Amplifying Counternarratives: Institutionally Supported Student Voice(s) and the Impacts on E12 Practices & Policies

Abstract

Over 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.