Student Voices is a curriculum-based civic-engagement project for high school students aimed at increasing civic knowledge and participation among young people in the United States. Working with high-schools around the country, the project integrates its unique curricular materials and specially designed Web site into traditional civics, social studies, and government classes to build an in-class experience for students around real-world local community issues, political processes, and election campaigns.

Student Voices provides teachers with two basic components that teach students how to become active and involved citizens: a curriculum and a local Student Voices Web site. The Student Voices curriculum teaches students how to use timely resources-many available on the Student Voices Web site-to understand their communities, to formulate issues agendas, and to raise those issues in a public forum. The Student Voices Web site in each locality provides students with the news and informational resources to perform those tasks while also providing them opportunities to express their opinions and engage in online dialogue with their peers at other schools.

The Student Voices curriculum complements traditional civics and social studies curricula through its emphasis on experiential learning. With Student Voices integrated into a traditional curriculum, textbook readings and lessons come alive for students as they learn about government by becoming active civic participants. Students identify and research issues they care about, and throughout the school year they work to engage candidates for local office and other civic leaders, the media, and their communities in a discussion of the future of their communities. Through such hands-on study students learn not only the knowledge and skills of democratic citizenship but the important lesson about their rightful place in the democratic process.

The Student Voices curricular materials have been designed to assist educators who must address state- and district-mandated curriculum standards. Through lessons that require research on local issues and government structures and processes, teachers are able to address benchmarks in a range of subject areas, from the social studies to history and even to math. Also, because Student Voices encourages students to become knowledgeable about local issues and then work to inform their communities about those issues, teachers are able to use the project to meet service-learning requirements while simultaneously educating their students about underlying causes of social problems and government action to address them.

Student Voices is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, with funding from the Annenberg Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts. The project is under the direction of Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.