Why educational change will fail unless it centers the student voice.

1. Student Voice: The Missing
Link to Educational Change
Naima Raza

2. How can we transform the high school
education system on a district-level?

3. Our education system is one that was imported
from Soviet Russia.
It was designed to teach conformity, discipline,
and respect to a centralized authority -
the teacher.

4. Our current education system is obsolete.
Our goal for public education has changed.

5. Numerous changes, including the nature of
work, expectations for citizenship and in our
understanding of what must be taught and
how, have identified the need for change in the
education system (Senge, 2000).

6. We try to “reform”, “improve”, or “modernize” it.
It doesn’t usually work.
We call on for the need to “innovate” within the
system, without utilizing a critical lens.

7. Educational Reform or Revolution?
● What is the purpose of education? To what ends are we trying to achieve change?
○ Our current education system was built to create workers for the neoliberal economy, not to allow
students make meaning of themselves and their world.
● Changing the purpose of this this system - which prioritizes the creation of economic workers - requires
transformation, not change.
○ Audre Lorde once said that “the Master’s Tools will never dismantle the Master’s House”.
○ Transformation cannot come from higher leadership. It must come from those whose voice has
been most marginalized: students.
● The systems change imperative:
○ Why does reform and revolution need to exist in isolation? Chomsky advocates for the need to
implement reforms that will “expand the floor of the cage” we are in.

8. What is the goal of our system?

9. Success - growth, learning, self-actualization,
and more - for every student.

10. Where does success come from?

11. Success requires engagement.

12. Moving From Institutional to Intellectual
Engagement
(Wilms, Friesen and Milton 2009)

13. Students must be given genuine authority and
autonomy in order to engage in their education
(Cook-Sathers, 2002; Freire 1990; Kohl 1994; Oldfather et. al, 1999).
Our current system is not designed to promote
deep engagement and does not meaningfully
integrate students in decision-making.

14. Student Voice
Governance
Research
Consultation

15. Student Voice
● Student voice, in its most meaningful form, calls for a cultural shift that opens up spaces and minds
not only to the sound but also to the presence and power of students.
● The deepest level of student voice is governance, which would including engaging them in the
redesign of their educational system.
● “How can students take ownership over a process that has historically left them excluded, silenced
and distrusted?” (Joseph, 2006)

16. All students must be invited to dialogue about their perspectives on schooling.
Participants must ask where the opportunity for dialogue could exist at every
level in education (Cook-Sather, 2002).
No particular group of students can or should be given the responsibility of
representing the student voice or leading systemic change (Cook-Sather, 2002).
Moving Forward

17. Change Requires Dialogue
● Change in education “cannot happen until people move beyond superficial conceptions of
education systems and recognize the unseen values and attitudes about power [...] and
knowledge that keep existing structures, regulations and authority relationships in place” (Senge
2000).
● Change requires a dialogue around current assumptions and values surrounding education,
teaching and learning. The success of the dialogue process is based upon the ability to listen
deeply to students (Cook-Sather, 2002; Mitra, 2004).
● This can be done on a most basic level by providing a space where staff and students meet one
another as equals in order to transcend existing mindsets and assumptions about education
(Fielding, 2001). If adults started to genuinely trust students, it would be possible to change the
paradigm of how staff and students work together and practice education in school.

18. The Problem
● We need to examine how to distribute leadership and give decision-making
ability to students in the system, not how to “change education”.
● How do we empower students to discuss issues in the education system
and advocate for their inclusion in all aspects of education?

19. Transformation through Youth-Adult
Partnership
- Though students form the grassroots, power dynamics in the education
system are much more complex. Teachers have been implicated and lack
voice to an extent, as well. Systems change requires identifying the current
reality building share understanding, visioning for the future, and design.
- Systems change is complex. It is not necessarily “bad” to have a
pre-planned vision and process, as long as it is adaptive and can be used
as a foundation for co-design.

20. How might we enable youth-adult
partnership within the education
system?