Browsing by Subject "Student Voice"
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Item Amplifying Counternarratives: Institutionally Supported Student Voice(s) and the Impacts on E12 Practices & Policies(2022-05) Walsh, ShaunOver the past two decades, efforts to amplify student voice have proliferated as a project or process to increase institutional engagement with young people. Institutionally supported student voice is generally distinguished from, yet not independent of, student activism and youth activism. The designs, outcomes, and impacts of student voice efforts vary across institutions and systems. In many instances, young people are tokenized by student voice efforts that essentialize “student” as a monolithic identity, dictate adult-controlled input, and lack power-sharing. In other spaces, efforts to systematically amplify student voices actively resist essentialization and tokenization while attempting to collaboratively build inclusive institutional policy and practices. In rare moments, institutionally supported efforts to include student voice may facilitate a strategic disruption of existing power structures, whereby young people and adults co-construct meaning to dismantle systemic educational oppression. This paper assumes that the goal of institutionally supported student voice projects is not simply to increase student engagement but rather to proactively alter the logic and system of schooling. Existing literature falls short of examining the dynamics of student voice by essentializing student subjectivity and maintaining binary concepts of power.Through a unique case study of an institutionally supported student voice effort, this paper analyzes constructions, intentions and perceived impacts of publicly presented student counternarratives. This paper applies relationality, as the embedded theoretical framework to provide greater insight into the complexity of institutionally supported student voice(s) as a response to, or interruption of, schooling as a saturated site of power. This study illuminates how one counternarrative can be carried forward, re-told, amplified and re-framed to challenge multiple aspects of schooling as a saturated site of power. Further, findings from this study suggest that amplifying student voices through institutionally supported structures, coupled with adult willingness to share power, can influence change toward more equitable, inclusive and just educational institutions.Item Student Voice in Education Policy: Understanding student participation in state-level K-12 education policy making(2019-07) Holquist, SamanthaPurpose: K-12 education systems are expected to prepare students to participate in society, but education leaders often neglect to ask students how policy decisions affect their learning. Educators have begun to incorporate student voice into classroom, school, and district decision making. However, students are still a largely untapped resource in statewide K-12 education policy change. One reason may be that there is no clear understanding of how students may participate. The purpose of this study is to examine how students, through student voice efforts, collectively participate in and influence the policy-making process for state-level K-12 education decision making. Research Methods/Approach: This study employs a qualitative case study and utilizes document analysis, observations, and interviews with students and adults participating in two statewide student voice efforts. Findings: Students are able to participate in and advocate for policy reform adoption in the K-12 education policy process. Statewide student voice efforts are generally structured to include the following components: (a) power shifts, (b) shared practices, (c) adult supports, and (d) student relationships. Within these structures, students participate in the policy making process by (a) identifying a problem and policy solution, (b) assessing social, political, and economic capital available to move a policy forward, (c) building a coalition for support and to gain access to additional resources, and (d) engage in grassroots and grasstops advocacy. Students utilize their status to gain power in the grassroots arena; however, this status also decreases their power in the grasstops arena. Conclusions and Implications: This study reveals the importance of providing a structured space for students to access support from their peers as well as adults when engaging in student voice efforts. It also demonstrates the importance of shifting different aspects of power within student voice efforts, particularly social order power dynamics, to ensure that student voice efforts do not become homogeneous and representative of a particular student voice. Finally, it shows the ways in which students harness their own power and access the power of others in order to engage in the policy process.Item Where are the Students in Student Voice? Challenging Dominant Epistemologies in Student Voice Discourses(2020-12) Brogan, DanielThe following master’s thesis explores how adult researchers and practitioners'defining, framing, and implementation of student voice may have contributed to the positioning of secondary school students in education policy and leadership. Key research questions addressed whether or not there is a disconnect in how researchers, practitioners, and students define student voice, as well as considering if the term, “student voice,” positions the role of students in educational decision making. The key themes that emerged from the content analysis include: Disconnect between student and adult stakeholders; aspirations of students within student voice; and students as spectacles. Findings suggest that the majority of student voice research literature frames student voice as a process that only occurs in a class and school setting. Student discourses, in contrast, understand student voice as a democratic process occurring in the state and federal policymaking arena, and view themselves as key decision makers.Item Why have we been trying to Solve a Non-Academic Issue with an Academic Solution?(2022-03) Walker, MichaelThis research will use evocative autoethnography to examine how effective the Office of Black Male Student Achievement (OBMSA) was with Black Male students’ success by centering relationships. This study will be examining data expanding a period of August 2014 to May 2021. The research will be conducted using traditional qualitative research strategies. These are the researcher’s account of events that will include detailed notes, emails, personal interactions, program evaluations, videos, interviews, 100 day listening tour, school board meeting presentations, and focus groups. I utilize three bodies of literature; Culturally Responsive School Leadership’s tenet of critical self-awareness; Critical Race Theory’s tenet of counter storytelling and finally, School Culture for Black Males. Due to the academic outcomes that have been garnered by this large urban district prior to the creation of this department, Black Males were at or near the bottom on every academic success indicator. This study posits that these three theories were absent within the broader system which lead to the previous desperate outcomes. Leaders aren’t making decisions consistently based on race, the system has continued to share the disparate narratives regarding our Black Males and their academic outcomes from a deficit lens, and the culture of the school hasn’t been designed with Black Males in mind. The director’s accounts and implementation will be cross-examined based on the four stakeholder groups of parents & families, community members, educators, and primarily by the Black Males that provided the critical feedback/insight during the initial 100 days of listening. This “listening tour” was the foundation to creating the belief framework that has been used as a road map for the department. The current study provides an in-depth and panoramic view of the birds-eye experience of the researcher, largely based on the collective and individual voices of the Black Males that the department was designed to support. This design lends itself to a checks and balances of sorts, that can be an important and critical feedback loop. Situating the experiences of Black Males, providing the venue for their true authentic voice, and/or, what has worked best for them. In doing so, we will witness the importance of critical self-awareness for educators, the telling of the Black Male story from an asset based by their voice, and finally when the culture is designed with them in mind you will get successful outcomes.