“Believe In Your Voice”

“Believe in your voice, especially if you’re a journalist of color,” Shaikh told a gathering of media makers at the Beyond Self Care Summit, a 2021 virtual event to support the mental health and wellbeing of youth storytellers. The summit was led by young people and organized by YR Media, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit media, technology and music training center and platform for emerging creators. As a student reporter, Shaikh covered the intersecting pandemics and civic unrest of 2020-2021. Fellow panelists were writers, editors and organizers from around the country.

“This industry will tell you that there’s this arbitrary standard of objectivity,” Shaikh said. Instead, he argued, “We should be trying to center humanity in the people we cover. The more we distance ourselves from the people that we cover, the more distant we are from their humanity.”

Humanizing digital platforms shrink the distance between the best interests of young people who have been systemically ill-served by technology, and the digital media they experience everyday. In this chapter, we take up Shaikh’s provocation to “center humanity.” We explore the processes, products, and reflections of youth creators who report on the leading issues of our times while navigating the relationship between technology and wellbeing.

While online tools and platforms became a lifeline for young people through the pandemic, a 24-hour news cycle replayed scenes of violence, disease, and political upheaval across devices they rarely put down (most of us didn’t). For youth reporters covering these events, technology provided tools to research, record, produce, and disseminate stories on social injustice, and at the same time constituted the environment where these same young people were living through the relentless realities of the last three years.

As educators and researchers collaborating with creators at YR Media, we have seen our youth colleagues act toward their own humanization under these challenging conditions. They advocate for and produce digital media platforms, workplaces and content that enable them to sustain themselves, support peers, and foreground rigor, imagination, and social justice without sacrificing mental health.

“Human centered design exists within a system that doesn't consider everyone human,” Mio, another Beyond Self Care Summit panelist told us. “And so that's a failing that's literally built into the name of this methodology.”

This volume takes aim at that failing, and so do we. Based on qualitative research and our participation in content co-creation with youth, we examine the agentive moves young producers make for self- and community-care, and the modes of collaboration they seek from adults. We offer a set of principles for designing environments guided by an approach where young people engage technology in ways that sustain their wellbeing and honor the humanity and resilience of others.

Orientation to YR Media

At YR Media, young people including Shaikh and Mio produce digital content on themes related to politics, education, health, identity, arts and culture through an equity lens. Participants are young people of color and others who live out our most urgent social issues and yet too often find their experiences ignored, distorted, and sometimes betrayed by the nation’s core institutions. They reach audiences via YR Media’s site and social channels as well as outlets such as NPR, New York Times, and Washington Post.

At the organization’s headquarters, students aged 14-24 enroll in six months of free after-school classes taught by peer educators and adult faculty. Eighty-five percent are BIPOC and/or attend schools with high percentages of students contending with economic and other drivers of inequality. After completing six months of courses, they are eligible for paid internships across every department. An additional 400-plus teens and young adults serve as contributors to our platform. YR Media’s free learning tools and workshops are available online and in-person for young people and educators nationwide. The three of us lead various programs at YR Media and carry out participatory research to glean insights that advance field-wide thinking on youth, media and learning in digital times.

Covering and Creating Conditions For Youth Wellbeing

Mental health has long been a focus within YR Media and a value guiding the organization’s programming. And yet, the events of 2020 revealed an even more urgent need for approaches that center young people’s wellbeing in relation to the technology they use, report on, and create. Amid widespread effects of COVID-19, BIPOC and low-income communities experienced disproportionate harm. Youth faced severe mental health impacts (Dlugosz 2021). When lockdowns took hold, YR Media shifted to remote learning and worked to combat isolation while supporting young people’s creative expression, skill development, wellbeing, and capacity to deploy journalism and media-making to speak truth to power.

Around this time emerged a global reckoning with anti-Black racism after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor spotlit white supremacy as not a fringe belief system or relic of a hateful past, but a mortal threat to our present and future – and one that digital media and technology have the potential to counter and exacerbate. We witnessed an uptick in assaults targeting Asian American communities in California and nationally. Laws jeopardizing the wellbeing of LGBTQ young people alarmed targeted students and their loved ones and allies.

These factors informed the reporting, analysis, essays, podcast episodes, videos, interactive experiences, and investigations young people created related to mental health and wellbeing. Their stories demonstrate how young BIPOC journalists experienced the collective trauma of the moment and created meaningful media and community online. YR Media launched the Beyond Self Care Summit to share resources and support.

Taken together, this body of content and the Beyond Self Care event make up the materials we draw on in the research reported here. We ask: How did young people decide on topics, framing, and pacing of the work? What themes surface across their coverage? We also interrogate workflows: What did youth need from adult collaborators? What work conditions were most and least helpful in youth’s efforts to sustain rigor, imagination, mutual support, and wellbeing? Regarding youths’ literacy practices, we inquire: In what ways did they critically engage with digital texts they encountered and produced?

Conceptual Frames

Our conceptual framework brings together two approaches – collegial pedagogy (Soep and Chávez 2016; Lee and Soep 2023) and humanizing critical digital literacies (Aguilera and Pandya 2021; Bartolome 1994; Freire 1970) – to conceptualize a humanizing collegial pedagogy, one derived from spaces of digital media production that value the human in relationship to technology, work, and content. We resist hierarchies in learning, instead asking: what does it mean to learn together as a mutually-constitutive, reciprocal endeavor that allows people to show up fully as human beings in culturally-sustaining ways (Paris 2012)?

Collegial pedagogy

The concept of collegial pedagogy emerged to explore the forms of youth-adult collaboration Soep witnessed and participated in as a producer at YR Media beginning in 2000. Over time and in partnership with Vivian Chávez, she came to understand the mutual learning that takes place between novice and veteran creators when they jointly produce media for outside audiences. Collegial pedagogy contends that neither young people nor adults can carry out the work independently with the same level of rigor, creativity and impact as they can together. While beholden to themselves and each other, their positionality also faces outward, toward a public that will engage with the work and help to shape its digital afterlife.

Since 2005, YR Media and others have adapted the framework of collegial pedagogy to reflect radical changes brought about with the internet and the social and mobile web (Neely 2015; Soep 2012; Vossoughi et al. 2021). But there is another factor that calls for re-examination of collegial pedagogy that we have not fully realized to date: the need to critically interrogate workplace norms and values. As humanizing approaches are concerned with technology within a social ecology – including people, institutions, and both the natural and built environment – we need to address the related dynamics and impacts between these elements, particularly as mediated by power. Collegial pedagogy affords an analytical frame that emerges from companionship and mutuality. It is grounded in Paolo Freire’s framework of critical pedagogy, which sees education as a process of problem-posing that moves through cycles of collective dialogue, action, theory, and reflection — what Freire called praxis. The idea is to dismantle youth-adult power dynamics where students receive knowledge teachers deposit into their minds (Freire 1974). Instead, education should unlock freedom and humanization. Freire’s critique remains as relevant as ever, as inequities persist across education, health, housing, income, and other indicators of wellbeing. Technology has not served as a “great equalizer” in this regard. Further, workplace relationships are often commercialized, polarized, and toxic (Ito et al. 2021). Young people who’ve been underserved and harmed in these contexts are calling for humanizing, anti-racist, and decolonizing practices that prioritize wellbeing. This call to action prompts us to revisit collegial pedagogy with a new lens: humanizing critical digital literacies.

Humanizing critical digital literacies

Humanizing approaches to learning and literacy work to resist histories of oppression and cultural disregard present in formal spaces of learning. The notion of “subtractive schooling” (Valenzuela 1999) illustrates how culturally-diminishing practices have been normalized in schools. This research resonates with learners’ experiences in academic-adjacent environments such as out-of-school learning spaces and workplaces. While youth possess extensive repertoires of practice (Gutierrez and Rogoff 2003), and cultural community wealth (Yosso 2005), institutional structures often inhibit the productive leveraging of those resources. With a commitment to welcoming students’ full historical, linguistic, and communicative repertoires, we take up youth’s everyday meaning-making practices as essential in imagining more just social futures.

These orientations to humanizing pedagogies are shaped by McBride’s work as a teacher educator, literacy researcher, and former high school English teacher. She entered teaching at a continuation high school for students aged 16-18 who have been deemed credit deficient and/or at risk of not graduating. Less than a mile from the city’s only comprehensive high school, the continuation high school was colloquially referred to as a “school for the bad kids,” and described in local news as “for the kids who don’t fit in elsewhere,” and even a “dumping ground.” Such deficit orientations to youth and nondominant communities reflect structures of dehumanization, which must be named in conversations about critical transformation of teaching and learning in both formal and informal contexts. In her English teaching and community leadership, McBride came to firmly recognize teaching, and education broadly, as an endeavor of working towards humanization — about building, imagining, and reconnecting with interdependence and relationality. Our framings of humanizing pedagogies are inspired by Freirean principles of criticality, dialogue, and praxis (Darder 2017). If we are to create tools and learning experiences that align with the needs of today’s learners, we must ask critical questions about taken-for-granted norms (e.g. racialized educational disparities, wealth inequality) and constructs (e.g. in-school vs. out-of-school, radical individualism, and technology as a catchall solution). Humanizing pedagogies both historicize such current sociocultural realities (Bartolome 1994) and seek to transform them through dialogue and action-oriented reflection on our own power and practice.

Whereas dominant narratives can vilify youth, analytical tools within critical digital literacies (CDL) offer a heuristic for building with the brilliance of non-dominant communities, namely their communicative repertoires and meaning-making. CDL asks: Which local meanings are reflected here? What participatory positionalities are enacted? How are tools used as sociomaterial objects? Yet as a largely explanatory framework, CDL only leads us so far. We must take up structural transformation and equity including forming more equitable partnerships with students (Bacalja et al. 2021), something we believe is possible via co-design with youth (Bang and Vossoughi 2016). Here, we consider pedagogy and practice as a lever toward such transformative ends.

Methods and Analysis

Shortly after the onset of the pandemic, YR Media held focus groups with 41 youth creators to understand how they were collaborating and producing meaningful work under lockdown. We then carried out six structured interviews with youth artists and journalists whose media work over 2020-2021 explored themes related to mental health and wellbeing. We explored their approaches, challenges, and supports that made a positive difference. We also interviewed five adult mentors and professionals about best practices from their varied domains (e.g., journalism, psychology, public health) for designing digital media environments that support youth wellbeing. Initial insights from this inquiry can be found in our 2021 Narrative Change and Impact report (YR Media 2021).

Our analysis also draws on a second round of three interviews with youth content creators. For these, we selected one or two examples of stories our interviewees had published in the prior year, and asked them to reflect on their processes and products. We transcribed the interviews and developed a codebook with 16 terms organized into three overarching categories that emerged from the data: relationship to technology, the work environment, and the content itself. Relationship to technology refers to the nuanced, humanizing ways that young journalists engage with and create tech as well as their reflections on relevant barriers to their wellbeing. We marked instances where young people grappled with tech overload and the paradox that often characterized their engagement with technology as both a positive and problematic force in their lives (we subcoded that latter phenomenon as “duality”). Relationship to work unpacks how young people push for humanizing environments, through practices including collaborative co-design as an alternative to more hierarchical dynamics, as well as mentorship and flexibility in the workplace. Relationship to content explores young journalists' connection to their media, their decision making in creating their content, and considerations of audience and current events in developing humanizing content.

Relationship to Technology

Technology emerged repeatedly as a tool, topic, and consequential context for young people’s reporting on mental health and wellbeing. Mio started working at YR Media when they were in high school as a reporter and peer educator. When we interviewed them, they were in their second year of college and interning with a startup centered on health and social tech.

Salience of story

“Everything and everyone has a story, and a story is authentic in the way that you're telling it, if it's your lived experience,” Mio told us. “And so how can we use stories to influence and impact and inform the things that we do, whether it be clinical research, whether it be design research, whether it be legislation and policy?”

This set of questions represents the heart of a humanizing approach to digital storytelling and engagement. “Being in spaces with other people who also hold intersectional identities [is] … very validating,” Mio said. Young people don’t always have access to others they can relate to in-person. Mio has found meaningful connections online: “I can look at someone like, hey, you don't necessarily know what it's like to be a Black queer person, but you do know what it's like to be told that you have to segregate your identities … I try to exude Blackness just as much as I exude queerness, just as much as I exude being Filipino and being an artist and being a writer and being academic.” That said, Mio grapples with a contradiction:

Social media and the Internet allows you to connect with people in a really profound sense across distance, across identity… And it allows for that really profound connection that's really beautiful, but simultaneously is very superficial and is very harmful … And that tension between connection and superficiality is really difficult to navigate.

This tension has helped to shape how Mio conducts themself on social media, in particular as related to activism. One of the radio essays Mio produced in 2020 opens with:

Being amidst the shuffle of sneakers and boots on the asphalt and the roaring chant of ‘no justice, no peace, no racist police!’ was not where I pictured myself starting Pride Month. As a queer person and a Black person, I didn’t know if I should celebrate my queer identity or hit the streets to shout and mourn the deaths of my brothers and sisters at the hands of the police.

Later, Mio reflected on how they chose this angle. When they scrolled through Instagram, they would not see a lot of young people recognizing that the Black Lives Matter protests were happening during Pride: “The idea that you have to be either queer and celebrate Pride Month or Black and attend BLM protests, it's like, that's not how identity works, and that's not how being a human being works.”

Mio connects problematic social media norms and young people’s wellbeing and identities. They have found that dimensions of platform design and user experience can make young people with multiple identities feel they have to pick one. This is one of the ways technology fails to recognize young people’s full humanity. And because Mio not only experiences these social media environments as a user, but also comments on them via storytelling, they are formulating broader takeaways about how identity structures relate to technology and wellbeing. They reveal the positive potentials of centering youth experience and agency in the design process, which benefit both products and their creators.

Reality of duality

In their reflections on tech affordances for wellbeing, Mio touches on beauty and danger, authenticity and superficiality. While they resist the “segregation” of identities, Mio has found that it can be important for them to compartmentalize and establish boundaries, as they tend to their wellbeing and communities’:

I explicitly and intentionally don't post a lot of political content on my social media to avoid that moment of, ‘here's political content,’ and then ‘here's me and my friends.’ I don't want other people to have to experience that.

What Mio is talking about here is that dissonant experience of scrolling through social media and being hit with the juxtaposition of a post decrying systemic violence and the next one showing, for example, a selfie on the beach. Mio makes it clear that they are not saying activism is devoid of joy, nor that having fun with friends undermines a person’s political seriousness. Rather, they emphasize that side-by-side artifacts of those experiences appearing together on a social media timeline, without context, can cause confusion and distrust. They are attuned not only to optics but also empathy for the wellbeing of their followers:

And so I've chosen to treat social media as a place … where I am putting out content about me and my friends and about the queer and Black joy that I'm experiencing in my life. And then I guess I experience political politics and identity politics and all of that in my everyday life, in almost every other space that I occupy.

When Mio does post on politics: “I'll wait 24 hours for that story to disappear entirely before I post anything like on my main Instagram … I try to be pretty conscious about how it's experienced by the people who might see it.”

Mio’s practices across personal, professional, and political digital activities reveal something profound about the relationship between technology and storytelling. Beyond publishing stories as a youth journalist, Mio is always thinking about how they represent themself and the effects of their content on audiences.

Other young people we interviewed echoed Mio's reflections. Nora used the word "duality" to convey the nuance in her relationship to technology – a concept so recurrent across our interviews that it became an in vivo code in our analysis. “I was really wanting to highlight the duality,” Nora said, reflecting on her story about use of AI-powered tools to deal with grief: “There are a lot of negative things that can come out of it. But there can also be good. And it's okay to critique these things … Life is not black and white.”

One of the key practices that allowed our interviewees to embrace the duality inherent in their relationship to technology was, paradoxically, compartmentalization. Tivera acknowledged that young journalists can feel pressure to be constantly on social media, but she has realized: “I could divest from it and still be a trusted source amongst my community,” that she could “take breaks” and not “lose my space” or “lose my momentum.” Rather than let technology make choices for them, the young people we interviewed are working to make thoughtful choices for themselves with respect to who they are, how they present, and their relationships with their communities, exercising agency and establishing boundaries for engaging with the digital in humanizing ways.

Relationship to Work

In a political economy driven by productivity and output, workers’ humanity is often lost among goals of profit and performance. The young journalists we interviewed push back on hierarchical relationships between personal and work, mind and body. Their reflections on work relationships – to self, to others, and to journalism – trouble normative dichotomies and amplify how the interpersonal plays a significant role in their professional development.

Journalism’s impact on mental health

Tivera, a young adult college student and freelance writer for YR Media, has published articles in magazines, online news sites, and pop culture venues and is managing editor for her university’s campus magazine. Drawing on her experience across various environments, newsrooms, and work cultures, she poignantly characterizes the toll that journalism work, content and culture can take on mental health: Tivera’s work pressures emerged across multiple aspects from micro contexts (peers, traumatic content, and identity) to macro ones (educational and work institutions, demands of the industry overall).

Given her positionality, everyday reporting can present disparities in how to investigate and share these stories. Not only is there the “pressure of perfectionism,” but also anxiety around producing material as traumatic events unfold. As a young Black woman who could personally identify with some traumatic stories, witnessing peer colleagues enact a kind of “separation” between work and personal life raised critical reflections: “Seeing other people in the industry being able to do that, I feel like that's such a privilege.”

While for other journalists, a personal to work “separation” afforded an opportunity for distance, for Tivera, such a division posed a risk of misalignment with her values: “having to separate my work and my personal life feels like I'm doing a disservice to like my own moral compass and who I was raised to be.” Despite the risks, and given her values, Tivera remains grounded and committed to her work.

Part of her strategy to sustain her wellbeing is enacting practices of self-care, which can look like taking a stand her media intake, such as she had to during the 2020 presidential debates:

The former vice president [came] to the podium and his first thing was this brutal attack on Kamala Harris. And it was just really hard for me to like as a Black woman. I remember I left. I was like, I'm going to go get Wendy's. I told my team, if you guys want to stay here, this is a great story for your resume. I understand, but I'm not going to do it. [...] I walked away from trauma, but that didn't make me a bad journalist.

Minding young journalists’ needs: Mentorship, collaboration, and reciprocity

One compelling insight around mental health is how Tivera’s relationship to challenges, stressors, and pressure is highly mitigated by the caring relationships she experienced among her teams. She feels fortunate to have work environments that held in high regard the kinds of practices she embraced. For example, “luckily I have been blessed with people who have really poured into me in the industry.” She shares that one mentor “has always been incredible.” The mentor checks in on Tivera and her friends with a stance of: “I don't want y’all to get burned out, no matter what,” and would take steps to protect their wellbeing, for example asking if they wanted to temporarily close the pitch line during a heavy time. Tivera names her as one of a few dozen professors who were “caring about the mental bandwidth of students.”

While feeling valued is something Tivera takes “very, very seriously” she describes that unfortunately, so much of journalism is about feeling “lucky,” especially as a young journalist. “I'm ‘lucky’ for the byline, I'm ‘lucky’ for another addition to my portfolio. I should just be ‘lucky.’” She emphasizes, though, “I appreciate places that don't make me feel like I'm ‘lucky,’ and make me feel like I'm valued,” a shift that she says helps shape “how you will navigate the industry for the rest of your life.” At YR Media, she said: “I never felt disposable ... I always felt like I was being considered and valued.”

Tivera’s insights illuminate the need for newsroom staff to model the kinds of humanizing practices young journalists need for their mental health. Even small practices can have a big impact. For example, Tivera contrasts how it’s “amazing” to be paid on time versus how some organizations take “up to three months” to pay her. Compensating writers, and doing so on time, is one way to honor the stresses they may feel as they embark on their careers. She has appreciated opportunities for collaboration around deadlines, in topics, in when and what to report. She shared that in YR, she was allowed to help set her own deadlines, with editors offering check-in questions like “is this feasible for you in this moment?” She contrasts this with her other work settings, where “the freelance and editor relationship is sometimes very stringent.”

Now Tivera is an editor herself, managing several writers. She seeks to not replicate newsroom shortcomings she has experienced, instead acknowledging her own writers’ socioemotional needs. She is specific in surfacing the human behind the writer, asserting with confidence, “there’s no such thing as indestructible resilience in journalism.”

You could say that Tivera is learning to stand in her own power, positioning herself as an agent of change by asking, “What can I do, as a student journalist using a network like YR Media?” She is clear about reciprocity in her writer relationships:“I don’t want it to ever be one-sided.” She prioritizes a “family dynamic” among her staff but also realizes “of course, that can't be in every workplace, but at least just show that you care.” While she makes efforts toward morale-building and social activities among staff, Tivera also reflects inward: “is it a curative balm for what's going on? No. But is it just to show you that I care enough, that I don't want you to think about work right now or for the rest of this week? Yes.”

Like Tivera, several youth journalists highlight the importance of mentorship, co-design, and reciprocity in these intergenerational work relationships. Several cited editors offering them support and learning. Mio reflects, “all of my work with YR has come from a place of ‘let's center your experience and make sure that it's a positive and fruitful one, and that's full of growth.’” Interviewees also placed a high value on co-design with youth, with one writer proposing that any organization that impacts young people should have a youth advisory board or council so young people are “at the table.” Co-design was also represented in practices that promote creativity. Niles shared that as writers with YR, “we had a lot of room to kind of play with, like, what are we going to do with this?” A reciprocal ethos is echoed in how Niles describes a “back and forth,” between youth and adults and admonishes adults to “focus on trusting young people and trusting them in positions of power and leadership.” Throughout, they show how these collaborative work relationships and environments were not only collegial, but humanizing.

Relationship to Content

Across our research, young journalists call for avenues of self-expression where they own and shape their stories, rather than having adults tell them who they are. They seek openness, accountability, and conversations that demand equity-driven approaches, as they develop content that is humanizing and collegial.

Niles started working at YR Media in the podcasting department shortly after college. He was 24 years old when we spoke. He notes the positive impact of creating content on mental health and wellbeing: “I didn’t think that even talking about all of this would even bring like a sense of comfort and it’s kind of like a catharsis. Like, I didn’t really even see any of that coming.” Echoing reflections from other young journalists we interviewed, Niles highlights the need for authenticity, representation, and actionable resources and support.

Authenticity and representation

“[In] podcasting, we always say that audio is such an intimate medium,” Niles pointed out. “So you need to be honest and to make genuine connections with people when you make audio or people aren’t going to really like it. And I think the same thing goes for mental health coverage.” The importance of genuine connections extends beyond content creation and into the co-design of events like the Beyond Self Care virtual summit, which Niles was a part of: “I think that’s what people want. You just want to hear people be honest and speak from the heart, especially when it’s something so, so personal.”

Alongside Niles’s call for authenticity, he emphasized the importance of representation. “As Black men, we don’t really talk about mental health in our culture,” Niles said on one episode of his podcast, with a guest who had experienced serious depression and opened up about it on social media. “It’s something that we kind of just push to the back burner.” Niles is working to unlock these conversations and sees his content creation as a vital part of that process. When people are able to see themselves and their identities represented in mental health stories, it breaks down barriers to access and care:

I think just feeling like you’re not alone, like something isn’t just wrong with you... like other people are dealing with stuff too, so when you see that representation, it brings a sense of comfort and then also might push you in a way where you might be more open to seeking help.

Echoing Mio’s insistence on intersectionality, Niles also aims to create content that refuses to reduce one’s identity to any one thing, instead acknowledging that a complex web of identities shapes our experiences in the world. “I mean, I think everybody is saying right now, representation is key, but not just in skin color or how you identify. It’s more than that. I think it’s also those things... Plus how you feel inside.” He believes it's important to consider how representation is done and to acknowledge the intricacies involved: “And I think that takes it to the next level. When you see somebody who looks like you and is from your community and feels like you!”

Actionable resources and supports

Niles felt strongly that telling stories about mental health struggles can help young people feel less alone and hold institutions accountable, but he also stressed the need to include practical tools, tips and resources in the content. He declared, “people need to stop reporting on mental health without providing adequate resources for the things that they're reporting on.” Niles shared how his podcast accounted for this last season: “We were like, how can we do more, give more tangible resources to people? So we posted resources through our website. We connected people to actual therapists and affordable therapy.”

Young people creating media about mental health need supports both while they’re producing the content and to prepare for what might happen once it’s published — what we call the “digital afterlife” (Soep 2012). Niles noted, “I think you have to surround people with people who have done these stories [and] this type of coverage before, because then it's just so many other things that you can warn people about and just prepare people for.” Having space to prepare and plan is especially crucial for mental health and wellbeing stories given their potential emotional toll. Niles emphasizes this in how he talks about the impact of thoughtfully deciding how much to disclose in collaboration with more experienced others:

When you connect young people with these resources, with extremely talented producers and with people who have been there before, I think you’re giving them all the information so that they can make the decision for themselves or they can create a story and have all the information that comes with creating a story and releasing it to the world.

Niles’ reflections orient us toward how resources and supports are intertwined to develop products and processes in ways that are humanizing for both content creators and others their stories may personally touch. Young people reporting on these themes exercise considerable vulnerability and deserve to be supported through possibilities of how audiences might engage with their now-public narratives in digital spaces.

Niles was not alone in his attention to mental health content in relation to journalists’ own wellbeing . Other young creatives reflected on similar themes regarding humanizing the processes, products, and virtual experiences when reporting on youth mental health and wellbeing in the digital newsroom. Writing about important issues that matter to them was powerful, even when difficult. Tivera talked about one story in particular:

I was just like, this piece was the hardest piece I've ever had to do. I did it in two weeks and I'm just now processing how that wore me out. Like for the rest of the year, I was not excited to write anything dealing with the Black Lives Matter protests. I felt like this piece with YR Media was very cathartic for me, and I felt like there were so many people who felt just how I felt.

Mio also discussed the importance of representation and authenticity in building out youth-driven digital newsrooms as we define how we can “make the world a better place.” They highlight how that work “happens in dialogue with other people,” and connects it to the reason they write as a journalist: “If someone can read this and be like, Oh, maybe I can start thinking about this, that is already a step in that direction of taking agency over how you are putting energy, I guess, out into the world.” Mio’s passion for this work is rooted in the power of using their agency to create and share stories to make connections and work toward equitable change.

Lastly, other young people echoed Niles’s call for digital media that provides practical supports and actionable resources. Shaikh said the Beyond Self Care Virtual Summit represented something he had “never heard of before” by centering mental health: “That's prioritizing something that isn’t usually prioritized… And this subject does deserve focus, not only in reporting, but trainings, in understanding how we go about our daily lives just as humans.” Storytelling rooted in humanistic approaches can have a positive impact on young people’s lives, helping them develop a sense of self, agency, and confidence. Too often, mental health coverage centers on hopelessness. Young people want to see humanizing stories of people like them, successfully navigating their difficulties and sharing in community.

Conclusion

Principles for humanizing collegial pedagogy in digital journalism

In our analysis, as educators in a youth-centered context, we focus on relationships in learning, asking: What does our teaching surface about our humanness? How and with what tools are we teaching? How do we as educators “hear” youth–their needs, narratives, and critical perspectives, as we seek to support them? To that end, we conclude with emergent principles for designing environments where young people engage technology in ways that sustain their own wellbeing and that of their peers across their workplaces and the public sphere. We frame these principles as a shift from “mental health day,” (or in journalism a “mental health desk”), to a “mental health way”–a design commitment to structure all youth activities through a lens of mental health and wellbeing.

We should note that the mental health coverage we report on here was carried out amidst stark therapy shortages across the US, especially clinicians who are BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and/or have direct experiences with various systems, including juvenile justice and foster care. YR Media is part of a movement to recognize the role that youth-serving organizations can and should play in sharing mental health resources that are accessible and culturally-sustaining. These youth perspectives inspire us to reimagine wellbeing as distributed work–not siloed to any one domain, area of focus or individuals, clinicians or specialists, but rather across partners in activity. We see young people themselves as untapped experts in this effort. They invite us to dream beyond a baseline of “time off” and toward the “even greater responsibility to tell people how to deal with it and how to handle it,” as Tivera put it.

We present three principles for humanizing collegial pedagogy as they emerged from youth’s meaning-making with digital tools–how they report on, with, and for wellbeing. Our vision is that educators (from both in-school and out-of-school contexts), designers, technologists, journalists, and practitioners across formal and informal contexts might hold central these humanizing commitments in digital learning: across technology, pedagogy, and content.

From “objectivity” to storytelling centering duality

In this tumultuous moment in history, attending to young people’s current lived realities is integral to their wellbeing and learning. A humanizing collegial pedagogy calls us to start from the interests of youth collaborators as nuanced individuals with both personal and work commitments. No matter the media context or mode of digital communication, there is a pull from young people to have platforms that allow them to share, find others with whom they can relate and belong. In many ways, rigid standards of objectivity suppress the role of the personal and thereby inhibit technology use as a situated social practice that is also personally meaningful. Instead, we recognize storytelling as key for youth wellbeing. Storytelling allows for the duality that emerged as a theme across our interviews: the capacity young people demonstrated again and again to hold two apparently conflicting truths at once. For them, technology can be a source of good and harm. They rely on it to live their full identities and practice their politics, while they also seek space from it. .When youth have the chance to narrate their own connections and experiences, they create powerful media that serves not just the purposes of their work or formal learning environments (e.g. journalism, enterprise, schooling), but that also benefits them personally.

Several youth described spaces of digital media creation as “cathartic” or “catharsis.” As adult collaborators, we welcome this framing alongside a shared need for us to wrestle with the relationship between technology and practices of vulnerability and sharing. In a co-designed environment like YR Media, we uplift the needs of young people, intersectionality, and relational reporting, to construct a safe place to ground one’s work in the personally meaningful. Through a humanizing collegial pedagogy, youth digital stories become a container for their unfolding narratives while also keeping their needs of safety and wellbeing at the forefront.

From “assignment” to co-designed and reciprocal project

Humanizing collegial pedagogy pays attention not only to content creation, but also to the relational needs of human collaborators in that process--a component of learning in any social context. Although one norm in digital newsrooms and schools is to direct creators to specific tasks and outputs, we extend beyond a normative classification of “assignments” to emphasize a reciprocal process of work co-designed with youth that values their input and ideas for direction. Across our study, mentorship, co-design, and flexibility are echoed as generative practices that make a difference in youths’ ability to navigate their identities, productivity, and wellbeing in output-driven working environments, including community-based contexts.

Through their narratives and visions for change, youth journalists surfaced the human behind the writer. Young BIPOC writers faced tensions writing on topics that disproportionately affected them–traumatic digitally-circulated images in the 2020 news cycles amidst shelter-in-place orders–racial reckoning, mental health, and political division. However, their experiences of humanizing collegial pedagogy reinforced their ability to exercise ownership of their work from inception to publication, including the timing, topics, and modes of communication. An ethos of flexibility helps reorganize priorities beyond formulaic indicators of performance toward humanizing engagement with digital tools. This approach requires and furthers a sense of safety and comfort to foster the vulnerability needed to meaningfully converse, disagree, and exercise trust. Largely informed by how their wellbeing was supported through similar humanizing collegial practices, young people remind us to “create connections with whoever you’re working with” so we “not only create beautiful stories, but feel comfortable putting those out.”

From “publish” to engage and belong

As youth produce digital content, a humanizing collegial pedagogy encourages us to broaden how we think about digital technologies and the creation process. We harness participatory engagement as opportunities to empower youth beyond consumers to thoughtful producers. Specifically, these youth voices encourage us to expand the objective of “publishing” from pushing out content to a way to invite their audiences to engage and belong. Youth-made media invites support, reinforcement, and a sense of belonging in others. Young creators value offering resources to others, finding satisfaction as others read, hear, engage their work and feel less alone. They enact what they also ask of adults–to “not provide something about mental health without providing a sense of hope.”

We underscore and affirm clinicians, social workers, licensed mental health professionals as experts in the work of mental health and wellbeing. At the same time, these youth voices demonstrate possibilities of embedding mental health in peer, situated relationships where they find wisdom, support, and community. The youth journalists demonstrate audience engagement through a lens of wellbeing, as they thoughtfully consider those who rely on their perspectives and imagine themselves as powerful partners. Their approaches humanize the process of digital media creation, including via the distributed work of collaborating with one another with care.

As intergenerational and interdisciplinary colleagues, youth creators learn that what they say matters, and beckon us to humanizing ways of relating to technology, and one another. Advancing humanizing values poses a formidable challenge in structures driven by competition and perpetual urgency, yet we believe that by listening to youth, we can cultivate the courage and inspiration to forge new relationships that ground our work--no matter the context--in humanization. We invite readers to heed these words from Mio: “to be a good ally, if you do not do anything else, if you do nothing else, please, listen. Listen to what – not only Black people, but also queer people, people of color, and trans folks, and differently abled folks and immigrant folks – listen to what we need, because no one has listened to us for hundreds of years. So if you listen to us now, it is the bare minimum for what I feel I would want in an ally. Listen. Listen. Listen.”

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