Student Soapbox

Nothing magical happens when we turn 18. And yet, we are given the reins to lead the future of democracy. In the United States, youth voter participation (18-29 year olds) was still only at 50% in the 2020 election, and down to 27% in the 2022 midterms. Breaking that data down to the youngest voters aged 18-19 years old, the numbers further drops down. Additionally, statewide data analysis shows that the gains in youth voter turnout drastically varies across the country, with unequal gains in youth voter participation. Globally, youth civic engagement is a key concern and priority for the United Nations as a means for human and social capital growth and gains in democratic governance across the globe. But the youth really aren't voting. Why?

While we may not formally participate in elections until the age of 18, we still experience democracy in different forms, as well as what role we may, or may not play in it. From experiences in our communities, and especially in our schools, we recognize early on the implicit messages surrounding democracy. Our voice may or may not matter; change may not be possible because that's just the way things are. These messages ring constantly across many schools. This is especially evident in schools educating populations of underrepresented people in our democracy.

When youth vote early in their eligibility, it builds good civic engagement practices well into their futures, which in turn, leads to a healthy, diverse, and strong democracy. Youth civic engagement is not just good for democracy, it's essential to the well-being of students as well. To build this practice, schools play an important role because of their systematic impact and reach. However, many schools actually decrease opportunities for civic engagement, especially in less affluent areas, rural or urban, because of competing priorities of test scores and the political landscape. This leaves students in the dark at 18, trying to figure out how and if their voice even matters, and a political apathy to the local elections that impact them the greatest. 

If we want our students to use their voice and choose to participate in our democracy, we have to address the lack of democracy in our largest shared experience - our schools.

Student Soapbox is a simple tool to bring principles of democracy into K12 classrooms at scale. Students get to vote on what lessons they want to learn, through teacher-led choices by accessing them via a mobile-friendly site. 

The technology used is a cloud-based tool built on the Salesforce platform. Administrators and Teachers have access to a Digital Lesson Library where all lessons and materials needed to teach a class are linked together, as well as real-time engagement data and student feedback. The lessons are used as the basis for the Student site’s voting choices. Students are emailed a link to a poll to vote or rank lessons, view the current count and the last poll's winner, as well as request their own designed lesson. This site is accessible via desktop, tablet or mobile site. 

To fully utilize Student Soapbox as a practice for democracy, we propose a framework that builds skills through hands-on, impactful practice on things that can affect students in their daily lives - their own education.

We envision the framework in a three-fold process, beginning in Elementary School.  We first encourage Elementary School students to use their voice, and practice voting.  The concept of voting is practiced through curriculum units, or lessons that are upcoming in the school year.  The students, through voting, are able to create a living, relatable syllabus, designed by them with guidance and choice provided by teachers and curriculum designers, ensuring standards are met.  

As students move to Middle School, we support the students in running campaigns for what unit or lesson they want to learn. We support discourse and dialogue in the classroom, and students experience voting and campaigns in way that is directly important to them, as elections are to democracy.  Students are able to see anonymous data on what their peers are voting for, sparking discussion and insight into commonalities and differences in choices, and why that is okay and important for progress. Student Government organizations can be influential in building this experience as well, and by starting with Middle School, we encourage students to build a community early on. 

Transitioning to High School, we inspire students to propose new lessons, and provide the reasons why they should be added to the curriculum.  The generation, reflection, and adoption of new ideas is practiced in a hands-on approach, all through the curriculum, in order for students to understand their voice and impact directly.  By the time students turn 18, they are well versed, and have practiced democracy to understand their voice and vote, and how that can translate to their wider community needs.  It leads to meaningful civic engagement right at the voting age, and reaping the benefits of youth participation throughout.

Please view a demo of the Student Soapbox here.

Please view a little bit longer, more complete pitch of Student Soapbox for Civic Engagement here. Thank you!

Student Soapbox, being cloud-based and easily implemented and accessible, is a solution we are looking to introduce to public K12 schools, especially those in the United States with large populations of students underrepresented in our current democracy. 

Schools vary in how they teach democracy, ranging from implemented Civics courses required for High School graduation, to a unit within their American History course taken in Middle School. Schools also vary in how they engage their students to use their voice. Many students in schools outright lack a voice in their own education, also leading to lower engagement across the board. Tufts CIRCLE center highlights the school as a ‘Civic Desert’ - defined as an area in a community where opportunities for civic engagement are lacking or missing. We must transform schools from being Civic Deserts to becoming Civic Oases to help nurture our citizenry.  

School, for the most part, is one of the largest shared experiences collectively of our society. The shared experience of school as of now, is one where they “tell you what to do.”  Building discipline isn’t a bad thing over all, and is important for personal growth, but when discourse and engagement is missing from the entire community, it is amplified further in schools. This results in schools being places to follow others, and not always as places to engage, often losing our sense of belonging within the communities we are a part of.  

To transform our schools to Civic Oases, we must increase ways for students to connect with others, and practice the responsibility of using their voice.  We can create multiple shared experiences for our society moving forward.  School experiences would be able to go beyond just test-taking and attendance awards, to now include shared experiences of voting, curriculum, successes and failures, discourse, and collaboration. 

Student Soapbox seeks to address these issues by giving students a voice in what they will learn, and encouraging them to question what they learn, and have a personal buy-in to their education. The Student Soapbox platform makes it so that their school becomes a Civic Oasis, and regardless of what teacher a student has, the student has the expectation that their voice matters. 

Brazen Learning’s founding team is uniquely positioned to implement and grow Student Soapbox in K12 schools across the country. Girija, our co-founder, is also a current educator in a public school system in Massachusetts, and has the unique background of teaching across multiple grade levels and subjects in the K12 system. She has seen the first-hand impact when students use and nurture their voice in their learning, and also understands the difficulties when implementing solutions in schools that can disrupt their current ways of educating. 

Additionally, both Girija, and Brendan Heyck, prior to co-founding Brazen Learning, both have had impactful experiences being involved in state and local government. Brendan is a former legislative aide and community organizer in Newburyport, MA. This experience helps understand how policy can, and must, be shaped by our communities to be able to provide equitable opportunities. Girija’s volunteer experience in Get-Out-The-Vote campaigns has been incredible in understanding that voting doesn’t have the same meaning in all communities. To be able to break that cycle, and understand that voting is our right, and can be the most impactful when used effectively, especially in local communities is what drives our passion to ensure Student Soapbox’ success in our schools moving forward. 

Additionally, we design solutions for all education stakeholders. Teachers, being one of the main users of Student Soapbox, have helped develop our product roadmap, and we will include opportunities for community educators to help drive curriculum packages that their own students want, vote for, and ask for. 

Building youth civic engagement, especially through practices in K12 schools, is a cultural and sometimes technical and financial problem. 

Cultural in the sense that teachers and administrators have varied priorities, and with the educational political landscape so tense, having champions on our side as we work towards a more equitable democracy is important. We believe MIT Solve’s partnership and connections to networks will help us as we start to build our customer base and bring Student Soapbox into schools. Additionally, having a champion with recognized influence will provide the credibility schools need to begin implementing Student Soapbox to scale.

Technical in the sense that schools may not see using technical tools and methods or tools to help develop civic engagement in youth through student voting, as a way that fits in with their 5-year digital plans. We would like to leverage MIT Solve’s network and expertise to assist with messaging and technical design to ensure that schools, their IT departments, and leadership's technical priorities find that Student Soapbox can evolve and fit with their 5-year digital plan, and not be counter to those priorities. 

Financially, in the sense that school systems don’t readily have the resources to utilize new tools that can push forward their priorities. We would like to leverage MIT Solve’s network to find programs that will help incentivize schools to adopt, pilot and scale Student Soapbox for their communities, either through grants we partner with, or with direct funds that schools can leverage pilot programs to scale as we work towards quantifying efficacy data.

Student choice has been gaining popularity in individual classrooms over the past few years. Teachers now adapt classroom procedures to introduce choice as a way for assessment or work activity; each have their own methods specific to their students. These approaches are not digital in nature, nor do the solutions currently in the market allow for students to engage in the planning process of learning, which is essential in creating a hands-on democratic practice. 

Student Soapbox approaches this directly by providing students a standard, user-friendly interface where they vote on what they want to learn next and request lessons for upcoming units, regardless of what teacher they have. It creates a pathway to not only learn about civic engagement, but participate in democracy well before a student becomes a registered voter. 

Our impact goals are focused on two areas within K12 education and youth democratic participation.

Firstly, in the next year, we are looking to quantify our anecdotal evidence that students who are using Student Soapbox are more engaged than the average student, leading to a better sense of community. We will partner with teachers to show student success data with pre and post Student Soapbox usage mapped to success measures like test scores and classroom behavior grades.

Over the next 5 years, we hope to show a longitudinal study of students who have used Student Soapbox for a number of years have a better sense of civic engagement at 18, and are more likely to continue their involvement through the years. This will require us to work with a democracy-focused institution at the post-secondary school level to identify and define parameters of this study. 

Currently, we are measuring our progress against our impact goals anecdotally. From our current pilot (in beta), the teachers have shared that across their school, student engagement has been significantly lower ever since returning back to school from the pandemic closures. The teachers shared that their students using the Student Soapbox showed a marketed improvement in engagement and confidence, not just in their class but in all of their High School classes compared to other students. While we haven't yet mapped this to civic engagement, we are happy to have customer stories that identify an improved student voice and sense of belonging in a school when using Student Soapbox, and can only infer that can lead to increased community and democracy practice.

Our current theory of change model is below, and is currently focused only the Student stakeholder:

Input Features:

• A Diverse Lesson Library of High Quality Instructional Material

• Lessons and Resources that are designed to be relevant, and engaging, providing differentiated learning to standards-aligned curriculum

• Teachers are knowledgeable of these lessons

User Activities: 

• Student votes on Lessons

• Student request Lessons

• Student views what the class is voting on

Generated Data:

• The frequency which student votes on lessons

• Student submissions of requested lesson ideas that get turned into real lessons

• A student's overall grade in their class, which is primarily teacher collected

Near Outcomes:

• Students will work towards building campaigns around what lessons they’d like the class to explore

• Influence their peers on which Lessons they want using democratic prinicples

Long-Term Impact:

• Students are more confident in themselves

• Students are able to leverage their vote and voice when they need to

• By 18, they are able to make better decisions by understanding the consequences of their decisions, and votes, because they have practice in making decisions that affect them directly

The technology that powers Student Soapbox is two-fold; the first is leveraging the Salesforce platform for our basic voting, digital Lesson Library and reporting dashboard products. We have custom objects built on top of the Salesforce platform that focuses primarily in the user-interface of our technology.

The second technology process that our product uses is more abstract - it leverages traditional pedagogical practices to ensure student voice and choice is the central focus of education. 

Student choice at the lesson level introduces engagement in ways we haven’t seen before, taking student-centered learning to the next level. Rather than taking a singular approach to address students’ needs in the classroom, Student Soapbox’s model is three-pronged, addressing often overlooked aspects of engagement and the student experience. Student Soapbox seeks to provide a holistic, one-stop-shop platform to engage students, reinforce democratic values, and guide student choice. Expression is a major asset for students. With Student Soapbox, students guide their learning through just that. As a voting platform, Student Soapbox sets students up to pursue campaigns and discussions with classmates to power their agency.

Student Soapbox is innovative in the way that it tackles major pillars of engagement, while also upholding pedagogical practices. While also aiming to support students, our product provides teachers with a wealth of innovative features to deliver an unforgettable educational experience. With a communal lesson library and real-time insights, teachers can put their practice into motion with confidence. When teachers and students are on the same page about learning goals and expectations, it reaps remarkable results.

Our technology roadmap includes the use of AI to help teachers create better lesson options, and provide high quality lesson options to students who are voting for certain lessons.

Brazen Learning is unequivocally committed to diverse, inclusive, and equitable culture. We strive to remove barriers to provide opportunity and support to people who need it, without reservation. We work towards providing a safe, open, and supportive work environment, and encourage those traditionally left out of technology work forces to join us as a part of our apprentice to career approach to hiring.

Student Soapbox' value to schools can be measured in a few different ways with an ROI increasing year over year.

Firstly, we provide schools with an easy to implement, subject-agnostic engagement tool that addresses student engagement across behavioral, emotional and cognitive dimensions - leading to proven engagement opportunities for students. 

Secondly, our growing Digital Lesson Library provides teachers and schools an easy to use and access library of lessons and materials needed to teach any class. Each lesson and material can be linked, and any modified resources can be easily shared across districts, schools, and towns. The Lesson Library allows for schools to retain the essential class resources their teachers posses, even if the teacher ends up retiring or leaving. Additionally, with the Lesson Library, each lesson retains a historical archive of any questions and answers related to the lesson, so incoming and new teachers will have access to the history of lesson as well as anything else that can provide new insight.

Finally, for administrators and school district leadership, we provide real-time engagement data on curriculum. As the buyers of curricula, administrators will have quantified feedback from their students and teachers, in easy to access dashboards that highlights the wants and needs of their community, providing them with the data they need to make more informed purchasing decisions in the future.

Student Soapbox has a pricing model based on the number of teacher and school administrator licenses a school or district needs. Students will remain free.

Our pricing model is as follows: 

Every Student Soapbox pricing package includes:

• Salesforce licenses

• System implementation

• Data capture and analysis capabilities

• Admin & Teacher training programs and user guides

• Ongoing customer support

• 10 Teachers

• 2 School Administrators

• $6,500 Per Year

• 25 Teachers

• 5 School Administrators

• $15,500 Per Year

• 50 Teachers

• 10 School Administrators

• $30,000 Per Year

Additional licenses can be purchased to supplement the packages above.

All plans are annual agreements.

We also want to explore grants focused on increasing engagement and youth democracy frameworks, partnerships with universities and teaching colleges to explore long-term studies, as well as other opportunities that come up.

As of now, we remained bootstrapped through the development and initial marketing phase, and we look to build our revenue through sales, grants and partnerships in the near future.

We are currently bootstrapped, and looking to build our partnerships, including with Salesforce, as opportunities arise.