Our 2023-24 Student Contest Calendar

Our annual Contest Calendar is probably the single most powerful thing we publish all year. Teachers tell us they plan their classes around our challenges, and tens of thousands of teenagers across the globe participate by creating narratives, profiles, opinion pieces and reviews, podcasts, videos, illustrations and photo essays.

For us, these contests are an honor and a joy to host. We love learning from young people — about what moves them and makes them mad, what intrigues and confuses and delights and defines them.

Every summer, we tinker with our offerings to keep them fresh, and we’ve made some significant changes this time around.

To start, in August, The Learning Network will celebrate its 25th anniversary, and we’re marking it by running our first-ever challenge that is open to our full audience, both teachers and teenagers. We hope together you’ll help us tell a rich story about what it’s like to be in high school in 2023.

Like educators all over, we’ve been spurred by the advent of generative artificial intelligence to make creative tweaks to our offerings. This year, we’re putting more emphasis on the parts of the composing process that are, well, human. A glance at the 10 descriptions below might show you that elements like voice, point of view, reflection, making connections and building community are more central than ever. We’ve invented new contests and updated old ones, and we’ll be emphasizing process as well as product throughout. We also have a full writing curriculum to help support this work.

If you need a little encouragement to participate, we recommend two pieces. Students might start with “‘I Was Enough’: How I Stopped Trying to Sound Smart and Found My Genuine Writing Voice,” by a teenager who reflects on how our competitions helped her grow. If you are a teacher, our reader-submitted 10 Reasons to Send Student Work Out Into the World might be compelling — especially, perhaps, reason number 10.