This book examines the importance of exploring the varied and diverse perspectives of student experiences. In both academic institutions and everyday discourse, the notion of the ‘student voice’ is an ever-present reminder of the importance placed upon the student experience in Higher Education: particularly in a context where the financial burden of undertaking a university education continues to grow. The editors and contributors explore how notions of the ‘student voice’ as a single, monolithic entity may in fact obscure divergence in the experiences of students. Placing so much emphasis on the ‘student voice’ may lead educators and policy makers to miss important messages communicated – or consciously uncommunicated – through student actions. This book also explores ways of working in partnership with students to develop their own experiences. It is sure to be of interest and value to scholars of the student experience and its inherent diversity.
Meaningful school reform starts with your most powerful partner—your students! When you take time to listen, you’ll find that students’ aspirations can drive your school toward exciting new goals—and when students know they’re being heard, they engage meaningfully in their own academic success. Using examples drawn from student surveys, focus groups, observations, and interviews, this groundbreaking book presents a blueprint for a successful partnership between educators and students. You’ll discover how to: Ask the right questions—and understand how to build from the answers Engage students in decision-making and improvement-related processes Implement the Aspirations Framework to guide students toward their full potential
High schools continue to be places that isolate, alienate, and disengage students. But what would happen if students were viewed as part of the solution in schools rather than part of the problem? This book examines the emergence of "student voice" at one high school in the San Francisco Bay area where educators went straight to the source and asked the students to help. Struggling, like many high schools, with how to improve student outcomes, educators at Whitman High School decided to invite students to participate in the reform process. Dana L. Mitra describes the evolution of student voice at Whitman, showing that the students enthusiastically created partnerships with teachers and administrators, engaged in meaningful discussion about why so many failed or dropped out, and partnered with teachers and principals to improve learning for themselves and their peers. In documenting the difference that student voice made, this book helps expand ideas of distributed leadership, professional learning communities, and collaboration. The book also contributes much needed research on what student voice initiatives look like in practice and provides powerful evidence of ways in which young people can increase their sense of agency and their sense of belonging in school.
Finally, mentor texts written by teenagers, to help your students craft convincing arguments. In this new collection of 100 essays curated by The New York Times, students will find mentor texts written by their peers—13-to-18-year-olds—on a wide range of topics, including social media, race, video games, lockdown drills, immigration, tackle football, and the #MeToo movement. All of the essays were either winners or runners-up from The New York Times Learning Network 2014–2019 Student Editorial contests, in which students could take on any issue they liked and, in 450 words or fewer, persuade readers—including educators from around the country as well as Times judges—to adopt their point of view. The essays have been selected for their voice, style, and use of evidence, as well as to present snapshot of issues across a dozen categories that are of particular interest to adolescents. Student Voice is also available as a package with Raising Student Voice: 35 Ways to Help Students Write Better Argument Essays, from The New York Times Learning Network, a teacher's companion guide packed with practical advice from teachers, Times editors, and even student winners about how to use these essays in writing instruction.
We are surrounded by voices, but how often do we actually stop and listen to the stories they have to tell? Martha E.Casazza and Sharon L. Silverman have been listening to the stories of students for the past five years, and they share how high achievers have overcome obstacles. Throughout the interviews, students told the authors having someone believe in them was key to their success. Find out what else made a difference in their lives by listening closely to Student Voices. This book offers a fundamental truth: If you listen carefully when students talk, you will learn a great deal. Casazza and Silverman listened, and the result is both a celebration of student achievement and a model for how to foster it. Mike Rose, author, Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education Casazza and Silverman go right to the source, the purest source, the student voice, to find out what truly works for students. This is what we as educators need to hear and heed if we truly want to succeed in our efforts to improve education. Robin Ozz, president, National Association for Developmental Education
This book focuses on the voices and experiences of non-traditional students in European higher education. It examines the impact that access to higher education is having on these students’ lives and discusses what this tells us about European education and society. In particular, it explores the multi-dimensional nature of inequality in varied national contexts focusing on the issues of class, gender, ethnicity, age and disability. The book contributes to the on-going debate about the changing nature of European higher education and argues that research based on the experiences of non-traditional students can be used to improve policy and practice in tertiary education. Drawing on biographical narrative interviews with ‘non-traditional’ students, the book covers topics including: • the contemporary nature of inequality and how the various forms of inequality intersect and overlap in higher education and society • the formation and transformation of learner identities • the structural barriers faced by non-traditional students • the sources of student resilience and agency • a comparison of patterns of inequality, access and retention in various European countries • the implications of these findings for practice and policies. Student Voices on Inequalities in Higher Education will appeal to academics, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners working in higher education institutions as well as people working in the field of widening participation, adult education, access and centres for teaching and learning. It will also be of interest to postgraduate students in higher education.
This book addresses the all-important dimensions of collaboration in the study of learning raised by such questions as: Should teachers engage students directly in discussions and inquiry about learning? To what extent? What is gained by the collaboration? Does it improve learning, and what do shared responsibilities mean for classroom dynamics, and beyond?Practicing what it advocates, a faculty-student team co-edited this book, and faculty-student (or former student) teams co-authored eight of its eleven chapters. The opening section of this book explores such dimensions of student voices in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) as power and authority in the classroom, collaborative meaning-making, and the role of students as both learners and experts on their own learning. It opens up the process of knowledge-building to a wider group of participants, and expands our conception of who has expertise to contribute – for instance recognizing students’ “insider” knowledge of themselves as learners. Using various institutional models to illustrate these foundational concepts, part one provides a context for understanding the detailed examples that follow. The case studies in the second half of the volume illustrate how these concepts play out inside and outside the classroom when students shift from serving as research subjects in a SoTL study to working as independent researchers or as partners with faculty in such work as studying curricular design/redesign, readings, requirements, and assessment. This co-inquiry brings the principles and benefits of the broader undergraduate research movement to the topic of teaching and learning. It also increases student researchers’ sense of themselves as independent learners. While recognizing the impossibility of engaging every student in the scholarship of teaching and learning in every course, the editors and contributors make the case for making such opportunities available as broadly as possible because, as this volume also makes clear, this is transformational work – with the potential to produce paradigm shifts, turning points, new insights, and changes in classroom culture – for both faculty and students. The contributors demonstrate how they validated student voices in theory, method, and methodology across a wide variety of disciplines and while engaging with different pedagogies. Disciplinary examples include: anthropology, communication, chemistry, criminal science, education, English, geography, history, human services, mathematics, psychology, sociology, theater arts, philosophy, and political science.
Across the globe, students are speaking up, walking out, and marching for social and ecological justice. Despite deficit discourses about students, youth are using their voice and agency to call forth a better world. Will educators respond to this call to stand with students in relational solidarity as co-constructors of a new tomorrow? What is possible when teachers and students engage together in new ways? Pedagogies of With-ness: Students, Teachers, Voice and Agency offers insight into the transformative possibilities of education when enacted as the art of being with. Driven by student voices and their experiences of marginalization, this text takes a clear ethical stance. It asserts that students are both capable and competent. Taking a narrative approach, this book honors academic work that is rooted in educational practice. Expanding beyond traditional conceptions of student voice, chapters engage in meditations on three themes: identity, pedagogy, and partnership. This book is an exploration of with-ness, a way of knowing, being, and acting. By centralizing the all-too-often suppressed wisdom of youth, teachers and researchers engage in new forms of critique and possibility-making with students. Editors reflect on this central theme, exploring the dimensions of such pedagogies of with-ness. Through this book, teachers are invited to imagine pedagogy under this new framework, actively committed to students, their voice, and mutual engagement. Click HERE to watch the editors discuss their book. Perfect for courses such as: Social Foundations | Student-Teacher Partnerships | Secondary Methods | Service Learning Leadership Ethnic Studies | Democracy and Civics | Social Justice and Education | Student Voice in Classrooms/Education | Ethical Issues in Education | Leadership for Social Justice
This work interrupts the current “consulting students” discourse that positions students as service clients and thus renders more problematic the concept of student voice in ways that it might be sustained as a democratic process. It looks at student voice holistically across realms of classroom practices, higher education, practitioner inquiry and policy formulation. The authors render problematic the “empowerment” rhetoric that is the dominant and insufficient narrative justifying consulting children and young people. They explore the many contradictions and ambiguities associating with recruiting and encouraging them to participate and the varying impacts of different circumstances on the ways in which student voice projects are enacted. They perceive that it is possible for student voice projects to be subverted from both above and below as varying stakeholders with varying purposes struggle to manage and control projects. Importantly, the book reports on research that identifies and highlights conditions for initiating and sustaining student voice and include “beyond school” dimensions that consider young people as “audiences” who can inform community facilities, their development and design as well as undergraduate students in universities. These cases are not reported as celebratory, but rather act as narratives that illuminate the many challenges facing those who chose to work with young people in authentic ways. It both advances methodologies for engaging young people as active agents in the design and interpretation of research that concerns them and offers a critique of those methods that see young people as the objects of research, where the data is mined for purposes that do not recognise that students are the consequential stakeholders with respect to decisions made in their interests.
