What do the writers learn? How are they trained?
The teen staff members work under the direction of several full-time adult editors in Youth Communication’s Manhattan newsroom. Many of the students who walk through our doors have uneven skills as a result of poor education, living under extremely stressful conditions, or coming from homes where English is a second language. To complete their stories, students must successfully perform a wide range of activities, including writing and rewriting, reading, discussion, reflection, research, interviewing, and typing. They work as members of a team and they must accept a great deal of individual responsibility. They learn to read subway maps, verify facts, cope with rejection, and meet deadlines. It would be impossible to teach these skills and dispositions as separate, disconnected topics such as grammar, ethics, or assertiveness training. However, we have found that students make rapid progress when they are learning skills in the context of an inquiry that is personally significant to t
