hajar – Youth Voices

About us

This is a youth-powered publishing platform that was started in 2003 by a group of teachers from local sites of the National Writing Project.

We merged several earlier blogging projects. We have found that there are many advantages to bringing students together in one site that lives beyond any particular class. It’s easier for individual students to read and write about their own passions, to connect with other students, comment on each other’s work, and create multimedia posts for each other. Further, it’s been exciting for us to pool our knowledge about curriculum, connected learning, and digital literacies.

There are over 8,000 posts and over 13,000 comments by young people on the site on topics as diverse as the American Dream, Shakespeare, and sports as well as original poems and stories.

Youth Voices is a platform for youth to write about their interests, both in school and outside of school: what they are reading, what their hobbies or future careers might be, what they enjoy in their spare time. Like all of us, students follow our national leadership and form opinions. They are also welcome to write about those topics as well.

Youth Voices is fully non-partisan and welcomes youth of all types, from all regions, and with all viewpoints. Educators support youth in writing and thoughtfully responding to each other through the use of commenting guides, using tags to show common interests, playlists to support self-guided inquiry; opinions expressed by writers are their own.

If being part of such a community makes sense to you, we invite you to join us. We welcome all youth and any teacher interested in having students publish online and participate in the give and take of a social network like Youth Voices.