Teach Writing With The New York Times: Our 2024-25 Curriculum

This year, we’re inviting teenagers to do the same kind of documentation and reflection. But this time, during a year of pivotal elections around the world, we’re focusing on their political and civic identities, values and beliefs, and how those have been formed — and are still being shaped — as they grow up.

An invitation to young people to speak for themselves

Though The Times and other news sources often report on the attitudes of young people, in this unit we offer teenagers an open-ended opportunity to speak for themselves, in whatever media they are most comfortable using.

In 2020, 2021 and 2022 we asked teenagers what it was like to come of age during the pandemic and its aftermath, and we got a rich range of responses, expressed in photos, diary entries, comics, paintings, songs, collages, GIFs, videos, poems, essays, lists and Lego sculptures. In 2023, to celebrate our 25th anniversary as a site, we invited teachers and students to document and reflect on what high school is like today — and, again, we received an outpouring of multimedia, including graphs and a diorama.

Now, at a political moment when, as one Opinion writer characterized it, “things have been changing so fast that no one can really make sense of the time we’re living in and what this chaos means,” we are asking students around the world to reflect on big questions about their political identities, beliefs and values, their roles as citizens, and their understanding of how the world works — or ought to work.

They’ll do this by following news from a variety of sources; conducting productive and civil discussions about issues with other teens; and, finally, creating something in the medium of their choice to respond to what they have learned.