them because they realise it’s not just about school rules and so on out there.”
Challenging students to do more
Bott said that working with professionals at News Decoder gets the students to step up. “When you’re a journalist, you’ve got a responsibility,” he said. “That’s something we’ve been able to talk about with journalists who’ve met us from various parts of the world through News Decoder. And you’ve got real pressure as well. And they’re not, I think they’re not quite used to that. So it really opens their eyes.”
At The Hewitt School in New York, 15 teens at the all-girls school meet once a month as a club. They read and discuss News Decoder stories and pitch their own stories. They also prepare for a cross-border webinar; each year they join with students from a News Decoder partner school in another country, and decide with those students on a topic to explore.
They then research the topic, interview experts and come together with the students from the other school to present their findings live in a video conference before an audience of people from the two schools.
In 2024, students from The Thacher School in California worked with peers at the European School of Brussels II on a webinar on consumerism and the human impacts of climate change.
Russell Spinney is faculty adviser for News Decoder at Thacher. “The webinars really were kind of ways just to get to know each other, discover that we actually do have some common interests. But not only that, that we also have problems that are similar,” he said.
“News Decoder’s workshops,” he said, “get students to think of ways to communicate their research beyond the classroom and connect with what’s going on in the world.” News Decoder has partnered schools this way in some 50 school-school webinars.
Connecting students across borders
Another way News Decoder connects students in our partner schools across borders is through Decoder Dialogues, once-a-month sessions in which we bring students from different countries together with experts on a topic for a virtual roundtable.
A montage of highlights from past Decoder Dialogues
The next Decoder Dialogue will be 2 December, when students from The Hewitt School will join with their peers from African Leadership Academy in South Africa and VIBGYOR High in India, along with News Decoder alum Marouane El Bahraoui, now a research intern at the Carter Center in Atlanta, and News Decoder Correspondent Alfonso Silva-Santisteban from Peru. They will discuss ways young people can best enact change, stand up and be heard.
As educational news director at News Decoder, Marcy Burstiner works one-on-one with students on story pitches and drafts, and oversees the publication process. Before coming to News Decoder, she had been an editor who worked with a staff of experienced reporters and later she taught journalism at university, where she was the adviser to a university student newspaper.
She said that working with high school students is challenging and rewarding. “They are itching to follow their own ideas and they have all kinds of questions that aren’t getting answered,” she said. “They have ideas for big projects but they don’t know how to even start.”
She said she shows them that no project is too daunting if you take it step-by-step, and that all questions can get answered if you can find the people who have the answers. But most transforming is when students discover that when you reach out to those people directly, they will talk to you, regardless of whether they are local government officials or experts in a think tank halfway across the globe.
“We tell students to not be intimidated by their own age or lack of knowledge or experience,” Burstiner said. “Often, it is because they are teens and in high school that so-called important people will talk to them. I mean, who doesn’t want to help out a high school student?”
This is day three of News Decoder’s two-week Annual Giving Campaign, with reflections on 10 years of empowering young people to think critically and engage with the world.
As our anniversary year draws to a close, we wrap up the celebrations with a look back at News Decoder’s impact on young people and educators over the last decade — and we couldn’t have done it without you.
Join us in supporting the next generation of thinkers and storytellers.