PBS FRONTLINE
PBS FRONTLINE hosted a six-week youth fellowship at the MIT Media Lab, where students led conversations on AI and civic life—treating their perspectives as primary source material for future reporting and a model for youth-led civic dialogue.
Listen to a medley of young people exploring how AI is shaping their lives, hopes, and fears.
Check out how young people are making sense of AI in the Conversation on AI portal, with themes and highlights from 40+ conversations and 180+ youth voices, led by FRONTLINE youth fellows.
“We fostered an environment of compassion amid often uncomfortable disagreement. This fellowship has influenced me to use discussion frameworks to accelerate learning, trust, and growth.” Erin Birdsong, high school senior
Challenge: Hearing how young people are experiencing AI
AI is reshaping daily life, learning, work, creativity, and information. FRONTLINE PBS wanted to understand how young people are making sense of these shifts in real time, and to do it in a way that treated youth perspectives as primary source material for public understanding and reporting. They also wanted to test a model for youth led civic dialogue that could grow beyond a single summer program.
Solution: A six week youth fellowship pairing dialogue, sensemaking, and storytelling
In summer 2025, FRONTLINE, MIT CCC, and Cortico hosted 11 Boston area fellows ages 16 to 21 for a six week paid program at the MIT Media Lab. Fellows met weekly, engaged with guest speakers and prompts about AI, recorded audio diaries, and led peer small group conversations on topics like creativity, ethics, education, work, and human connection.
As one fellow put it, “the engaged journalism part [is] like an empathetic lens [in]to how you center your story being able to recognize the biases that you bring or exist within the context of the story that you’re telling and being able to be fully transparent.”
Across the program, fellows designed and facilitated more than 40 conversations with over 180 young people, then used tools from MIT CCC and Cortico and a structured sensemaking process to surface themes and collective insights from what they heard.
Results: Youth insights shaping reporting and a model for scaling youth dialogue
The fellowship produced a grounded body of youth perspectives on AI in civic life.These insights are informing new FRONTLINE reporting for the For the Record series, and the project served as the first phase of a broader Youth Civic Voices Initiative focused on building a scalable, youth led conversation model. The next phase expands this approach through a national cohort of public libraries in 2026, carrying forward the core idea that young people can lead the conversation on emerging civic questions and help shape how those questions are understood publicly.
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