Trust

I came across a LinkedIn post last week from Bill Drayton, a former MacArthur Fellow and founder of Ashoka, an amazing organization that supports social entrepreneurs around the world, including young entrepreneurs through its Youth Venture program. In the post, Drayton explains that when he was a child he wasn't a good student, but he liked to create things, such as a school newspaper. He sometimes missed class because of these projects, which worried his mother. He was not always where he was "supposed to be."

Drayton's school principal, however, advised his mother to trust him: "Don't even show him that you're anxious."

Can anyone imagine a principal saying that to a parent today? Even without the fear of being sued if the child got hurt after the principal said it was OK for him not to be in school, we simply don't trust young people to take ownership of their own learning. Drayton had to organize fellow students, make sure articles were written and the paper edited, and he had to get it out to readers beyond his own school. He didn't learn how to do this in the classroom. In fact, he had to miss class in order to learn it!

Drayton's mother, like any mother, was uncomfortable allowing him to not follow the rules. But it is only in allowing young people the freedom to experiment that they develop the ability to choose between alternative courses of action, solve problems and learn from their mistakes. These are critical civic competencies, and they only come when we begin to trust young people.

The real challenge to youth civic participation, Part 1

It's been ten months! Guess it's time for another post. 

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When we in the U.S. speak of civic education we usually focus on preparing young people to participate. The assumption is that if we provide young people with the right knowledge and skills, they will go out and participate.

There are some problems with this assumption, most of which have to do with applying skills and knowledge in the real world. For example:

1. Schools and community-based youth programs don’t generally spend much time on local government and helping students understand how to influence local policy, such as decisions made by the school board, and they don't really encourage young people to get involved or provide clear direction on how to do so.
2. Although we try to teach young people skills we believe are universally useful (e.g., persuasive writing, public speaking, conducting research, etc.), we rarely teach them how to combine these skills in a civic context, such as identifying a local problem, researching the causes and potential solutions, building support, and offering recommendations to the city council.
3. Schools don't teach young people about collective action—working with others to solve real problems.

Clearly we need to do a better job of preparing young people to participate in politics and civic affairs, and many groups and individuals are working on this. But there's a bigger problem.

Student voice reading list

Involver has a great list up today of research on student voice. It's very U.K.-centric, but still a great resource to anyone interested in the topic.

Student voice reading list

Youth engagement as a social change strategy

The Forum for Youth Investment sends out a periodic "Ready Thoughts" email blast from its "Ready by 21" campaign. Today's email was about involving students in decisions about their own education.

The Forum is encouraging communities to use the Gallup Student Poll as a starting point for conversations with students about how their schools could be improved. According to poll results, only 50% of students report that they are engaged in school, and engagement declines with each grade.

The Forum article argues that while youth engagement is important for individual student achievement, it can also serve as an important strategy for social change because engaged students become engaged adults. A study by the Funders Collaborative on Youth Organizing indicates that engaged students are more likely to become effective advocates for change in their communities by volunteering for political organizations, canvassing, contacting public officials, holding meetings about issues that are important to them and attempting to solve community problems.

This is an important argument for engaging young people in decision-making. When dealing with youth-serving nonprofits and educators, I've often heard the argument that "I'd like to do this but there are just too many other things to get done." Things like helping drop-outs get back in school and helping disadvantaged youth get job training and graduate are clearly important. But these are challenges that exist disproportionately among poor and working-class youth, and they will never really be met unless we think bigger.

Young people need to learn how to advocate for their own needs and those of their families and communities. But if we don't ever allow them to identify problems and recommend solutions--especially in an area like education, in which they have daily, firsthand experience--they may never develop the skills to effect change and the confidence to do so. Affluent communities stay that way because their members know how to advocate for their own needs. Deliberate efforts to engage disadvantaged youth in problem-solving and decision-making can help them become engaged adults who can advocate for their communities' needs too.

Youth Engagement = Student Success

The school I'd like

The Guardian in the U.K. is running a series called "The School I'd Like," which asked British students for their ideas about how to make school better. Most of the students who responded are in the primary grades, and much of what they want is pie-in-the-sky, but there are also some thoughtful, sensible suggestions. Many of the suggestions reflect children's understandable frustration at being treated like, well, children. Joshua Kennedy, age 11, wrote:

"The children of the modern day are getting more and more rights such as having the right to say their opinion, and this is mine....[Y]ou should be allowed to say what you think to the teacher without being criticised or given a detention."

There is some evidence that schools are encouraging more participation, and that students are being heard. According to Hannah Scott, age 10,

"They do ask what we'd like sometimes. When we were getting a new teacher, we had a lesson from three teachers and we were asked which one we liked the best. They did choose her, so they listened to us."

The Guardian worked with a panel of ten children to develop a manifesto based on the submissions they received. The Guardian will share the manifesto with opinion leaders and ask for their feedback.

You can find the whole series, including an introduction to the panel and the 2011 manifesto, as well as the manifesto from a similar project conducted ten years ago, here.

Sefton and Knowsley Young Advisors Showcase

I recently visited Young Advisors in Manchester, U.K. I had a great time and learned a lot about Young Advisors in general and about the work done by teams in Knowsley and Sefton. Young Advisors act as paid "social action consultants," providing a variety of services designed to provide young people's perspective on issues, programs, services and events that affect them.

The work done by the Sefton and Knowsley groups includes, among many other projects, consultation and workshops for a local workforce development department on the use of social networking, providing feedback on a new curriculum in the "centers for learning" that replaced local schools, awarding funds across England to young people learning media skills, making recommendations to local councilors about how to make their meetings more interesting and accessible to young people, developing workshops for young people designed to raise awareness and understanding of mental illness, getting out the vote for the U.K. Youth Parliament, and providing young people's perspectives on "Section 30," a law that allows the police to disperse groups of more than two people--a law that many young people believe is disproportionately and unjustly applied to them.

This is an excellent model for youth participation. Take a look!

A different kind of charter school

A school in Leicestershire, England has created a student participation charter that lays out, in detail, the ways in which students will participate in the governance of the school. The document was created by two members of the local youth council with the support of the borough council and the county council, and will be piloted in a Leicestershire school with the support of a nearby college.

The Forward, written by Gareth Williams, the Director of Children and Young People’s Service for the county, acknowledges the link between student voice initiatives the a healthy democracy:

Encouraging young people to both understand the importance of democratic decision-making and also to develop the skills that go with participative democracy in our communities is a high priority for us.

The democratic life of our country is dependent on future generations playing a full and active part in their communities and making informed choices in elections.

The charter includes numerous criteria by which a school can gauge its commitment to student voice. Schools judged by the Healthy Schools Student Participation Quality Assurance Group to have achieved "advanced" status will receive a Student Participation in School Award. Examples of the criteria include:

11.4 Student Representatives will be involved with the appointment of staff and are suitably prepared for this work (understanding the processes, weighting given to their views and equal opportunities).

12.7 Students will be given the opportunity to be part of the quality assurance process for teaching and learning within the school.

Leicestershire Student and School Participation Charter

The role of intermediary organizations in sustaining student voice initiatives

There's an article in the current Teachers College Record by Dana Mitra of Penn State, describing the importance of outside organizations in sustaining student voice initiatives in schools. You have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing (about fifteen bucks a year, and well worth it), but here is the nickel version:

Findings/Results: The data indicate that the persistence of a student-voice effort after the initial influx of funds and support disappeared requires support from an intermediary organization (IO)—an organization located outside the auspices of school walls. IOs can help with fostering a clear and long-term vision, providing a more stable source of leadership, identifying ongoing financial and collaborative resources, and building a network for knowledge generation and sharing.

Conclusions/Recommendations: Although they are a part of many reform initiatives, partnerships with IOs are usually considered to be short-term relationships during the implementation phase of an initiative. This research instead suggests that IOs might be better suited as long-term partners in many change efforts. An awareness of the important roles that IOs can play in the long-term work toward change could help researchers, practitioners, and policy makers think more intentionally about how to plan for stabilizing such partnerships as an avenue toward sustaining reform initiatives.

The Role of Intermediary Organizations in Sustaining Student Voice Initiatives