Today, I’ve brought together two of the most accomplished teachers I know to talk about the unique opportunities and challenges of teaching Gen Z, that awesomely diverse group of sixteen to twenty-eight year olds who are poised to inherent a wildly uncertain American future. On one end of the spectrum, Darieck Scott has been teaching at UC Berkeley for nearly thirty years as professor of African American literature; as he nears retirement, Darieck still celebrates the capacity of the university classroom experience to spark a life-changing encounter with the unknown—in his words, to experience something “mind-blowing”—including students’ interactions with literary texts and works of art that long preceded the digital age. On the other, my fellow UW Madison colleague Ainehi Edoro has been a professor for seven years; still at the start of her teaching journey, Ainehi has committed herself to training this generation of students in social media and AI literacy, encouraging them to be intelligent and inventive producers of digital media content rather than passive consumers of it.

In our dialogue we share some of our observations about the long-term effects of Covid, economic uncertainty, and non-stop political upheaval on our students as well as our divergent strategies for responding to this generation’s shifting educational and career aspirations. Later in the episode, we invite the Nerd Form the Future production team, UW Madison English major Ella Rae Olson and journalism major Oliver Gerharz, to join our conversation. They help us debunk a series of myths about Gen Z, reminding us that this generation is incredibly hardworking, self-critical about their own overreliance on technology, deeply eager for more in-person interaction, and earnestly committed to making a more just world. We collectively arrive at the conclusion that we could all use a hefty dose of intergenerational dialogue to dispose of some of the narrow cliches we’ve attached to the most diverse generation in American history before they’ve even come into their own.