Pushing a Student in Front of a School Board Meeting Isn’t Student Voice; It’s Working for Adults
What does real student voice look like? Like, for real student voice. I’m not talking about forcing kids to come attend a board meeting, and making them stay up past their bedtime just to read from a card that an adult wrote for them with the promise of pizza.
Let that baby go to bed!
I mean seriously, when is the last time we really met young people where they were and fully engaged them? Again, not talking about where we inject our political leanings on them — I’m looking at both the anti-reformer and reformer crowd here.
I’m talking about actually sitting down, asking questions, listening and then offering the support they are asking for.
The antiquated model of “lifting student voice” is children working to serve adults and we need to completely flip that.
A kid being paraded at a school board meeting = a kid working for adults.
A kid being displayed front and center for a funder = a kid working for adults.
We need to fix the equation.
An adult listening and supporting what students say and what students show us through their actions = adults working for kids.
Imagine if we thought of empowering student voice as an opportunity to instill leadership. In a report recently published by the organization I founded, Energy Convertors, we found that students want to be authentically engaged around education.
What if we built a capacity for leadership in our students and then we just followed them?
How do we do this? I’m talking about spending time in their classes, learning about how they get to school, better understanding what they like to do and we document it. The things that students need become evident quite quickly when we truly elevate their voices. Doesn’t that seem more authentic? Doesn’t that feel different than when we, the adults, have already chosen the issue we want them to focus on?
Young people often have a lot say, we just struggle to hear them a lot of the time. If the way we’ve committed to helping students has no trace of their actual voices, then we are missing quite a few valuable opportunities.
Let’s look at doing things differently in service of young people. We, as adult education leaders should be listening to what students need and then we work for them. Let’s actually work for kids.
This article is updated from an original version of this post that appeared on HuffPost as Building Student Voice — A Third Way Approach.
