FRONTLINE Youth Civic Voices Initiative
Reimagining Civil Discourse for the Next Generation
Pilots & Programs
This past summer, the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, its closely affiliated non profit, Cortico, and GBH’s FRONTLINE hosted 11 Boston students, ages 16 -21 as FRONTLINE fellows for a six-week paid fellowship at MIT’s Media Lab. The goal: to explore how best to engage young people in meaningful civic dialogue and storytelling amidst the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
”AI is changing everyone’s life at lightning speed,” says MIT Professor Deb Roy, director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication and co-founder and CEO of Cortico. “By combining youth-led dialogue with the storytelling power of short-form video—and then equipping young people with the AI tools they can control—we can make important inroads toward establishing a scalable model for engagement in authentic, inclusive public conversation.”
Raney Aronson-Rath, editor in chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, who began her affiliation with the MIT Media Lab more than a decade ago, reiterates how strong storytelling and technological expertise can be such a powerful combination. “For this summer’s curriculum we placed a special emphasis on AI and the long shadow it already casts in the fellows’ lives. We wanted to know how kids are thinking about AI: what are their concerns, their fears, but also what are the possibilities.”
The fellows represented a wide range of backgrounds and fields of interest, including computer science, business, finance, economics, English, and journalism. All fellows received a stipend to ensure that they represented economic diversity.
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