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Making Student Involvement Meaningful
By Adam Fletcher for SoundOut
“The times are a changing.” Forty
years ago Bob Dylan's song was shocking, provocative and powerful.
Today it seems shocked, pretentious and spent. However, as a teacher
from Oakland
recently said in a SoundOut workshop, “Students have changed more in
the last ten years than schools have in the last hundred.” Despite
all these years of sage voices and students changing, schools have
not done a very good job of listening, let alone responding to these
challenges.
Lots of people have thought about
why students have changed so much. Media infiltration, commercialism
and technology usage have all been cited as sources that have
changed the experience of learning in today’s schools. However, as
educators search for answers, the drivers who fuel these changes
have largely been ignored: students themselves. Rather than working
with students to help understand and negotiate why, how,
when, where and what they learn, educators, administrators and
school leaders have largely changed schools for students, and
done change to students, without their ideas, concerns or
actions in mind.
In the past five years SoundOut
has worked with more than 75 K-12 schools across the nation to help
students and educators re-envision the role of students in
education. Make no mistake: Students have one essential role in
schools, and that is the position of learner. What SoundOut does is
help define new ways students can learn in schools, while
they become engaged in positively changing schools.
A Crisis of Purpose
Traditional student involvement
has taken several forms, including student government,
extra-curricular programs and athletic activities. In some of the
most progressive classrooms, schools and education agencies across
the country, those activities have been extended to engage students
in special committees, advisory boards and other opportunities. The
dilemma with the majority of all of those activities is simple: It
is disconnected from the essential role of students in schools.
Devoid of classroom credit or meaningful evaluations of student
learning, these activities actually dissuade the majority of the
student body in many schools from participating. Informal surveying
conducted in many of the schools SoundOut has worked in has shown
that fewer than 25% of all students in a school participate in any
substantive school-based activity outside of the classroom.
Adding to that conundrum is the
reality that many students do not connect with classroom learning
topics, teachers or outcomes in any significant way. That is not a
recent development: in the 1920s John Dewey proposed that schools
design relevant learning opportunities for all students, which
eventually led to the creation of career and technical education
classes in many high schools. While some schools have adjusted their
subject areas for modern interests, a large number still have not.
Leadership, technology, modern politics and contemporary culture
courses are not the norm in American high schools; worse still,
these are actually rare topics in middle schools, and almost
completely missing from elementary schools. Even in schools where
these adjustments have happened, there is still often a crisis of
disinterest among students.
All of that is to say that most
activities that proponent student involvement suffer a crisis of
purpose. There is no real reason for the majority of students to
actually become engaged throughout their education. This majority
does not seek the rewards of traditional student leadership
activities, and generally speaking, they do not yearn for the
acknowledgment of being "star" students. This is the same majority
of students who go to school just because somebody tells them to.
Their moms or dads, girlfriends or best friends, or the truancy
officer is there everyday to remind them that they are not in it
alone.
Staring Out the
Window
The good news is the answers to
these problems have been shared no fewer than ten million times over
the last one hundred years! The problem is that we – educators,
administrators, politicians, researchers – still have not learned to
listen to them. The voices offering the solutions do not offer them
in simple ways; rather, the answers are complex and idealistic,
opportunistic and often inconvenient. Sometimes the answers present
themselves as very sophisticated, substantive transformations;
others, they are seemingly menial and insignificant – to the people
listening. However, each of these answers is a solution to the
challenges schools face.
Where do these elusive “silver
bullets” come from? The tests where the unexceptional student
performed exceptionally – there was an answer there. Classes that
had high attendance – there was an answer there. Teachers that every
student loved, hallways where students want to “hang out”, clothes
that lots of students wanted to wear each have an answer. In
a more complex fashion, every time a student has griped about class,
they have shared a solution. Every frustrated crumpling of paper,
every exhibition of crying and storming from a room, every hallway
fight, and even every school shooting has presented a solution to
the challenges of schools.
Perhaps the most frustrating
aspect of these solutions is that they have not been so convenient
to us. Rather than staring us in the in the face, they are staring
out the window or down at their cell phone - where they are often
text messaging a friend about how boring this class is. So it is not
particularly clear how to learn from student voice. However, there
is an answer in the words and actions of students.
Somehow, somewhere along the way
many adults forgot to listen. Or we actively plugged our ears. Worst
still, a small group of us, the masters of education, learned how to
manipulate student voices, turning them into opportunities to
strengthen our assumptions, keep our jobs, maintain our schools, and
build our reputations. Perhaps most heinously, a small (and actively
growing) group of adults learned how to use student voice against
students, actually using their words, deeds and ideas to keep
them from becoming active partners throughout the educational
process.
Starting Point
In order to find out what
students think is meaningful, start by listening to their voices.
Not just the token few, either: surround yourself in the muck and
mire of daily student lives. Stand in the hallways and just listen.
Go to the cafeteria and simply hear. Make provocative statements to
your classroom and soak up the responses, positive and challenging.
Gather together a group of students and challenge them to be
completely honest with you about what sucks about their
school. Don't stop after that. SoundOut offers
an entire Cycle that
addresses next steps. But trust that the only place to start
honestly, authentically transforming schools is by listening to
students themselves.
SoundOut
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