This Teenage STEM

When I go to schools, conferences, or read books about education, there is one thing, which, despite its centrality to learning, is often entirely absent. Its ghostly omission is, I believe, a core reason schools are so often misaligned with how young people actually learn. 

Authentic learning happens from an emotional place — from the wonder, curiosity, connectedness, meaning-making, and identity expression that happens when you create something useful or beautiful. However, we — students, teachers, professors, parents — do not have language to make legible these forces that drive real learning. As a result, our education system does not often intentionally create contexts that are fertile grounds for seeding intellectual and creative passions. 

In a 2021 national survey, only 46 percent of students reported feeling engaged at school. This was a significant decrease from 53 percent in 2019 and 65 percent in 2018. Furthermore,  and that 81 percent of teachers say student engagement increases when educators value social-emotional well-being. 

Because they are not emotionally connected to what they are learning, young people usually “pattern match” and fake-learn quite convincingly and graduate having no idea what they want to do with their lives. The cost is enormous. Not only are young people not learning. They are also learning how to not-learn. If we do not emphasize the emotional dimensions of learning, we are dimming, rather than growing young people’s potential. 

This reality is put into stark relief when we consider the scale and magnitude of the current youth mental health crisis; a catastrophe schools are entirely unequipped to address and which drastically impact young people's ability to learn. This crisis is disproportionately affecting young women, especially Black and Brown girls. A 2021 CDC survey found that almost 60 percent of high school girls experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year and nearly 25 percent of high school girls made a suicide plan. 

We cannot address current gender disparities in STEM without addressing the emotional dimensions of learning. I, a 14+ year science and computer science high school teacher, am working with a team of teens to imagine and  co-create a new pedogogical method and paradigm. This

Imagine if STEM courses were centered around wonder, meaning, relevance, adolescent identity construction, teen social relationships, and belonging? How much more successful, representative, and inclusive would these courses be?

Everyone with an internet connection can log on to Kahn Academy and learn science. However, that's not happening because young people are not emotionally connected to ideas and projects that reflect what they care about.

Outside of teaching, I run a program called This Teenage Life (TTL). TTL began as an after school club with seven teen girls at High Tech High, a public charter school in San Diego, California. Now,TTL is an online youth community and media organization whose flagship publication is a podcast about teen mental health. Overseen by myself and a paid college student, the podcast showcases the voices of teenagers from around the U.S. and world, who gather each week and participate in dialogue groups. Together, they discuss topics that are important to them, but for which they have few outlets. Each of the four core dialogue groups, comprising around twelve teens and one facilitator, meet weekly to generate topics, record their conversations, and make music and art. This all ultimately contributes to a podcast with over 1.3 million downloads. We’ve published over 110 episodes on topics such body image, parental divorce, and bullying. According to our research, we are the world’s only podcast where youth listeners can become long-term contributors. All of our current contributors were listeners first who reached out, and over 80 percent of our 445 thousand listeners identify as teen girls.

TTL will work with teens to center the community dimensions of STEM learning. We will produce a teen-made science journalism podcasting series, run a virtual webinar series by teens for teens, and youth-driven workshops. All of these will be designed in collaboration with teenagers themselves and will be free and open source. They will be different from traditional online learning experiences because they will be creative and project-based, while centering relationships, community, belonging, and treating young people as producers of knowledge rather than consumers of information.

To help more educators do this kind of work with students, we will codify our methodology via guides and youth-led professional development experiences. This will educators foster a greater sense of belonging in their classrooms in order to teach science and computer science in a way that is more emotionally relevant and authentically connected with young people’s experiences. All of this will ultimately result in greater diversity and equity in STEM courses and fields.

We believe that This Teenage Life’s STEM initiative, and the documentation of it, could be part of a cultural shift of how students learn STEM in schools across the U.S. 

As described earlier, This Teenage Life has had hundreds of teen contributors over the past five years — currently we have just over 50. We also have hundreds of thousands of listeners. We receive emails from these listeners (primarily teen girls) each day in which they describe how our podcast changes their lives. Here is a link to just a few of these emails.

We have surveyed TTL’s impact on the well-being of our longest-term dialogue group  participants. For all categories, including developing a sense of belonging, self-esteem, communication skills, and emotional health, over 70% of responses from participants and their parents ranked TTL’s impact as the highest it could be (10/10). Parents shared reflections. One mother wrote, “I saw my daughter  grow greatly during her time with TTL. Not only did she gain confidence, emotional intelligence, and experience her impact … She interviewed me and my experience with fighting cancer and we learned a lot about each other and our relationship became stronger.”

We also positively impact our listeners. We typically have between 1,000 - 4,000 listeners of our podcast each day, 80% of whom are preteens and teens who identify as girls. We reach youth in over 150 countries, with particularly large audiences in the U.S. and India. According to Spotify statistics, our show has, in total, over 450K listeners, 125K subscribers, and over 1.2 million downloads.  

As described earlier, we receive feedback from listeners via email. Here’s an example. “Hi I’m Gamu, I’m 15 and recently started binging your podcast and the first episode I chose was on loneliness really connected with me, especially in the context of this pandemic. My dad recently passed away from covid and I’ve been struggling with feeling isolated and sad but hearing other people and their experiences really helped me feel seen and (for want of better vocab) not alone…” We invite each teen that reaches out to join our dialogue program. Since she wrote to us a year ago, Gamu has become one of our most active contributors. 

We are the only podcast we know of where the listeners become the contributors. This model ensures that we are constantly incorporating feedback from our beneficiaries into our work because they are, in many ways, at the helm.

I have taught middle and high school science and computer science for the past fourteen years across the US. I also have worked on designing and running programs to help start new STEM district-wide initiatives in Massachusetts and have my principal's license.

Throughout my time as an educator I have seen how making learning emotionally relevant for young people transforms them from passive recipients of information into independent investigators. 

Inspired by the thinking and writings of constructionists from MIT (i.e. Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert), I have created a new project-based learning methodology over the past decade, which centers around leveraging wonder, relevance, meaning, belonging, identity construction, and the importance of teen friendships in order to support teens in designing and doing high quality technical and creative STEM projects that reflect their individual tastes and interests. As a result, the STEM electives I currently teach have the most racial and gender-based diversity in the high school where I teach.

Now, I want to use this work in combination with a program I run that reaches hundreds of thousands of teen girls. I believe this community of young people and I could catalyze a paradigm shift in STEM teaching and learning.

The TTL team is made up of myself, a college intern, and over 50 teen contributors from all over the U.S. and the world. Over 80 percent of the teens who contribute to our podcast identify as girls. Several identify as nonbinary, and several identify as boys. We are a geographically, racially, socioeconomically, ethnically, and religiously diverse group. The teens spend several hours per week on the podcast. I invest approximately 30-40 hours per week outside of my role as an educator. 

We are extremely well positioned to deliver this solution because we have already been working on it for the past five years and have built a learning culture and practice that embodies how we will approach our STEM initiative. Furthermore, the architects of this solution _are_ its beneficiaries, not only demographically but literally. This Teenage Life's contributors are former listeners who reached out. The young people helping to design and iterate upon our STEM programming will in large part be teens who identify as struggling with STEM.

Too often, young people ane educators are excluded from helping to design the solutions meant to serve them. This so often why so many education solutions don't actually work. Teenagers have incredible creative capacities and our diverse teen team will contribute substantially to creating media, community-centered virtual experiences, and pedagogical tools that will support greater engagement in classes for students and educators. 

This Teenage Life's contributors and listeners include educators, parents, and teens and preteens. Our largest audience (over 80% of our listeners on Spotify) identify as teen girls. According to Spotify, the podcasting platform where our podcast is most frequently heard, we have 445K listeners there and 115 subscribers. However this does not account for our listenership on Apple Podcasts, on our website, and on other platforms.

TTL’s current dialogue groups include members from across the U.S. as well as teens from India, Zimbabwe, Canada, Portugal, England, and Malaysia. In terms of our listenership, we have 1,000 - 4,000 listeners per day, over 80% of whom are preteens and teens who identify as girls. Most of our listenership is in the U.S. but we also have listeners in over 150 countries. 

Every day we receive emails from listeners. We have collected thousands at this point. They want to be part of our community and we believe that our creative and expressive STEM program will not only resonate with them, but will excite the thousands of educators who have listened to our show, seen our work at conferences, or used our resources in their classrooms.

For the past five years, I am the only adult who has been working on This Teenage Life. Most of the team is made up of extremely dedicated teenagers and college students. I need a community of adult thought partners alongside whom I can codify and scale this work. The ideas that catalyzed my career as a constructionist educator, originated at MIT. Now, I want to become part of the MIT Solve community in order to reify the heart of those very ideas at scale.

TTL's programmatic model is well-designed, refined, and tested. We have run programming for five years for hundreds of youth contributors. We have run workshops for hundreds of educators across the country. We have made media (over 100 podcast episodes) with over 1.3 million downloads and 445K teen listeners. We have done this as an educator and a group of teens. We have yet to define an operational business model that will scale as we scale.

 Over the past two years we have become fully-funded through grants, podcast sponsorships, course-teaching contracts, and more. However, with the right business model, I am confident that our impact, listenership, and reach could grow by orders of magnitude. Not only could we become the largest and most impactful youth podcast in the world. We could also become a new kind of emotionally-centered, community driven educational organization that helps teachers across the country foster greater relationships and engagement with their students.

Given the nature of the powerful STEM ideas we want to engage, the practice we've already developed, the requests we've received from educators and teenagers to engage in this kind of work, I am confident that with the right partnerships and mentorship, we could have not only a big impact, but a unique one. 

After fourteen years of cultivating my teaching and educational design practice, I am finally ready to scale and MIT Solve is the community we need right now to develop operational business model that will make our work sustainable in the long term.

Molly Josephs (the team lead) directs and runs This Teenage Life. I founded and started it with a team of teenagers. From then until today, I interact with every single teenager who is part our community and all the eudcators who reach out to us. This Teenage Life was started by an educator (me) who was working at a public, project-based high school in San Diego, California. It was an after school program that helped young people feel less along in the world and do creative and technical work that mattered to them. Since then we have organically grown to have a podcast with hundreds of thousands of listeners and many teen contributors. Since its inception, I have been intimately involved with every single member of our community. 

I am intimately involved with every aspect of This Teenage Life. This summer, we are developing an organization model and structure — and hiring more people — in order to help delegate the work that I've been doing for the past five years directly with the teenagers we serve.

Until then, this work entails facilitating teen dialogue sessions along with our college student producer Evelyn, answering the teen listener emails we receive each day, engaging with participant family members, coding and managing our website, and more. Thus, on a daily basis, I interact and am part of the communities we serve. The young people and the educators we support began with a community I know very well: me and my students.

No one is doing what This Teenage Life is doing along multiple dimensions.

1. Participatory Youth Media: There are no other podcasts or high quality media that I am aware of where the consumers/listeners become the primary contributors. This is especially the case for youth media. Most youth media is made by adults, not teenagers. And media that features actual teenagers does not usually give its listeners a central role in its production. However, TTL is focused on universal themes, rather than specific characters. This will also be true for our STEM themed media. We will center our STEM podcast series on big ideas rather than individuals. This model means that our our listenership doesn’t change as "our cast" does. This not only makes our media sustainable and timeless, but enables us to be a new model for a kind of youth-driven media organization.

2. Approach to Learning: According to our partners, which are large educational nonprofits and foundations, we have made the only youth-created teacher facilitation guides and youth-made professional development experiences. 

3. There is no learning organization we know of that explicitly centers the emotional dimensions of learning, especially in service to doing deep technical work in science and computer science. In his seminal book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, Seymour Papert —the first co-director of Artificial Intelligence at MIT and the creator of the constructionist theory of education— wrote about the central role emotions play in learning. 

In the Forward to the book, Papert writes about playing with gears as a small child. He describes how his time with gears provided an analogy and model that enabled sophisticated engagement with mathematics later in life. His love of gears endowed mathematics with a “positive affective tone.” He then describes how Piaget, his mentor and the father of developmental psychology, never addressed the emotional dimensions of learning: “[Piaget’s] neglect of the affective comes more from a modest sense that little is known about it than from an arrogant sense of its irrelevance.”

This small sentence — an aside, really—  is, strangely enough, at the heart of the learning framework and paradigm of This Teenage Life and This Teenage STEM.

I have spent the last fourteen years of my life thinking about and working on how to help young people fall in love with ideas. How to help them immerse themselves in deep creative and intellectual work that matters to them. I have strangely become an expert in something we have no words for: my expertise lies in how to catalyze and translate the emotional — wonder, relevance, connection to self and others, love  — so that young people move from being consumers of information to producers of new knowledge.

My hope is to grow this work This Teenage Life and its STEM initiative. By creating community, centering dialogue, and addressing the emotional dimensions of learning in STEM contexts, we will deflate the barriers that generally keep girls from feeling comfortable pursuing STEM. We will help them see themselves and their STEM capacities in new ways.

We believe that making this methodology legible to more young people and educators will catalyze a paradigm shift for how young people and adults think about and practice education.

In the next five years, This Teenage Life aims to become the most listened to and impactful podcast for adolescents in the world. We have already made concrete steps in this direction. Several weeks ago, we were included as part of Common Sense Media’s Teen Mental Health Toolkit, which meant that TTL was featured on Apple Podcasts, one of the largest podcast platforms in the world. TTL is not only in the top 1 percent of podcasts in terms of listenership, worldwide, we are also gaining recognition for the quality of our content. Our work was referenced at this year’s American Academy of Pediatrics conference, is being used in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education courses, has been featured at the National Council of English Teachers’ annual conference, and more.

Our STEM program by young people for young people will be the first of it’s kind — webinars and STEM themed media available to anyone, from anywhere, for free. We will produce great stories (i.e. podcasts and a digital magazine) made by teens for teens (primarily girls) about STEM-related content. Our STEM-focused podcast series will sound like Radiolab, but will be centered around teenagers’ interests and will be co-produced and hosted by teens. Our related virtual events, courses, speaker series, and workshops will be available to anyone with access to the internet. 

We will document our methodologies and create youth-made, project-based STEM resources for educators—the first of their kind—that will be used by hundreds of thousands of teachers across the U.S. There are so few high-quality, free, easily-accessible resource guides for teachers that are concrete and actually work in classrooms. Even fewer resources resonate with students. Ours will be unique because our guides for educators will be made and tested with young people.

More explicitly, our impact goals are as follows. In the next five years we aim to:

1. Codify our Affective Learning Methodology and create free, open-source resources for educators. We will partner with school districts and charter networks to distribute the resources. To demonstrate the impact of these resources on student learning, we will document their impact with podcasts and short films featuring student voices and experiences that showcases how this approach transforms learning outcomes.

2. We will produce great teen-driven science media primarily by folks who identify as girls. They will be heard by hundreds of thousands of teens and we will use the This Teenage Life community and platform to publish these series’, which will help young women to learn about different STEM fields and related opportunities. This would look like interviews with women scientists, stories of personal experiences in STEM fields and classes made by teenagers, and stories about women engaging in technical fields in new and original ways.

This Teenage Life measures its impact in various ways and it will continue to do so with its STEM initiative.  For educators experiencing our youth-led professional development workshops we will issue surveys over time both for them and their students in order to see the impact our programming has on learning and engagement. For the science and technology podcasting series we create, we will track listenership data.

So few interventions in education have been successful over the past century. This is made evident by the fact that the most ubiquitous schooling model in the U.S has remained unchanged for the past 150 years. Most solutions in education don't work because they don't address the root cause of the deepest problem: For many, schooling is fundamentally mismatched with the way they learn. 

We will address this problem at its core by creating a new learning model that is particularly appealing to young women because it allows them to bring their whole selves — their tastes, interest, and identities — in service to doing creative, technical projects that are meaningful to them. These projects will serve as the medium through which they learn and practice STEM skills.

The webinars we run for young people, the programs we run for educators, and the methodology we ultimately develop will lead to more women in STEM. I know this because I have done it and seen it with my own eyes over the past 10+ years. The project-based approach I have developed, I’ve been developing and using for over a decade. It is impossible for me to show that the learning experiences I designed for young people— especially young women— caused them to succeed in STEM fields. However, I am very close with many of my former female students whom I taught ten years ago. Quite a few of them are computer scientists, medical doctors, computational biologists, and more. Many of them attribute their initial turn towards STEM to their initial experiences in the science courses I designed. These experiences gave them something so simple: the chance to discover a passion and do a rigorous, personally-meaningful project about a STEM-related issue relevant to them. These kind of experiences are formative for young people and even though they seem small, they can have such a powerful impact. Here is an extreme example. 

Eleven years ago I taught a young woman in my freshman year biology course. Two years pior, she had been diagnosed with pediatric hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer). She came to my class saying that she wasn’t interested in science. Instead of doing basic coursework like a normal freshman bio class, each student did their own projects. Elana, did many of hers about her cancer. 

From there, she became interested in the immune system, which she wrote an extensive research paper on. That summer she got an internship in a Lab. The next year, she learned to program and began analyzing data of other young people she knew struggling with the illness that she herself had. Ultimately, she ended up discovering the genetic mutation for the cancer that she herself had.

 While this is a remarkable story, it shouldn’t be as usual as it is. Teenagers have an incredible capacity to do work with great imagination, zest, and gusto. This Teenage Life’s STEM program will elevate the voices of young women who perhaps didn't identify as technical, until they did. It will help young women feel more seen and heard in STEM contexts. The impact and quality of the girl-made science media that we make, I believe, will speak for itself.

All of our dialogue groups are virtual. Our podcast is hosted on Libsyn, which primarily employs the simple technology of RSS feeds. For our dialogue sessions, we use Zoom. To make and send recordings and encourage ongoing dialogue amongst our teen contributors, we use Whatsapp. To edit audio, we use free applications such as Garage Band and Audacity. We use free and widely available technology in everything to do because we want our programming to be available with as many teens and educators as possible and as a result, we go where the teens already are and use what the teenagers are already using. This summer we will be re-doing our website and creating a smartphone application for our listeners, which will be quite useful for teens, parents, and educators.

This Teenage Life has an incredible team but it does not have a traditional organization structure. Most of our team is composed of teens. We currently have over 50 active teen participants, one adult who works full-time on This Teenage Life while also teaching full time, three college students who work part-time on the show, and a bunch of teen independent-contractors who will help us redesign our website this summer while also helping us design and make an app that we will be launching in the fall.

Molly Josephs, Director: 5 Years

Cloe Moreno and Molly Zucchet: First teen contributors who are now TTL's  web artist and sound engineer, respectively. They have been working on it also for 5 years.

Evelyn McKenney: College Student Dialogue Facilitator and Producer. 1 year.

Long term current teen participants (2+ years): Jayden Dial, Lydia Bach, Alexis Bowie, Stella Sturgill, Eva Friedlander, Divya Bamorya, Maitreyi Muralidhar, Kashika Barkakati

Diversity, equity, and inclusivity are intrinsic to This Teenage Life’s model. At our core, we are a forum for open dialogue and community-building for youth around the world. Anyone is welcome to join, and we have participants spanning the gender spectrum, with varying cultural, ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. We are low barrier-to-entry, require no previous podcast experience, and work closely with new participants to make sure they feel comfortable and incorporated. Consequently, we attract young folks who, because of age, location, gender, mental health status, or a multitude of other characteristics, may not feel comfortable voicing their experiences through other platforms. During our dialogues, we have had teens share vulnerable stories they say they would never express in a more traditional classroom context. Folks are able to experiment with articulating new ideas, without having to find the “correct” answer. I have watched participants make discoveries about themselves through learning from others and having the unique opportunity to exist in a truly safe space. 

Our method of sourcing new contributors from our listenership creates a community of immediate understanding and a deep desire to participate. Additionally, every participant has equal opportunity to contribute audio, writing, or ideas for how to grow the organization. We are completely non-hierarchical, and challenge the norm that students only learn from teachers, and not vice versa. This Teenage Life embraces the simple fact that we can all learn from each other, and diversity and equity are essential to that mission. We would apply that same level of commitment to inclusivity in our This Teenage STEM initiative through ensuring equal access to resources, low-barrier to joining, and generating content to promote a welcoming educational community for all. 

Until this year, the entirety of TTL’s costs have been paid for by a full-time teacher who lives on a teacher’s salary in New York City.  Thus, in terms of impact, we punch beyond our weight. Most youth podcast programs (e.g. public radio programs) operating on a similar scale have a full time adult staff of at least five people.

TTL will continue to have relatively low costs because our core programming — teen dialogue groups and podcast episodes— will be run primarily by college students on financial aid who are trained and employed to facilitate dialogue groups and produce podcast episodes based on these conversations.

Our current business model relies on partnerships with larger institutions — universities, large educational nonprofits, educational foundations, schools — who are interested in our expertise in student-centered, youth-driven learning and media. They sponsor podcast episodes, pay us for professional development experiences that we design and run, and pay us for workshops we run for young people. Our business model will continue to rely on partnerships because we offer a "cool factor," a large youth-reach, and youth-made quality that larger institutions cannot create themselves. 

Our low costs combined with our partnerships will allow us to continue to be free and open source for all kids will providing high quality experiences and media for larger institutions with resources.

Currently we are financially sustainable. All of the college students who work as independent contractors making the art and audio editing our episodes are paid very well for their contributions. I (Molly Josephs) do not currently pay myself for my 30-40 hours per week that I work on This Teenage Life. Instead, my 40 hours of full-time position teaching high school computer science is what allows me to afford to work on This Teenage Life outside of school.

Our goals for the next year is to hire two full-time employees by generating revenue through partnerships with mission-aligned larger youth-media organizations, university initiatives, and foundations. We are already in conversation with four mission-aligned organizations who are interested in partnering with us in ways that would make us much more financially sustainable.

For the past year, This Teenage Life has generated revenue through mission-aligned sponsorships of podcast episodes, predominantly from educational foundations. We have also run programs for mission-aligned nonprofits such as schools (eg. Codman Academy in Dorchester, MA) and summer programs.  Last summer, we partnered with a larger organization to run a vocational training program for low-income youth in California, which simultaneously generated revenue via grant-funding and provides teens with well-paying summer jobs where they produced episodes about issues they care about. This summer we will be running a program for Seeds of Peace, a conflict resolution camp for teenagers. We will also be running an online course for teens and preteens in collaboration with Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

In addition to these partnerships, we have received grants via participation in accelerators. In 2022, we participated in the Headstream Accelerator. This year year we are proud to be a participant in Connected Learning Alliance's "Connected Wellbeing Impact Studio," which will provide us with a grant.