Ed.L.D. Student to Help Teens Find Their Voice

April Wang believes there is magic in students finding their voice. The Ed.L.D. student recently launched a nonprofit, This Land Speaks, to restore the voices in what she considers America’s most voiceless population — rural communities. Through writing workshops, This Land Speaks aims to foster civic engagement among rural students and increases public awareness about social issues in America’s rural low-income areas.

The genesis for the nonprofit began many years ago, when Wang found herself lured to the Mississippi Delta soon after graduating Harvard College. Though she went to teach English as part of Teach For America, the history and literature major also hoped to write a great novel. Once she arrived, however, Wang discovered that the residents’ voices were absent in the community and nation. Although there are people visiting and writing literature about rural communities in America, many of its residents — especially students — voices are not heard nationally.

What Wang saw instead were communities of people who didn’t see importance in sharing what they had to say. “Students didn’t think their story was a story worth telling,” she says. “There is a general lack of self-efficacy or feeling that you have power over the events in your own life, and living in a world where the media and policymakers are focusing on everybody else’s stories except those of your community.”

While students had no trouble completing persuasive essays or even writing about each other, she noticed they had a general inability to write about themselves. Wang, who taught 267 students over two years, noticed students’ poor self-representations were often immobilizing.

“I’d see kids apply to college, but then elect not to go,” Wang says. “They’d give up on a dream because they don’t have the agency to [follow through]. It’s all tied to voice.”

Wang knows firsthand how finding your voice can change a life.

Growing up in Ohio, she remembers not speaking for nearly two years in junior high. Her mother’s encouragement to take a journalism course is what changed her trajectory. While Wang still struggles to understand why she didn’t speak, she knows that journalism helped her find her voice.

Though she went on to teach abroad and later work in policy, her desire to focus on both policy and practice led the Ed.L.D. program. Within the first week of orientation this past year, when asked by Senior Lecturer Marshall Ganz for her story, she shared her students’ stories — not her own. After many discussions and thought, Wang once again found herself rediscovering her voice at HGSE. Through the process, Wang developed This Land Speaks with the support and encouragement of Professor Monica Higgins, who helped get the nonprofit off the ground.

“Like everything else, using your voice takes practice. And that’s really what This Land Speaks is all about."

Now, through This Land Speaks — a recipient of the HGSE’s Education Entrepreneurship Summer Fellowship, which provides funding and space at the Harvard Innovation Lab to students to advance ventures — she hopes to help students living in disadvantaged rural communities like the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, Native American reservations, the Florida Panhandle, and the Eastern Carolinas. The program plans to send top journalism graduates to a rural community where they will live and teach journalism workshops and classes to high schoolers for a year.

Beginning this January, Wang will launch a pilot program that will send five Harvard Crimson senior writers to run a two-week journalism workshop in a Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Helena, Arkansas, high school.

“Like everything else, using your voice takes practice. And that’s really what This Land Speaks is all about — giving kids the opportunity to practice their voices, over and over and over,” Wang says. “Nobody can really teach anybody else to use their own voice. All we offer is to teach kids a few ways to craft the stories they want to tell. But if students are encouraged to use their voices and continually receive the message that their voice matters — whether it’s through seeing their work in the media or because there is a whole class focused on developing their voice — they'll use their voices more and more.”