Digital-first.
Youth-first.
Nuance-first.
Young people aren't failing at civil discourse. The tools are. We're building better ones. Curriculum that lives where students live, in digital spaces, navigating impossible conversations with no map.
We teach what adults keep saying can't be done: engage across the divide. Hold nuance. Choose dialogue. Not by avoiding the mess, but by learning to move through it.
WHAT WE DO
Curriculum & Resources
This generation doesn't need another lecture about screen time.
They need skills for the screens they're already staring at.
Focuses on how to think, not what to think.
Starts where students are, not where adults wish they were.
Builds on digital fluency instead of fighting it.
Professional Development
We don't help teachers to avoid controversy.
We support them in leaning into it.
Digital fluency isn't the enemy—it's the foundation.
Educators don't need another training. They need each other.
We’re building community that helps teachers be courageous.
Research & Convening
We connect educators to technologists,
researchers to classrooms, policy to practice.
Our convenings create the space for educators,
researchers, and innovators to build what
young people need to navigate a polarized world.
Our First Report
Young people are coming of age in high-speed, algorithmically-driven information environments where friendships, entertainment, and breaking news collide in the same scroll — and where polarizing, high-stakes issues arrive uninvited and out of context. Or Initiative was founded to help educators and young people navigate this reality. We started by listening.
Our first-year report, Coming of Age in Polarized Times: Teaching Civil Discourse in a Digital Era, uses the post–October 7 period and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a revealing case study of a broader generational condition. It examines how young people learn about contentious issues in digital spaces, what schools are (and aren’t) doing to support them, and what it would take to build curricular and educator supports that meet the moment: evidence-based, developmentally grounded, and designed to strengthen classrooms as the rare place where questions can still be asked, minds can still be changed, and dialogue across difference can still happen.
Videos
In these videos, quotes from interviewed students and educators reveal the outsized role that social media plays in shaping teens’ understanding of high-stakes conflicts, including the Middle East conflict—in addition to affecting their relationships, identity development, and civic behaviors. Their perspectives underscore the urgent need for classroom resources to help students better evaluate and contextualize what they learn online about complex and contentious issues, and to more effectively connect with their peers in discussions of what they have learned.
Information Asymmetry
Students discuss how knowing and caring more about an issue can have the unexpected effect of disadvantaging them in discussions with peers who are “TikTok educated” on the topic.
Majority Rules
Traditional media literacy skills don’t map onto algorithmic and AI-driven digital environments—so teens describe what they do when those skills fail them.
Making Meaning
Social media also offers teens opportunities: to deepen connections to community, reflect on personal connections to conflicts and current events—and, when they fact-check claims in their feeds, to foster understanding instead of division.
What Teachers Told Us
Educators and school leaders share how students’ digital lives and social media use are influencing how they learn, form opinions, and engage in classroom discussions.