ABSTRACT
Across the United States, educational institutions struggled to respond to the pandemic. In one program, black female teens gathered each week with their mentors, a group of five black female entrepreneurs, to design a product that responded to a local problem in their communities. The practice of being vulnerable and transparent extended into their TikToks. One of the facilitators, a documentary filmmaker, described how in the first weeks of the five week program the group “spent a lot of time building community, having more kinda deep conversations”, which were a jumping off point for developing pitches. After months of “Zoom school” and mandated learning apps, it’s notable that when given the opportunity to make media, youth in both of these examples opted to focus on making their voices heard when it came to their experiences of the pandemic – something especially important as youths’ locus of power and agency have been heavily disrupted by it.
