This is the first installment in a new format for the Underground Workshop: the Sunday Update, which will use a “call and response” model to invite student commentary and reporting. See details below.
Maggie Reynolds had one day to write her article.
Reynolds is a student at Middlebury College, and she is working for VTDigger as an intern.
That morning, her editor at VTDigger assigned her a story about a racist video that the captain of the CVU girls’ basketball team had posted on TikTok.
Students from all over the state had shared the video through social media. In response, the girls’ basketball teams at Rice Memorial High School and Burlington High School refused to play the CVU team, and other teams later followed their lead. They felt that CVU had not properly addressed the incident.
Reynolds’s editor sent her an open letter from Adam Bunting, the principal of Champlain Valley Union High School (CVU). He published the letter to address other teams’ concerns.
Bunting explained the school’s response, while also trying to balance the need for privacy.
“This player has experienced significant consequences in her life outside of school,” he wrote, “but this is not my story to tell.”
Reynolds called Bunting to learn more. The conversation that followed was an “illuminating moment” in her reporting.
“There are two sides to the story,” Reynolds said. “Talking to him made it feel more real.”
Reynolds initially approached the story as being about the consequences for the student who published the video. By the end of the interview, she came to a more nuanced conclusion.
“These are students who are still learning, and they can’t just be fully canceled,” Reynolds said. “[Social media] is changing so that people are so much more aware of incidents like these.”
Even though students are shaping the conversation on social media and in schools, their voices are often left out of the official public discourse. Seven Days interviewed students about the response to the video, but only after a sophomore from Rice emailed Seven Days to ask them to include the voices of Black students.
No student voices were included in the VTDigger article.
“I would have loved to reach out to students,” Reynolds said. “It’s just less accessible sometimes to get their voices, especially on a tight time crunch.”
The Underground Workshop’s new Sunday Update format is designed to address this issue by making student participation in local media more accessible. We welcome beginning and experienced writers, and we value the perspectives of students from all backgrounds.
At its core, the Underground Workshop is a student-led group telling students’ stories. Please read below about this week’s opportunity for commentary, and register for updates to support our mission and get involved.
One way to get involved is to join one of our weekly Thursday workshops. These workshops will occasionally include a guest speaker, which is an opportunity for students to learn about journalism.
Peter D’Auria, a VTDigger reporter who focuses on education, will be joining us on Thursday, Feb. 9, from 8 to 8:30 p.m. To get the link, fill out this form.
–Anna Hoppe, Essex High School, & Cecilia Luce, Thetford Academy
For Students and Teachers:
What is the Sunday Update?
Evidence-Based Commentary: Share your views!
Teachers’ Edition: Using the Sunday Update in your classroom.
Editor’s Note: A Transition to Student Leadership
What is the Sunday Update?
This is the first installment in a new format for the Underground Workshop: the Sunday Update, which will use a “call and response” model to invite student commentary and reporting.
The Sunday Update is a weekly publication, “Every Sunday when there’s school on Monday.” Our goal is to become a reliable classroom resource for Vermont’s students and teachers.
Here’s how it works:
1. Each week the Underground Workshop’s student editors will present a story that feels relevant for young Vermonters, involving the issues of the day as they appear on the ground, in our own communities. These will often be pieces of student journalism, from the Underground Workshop or from one of Vermont’s student publications, and sometimes the articles will come from VTDigger.
2. We’ll always include a “teachers’ edition,” with a printable version of the article for close reading in class, a few suggested questions for discussion, and sometimes a recommended classroom activity– never a full lesson, but enough for teachers to run with and adapt for their own students. A teacher might use a Sunday Update as a brief hook for a Monday lesson, as an extra credit assignment, or to drive a full lesson.
3. Every Sunday Update will call for student commentary, but there’s a catch: we’ll always ask students to support their views with a touch of reporting. We want to hear about specific situations, stories and examples. Readers are always interested to learn something new, and less interested to read unsubstantiated opinions. The reporting process also pushes students to explore perspectives other than their own– to listen, which is the first step toward civil discourse.
4. In a few weeks we’ll start publishing the commentaries we receive in response to these posts, offering VTDigger’s readers a diverse range of views from young Vermonters, and giving students the opportunity to hear what the conversation sounds like in other school communities.
The Sunday Update is a new format, but the Underground Workshop remains committed to the same mission: empowering student voices in the public sphere. Please spread the word!
Evidence-Based Commentary: Share your views!
Each week, we will invite students to write a small piece of evidence-based commentary on a topic related to our lead story. We hope students will discuss Maggie Reynolds’ story, explore the questions it raises, and then share relevant stories from their own school communities.
This week, we want to hear from students about the impacts of social media on their school and larger community. Are there stories from your community about the ways social media has empowered students? When social media has led to real changes on the ground? Or examples of moments when social media went awry, or was widely viewed as performative?
Your assignment:
1. Interview a peer, but not someone you already know well. Make sure to get their consent to publish their comments in VTDigger. The idea here is not to just tell a story about something that happened to you, or that you witnessed, but to listen to someone describe their own experiences, before you share your own views.
We’re looking for stories about specific experiences and events in our school communities. You may ask additional questions if you want, but in order to create consistency across our reporting, please be sure to include the following questions in your interview(s):
Questions to ask:
- How has social media impacted your opinions on different social and political issues? Can you give a specific example?
- To what extent does student activism on social media impact the real world? Can you describe a moment when this has been successful or when it has fallen short?
- When you learn about a local event on social media, how often do you look for a news article on that event? Again, can you give an example?
2. Convert the best example from your interview into a paragraph or two— this will be the evidence for your commentary. Begin by identifying the student you interviewed, with their grade and their school: “Jen Smith is a ninth grader at XHS.”
3. Once you share your story, we’re also curious to hear your opinion. Keep it pretty short, and connect it to the evidence. Feel free to back up your thoughts with links to other news stories, facts from research, etc, but keep a light touch.
4. Take photos, or find an image or two to accompany your commentary (again, be careful to get consent). Be creative; these can be screenshots of social media posts, photos from protests, etc.
*200-500 words / 2-5 paragraphs*
*Deadline: February 15th*
Reporting Guidelines:
This document explains how to conduct your reporting and how to submit your evidence-based commentary for publication.
Teachers’ Edition: Using the Sunday Update in your classroom.
Each week we’ll offer some basic resources for teachers.
Maggie Reynolds’ original story on VTDigger is here. A PDF with discussion questions and a printable version of the story is here.
The Sunday Update could generate meaningful discussion for any class discussing contemporary issues: civics and current events, literature classes, and of course, journalism.
These stories are powerful, because they’re authentically relevant to students. They also often involve sensitive issues and must be approached with care. Teachers are responsible for creating a safe environment and drawing clear boundaries.
One essential line to draw: Avoid sharing stories involving specific people in your school community. Even when we don’t use names, people often know who we’re talking about. The conversation can slip into rumor and hearsay, with students passing judgment on someone who’s not in the room.
It’s a fine line. Students should be able to discuss their school administration’s official response to an incident, for example, but it’s no longer a safe conversation when a student shares something she heard that the principal told a friend.
Many of us have participated in discussions that did more harm than good. If you as the teacher have misgivings, one strategy could be to have students share their thoughts in writing and to only share some pieces with the larger group. We’re eager to hear your ideas, requests and feedback: please email undergroundworkshop@vtdigger.org.
Editor’s Note: A Transition to Authentic Student Leadership
by Ben Heintz
The Underground Workshop is the product of two of Vermont’s most impactful nonprofits, and two visionary leaders: Chuck Scranton, founder of the Rowland Foundation, and Anne Galloway, founder of VTDigger.
Both took a chance on an ambitious idea: to build a collaborative community of student journalists from across Vermont, and to connect their work with a statewide audience.
I can’t thank Anne and Chuck enough for their support and mentorship. For the past two school years, with the resources and flexibility afforded to me by a Rowland fellowship, I was able to teach part-time while I organized workshops, visited classrooms & met with students one-on-one. A vibrant community formed in our Thursday workshops, gathering to share about issues in our schools and to support one another’s work.
I’m proud of the work we published, and we’ve had great encouragement from VTDigger’s readers. But there was always a problem, which Anne Galloway helped me see: we were focused on feature stories, and there were many hours behind most of our articles, mostly from the students but also from me, as a teacher and editor. We needed to find ways to give students a taste of journalism without such a large-scale commitment, and we needed to find a way for the project to be sustainable once my fellowship ended.
Last year we experimented with new structures for collaborative reporting, including a commentary project around our series of feature stories on BLM Flag in Vermont’s schools, and the Climate Report Card, which involved students from more than a dozen schools. Both projects were successful, but they were also labor intensive, and they were one-off events. We never arrived at a routine, ongoing system to give students small-scale opportunities to contribute reporting for VTDigger.
This year I’m back to teaching full time and the Underground Workshop has been transitioning to student leadership. Our core of student editors spent a lot of time last semester preparing a big collaborative project, focused on education, specifically the impact of Act 77 in Vermont’s schools. The editors did hear from some students, but less than we hoped, and we’re still getting off the ground. And without my hours of outreach, classroom visits and one-on-one conferences, we haven’t been able to maintain the same pipeline of feature stories (though we do have a couple in the works!).
So this year we’ve been more “underground” than we expected, in terms of publication. But at the same time, we’ve maintained our community for student journalists, meeting on Thursdays to discuss stories and give feedback for drafts, etc. And along the way our core of student editors has taken real leadership, organizing themselves and beginning to collaborate on their own. For the past several weeks we’ve been planning the Sunday Update, a format that builds on our past innovations, but with a routine, weekly opportunity for students to contribute.
In the three years since I first met Chuck Scranton and Anne Galloway, both have stepped back from the organizations they created, handing off control to the next generation of leaders. I’m not stepping away from the Underground Workshop, but I am giving leadership to a new generation: the UW’s student editors.
Please help them get the word out, and send them your ideas and feedback at undergroundworkshop@vtdigger.org.