Some student voice initiatives are passive or symbolic. Programs that give students agency and power in partnership with adults are the ultimate goal.  

We recently conducted research at a high school with three different initiatives that used the term student voice. All three were designed to increase student motivation and engagement. The first was a one-time school perception survey that sought young people’s opinions about school culture and performance. The second was a student council that aimed to leverage youth voice and input in planning dances and other school spirit events. The third initiative was a class called Student Voice and Leadership. It used a curriculum that supported young people in identifying problems in their school, conducting their own research, crafting policies that addressed those issues, and presenting them to district leadership.

We wondered how student voice is defined and how these three initiatives fit into this definition.

What we know about student voice

The term student voice generally refers to young people sharing their views on what transpires in classrooms, the larger school community, and even entire school districts (Conner & Rosen, 2016; Cook-Sather, 2006; Logan, 2019). Student voice initiatives, according to Dana Mitra (2007), “push schools to reevaluate who gets to define the problems of a school and who gets to try to improve them” (p. 727). These efforts can vary in form and impact. The school perception survey sought student opinions through a one-time measure, while the student council established an ongoing club for youth input and action on limited school topics curated and approved by adults. The class allowed for more youth autonomy in naming problems they found interesting and supplied them with research and tools to take a variety of actions, including writing policy.

While surveys and student councils are mainstream practices in schools, the class is more unusual. It pushes toward transformative student voice (TSV), which, according to Shelley Zion and colleagues (2021), refers to “practices that engage youth with adults in authentic partnerships that prioritize student voice” with the goal of creating “more equitable structures in their schools and communities” (p. 5). One-time surveys and spirit-focused student councils often fall short of these TSV aims. Listening to youth isn’t enough; acting on the information they produce is important (Robinson & Taylor, 2007).

Within TSV, the term student voice is a bit of a misnomer. Though youth do indeed use writing and speech, the idea of “voice” is less literal and encompasses ideas related to student power, presence, and potential for equitable change. As Carol Robinson and Carol Taylor note, “The word ‘voice’ also causes some concern as it implies that a pupil group has only one voice” (p. 6). While youth may unite around certain issues or policies, their individual lived experiences carry weight and consideration.

To be truly transformative, Zion (2020) claims, student voice initiatives require certain conditions:

• Dedicated time and space for youth to develop and present policy proposals.
• The participation of students from different races, ethnicities, and academic backgrounds.
• The participation of adults committed to building their own critical consciousness through professional development.
• Time and space for students and adults to learn together about youth-adult partnerships, educational equity, and intergenerational research.

Surveys, student councils, and TSV-type classes all provide youth a path to share their opinions and act to some degree. But the variations in how each initiative operated, the experiences of young people involved, and the initiatives’ different intended goals make it hard to come up with a singular definition of student voice.

Instead, we propose levels of student voice initiatives to help educators and school leaders assess current student-centered approaches and dream of new, more transformative options that deeply motivate and engage youth. These levels can be arranged in a pyramid (see Figure 1).

The pyramid of student voice

Consultation student voice

The high school perception survey represents consultation student voice, the base tier in our pyramid of student voice. In consultation student voice, adults craft surveys or other one-time conversations with youth who act as consultants in the decision-making process. Often, adults use consultation student voice when facing a problem or crisis for which they need further student insight. Annual school climate surveys also have become popular in school districts to gauge the attitudes and impressions of students, families, and staff.

These adult-created surveys can reveal important student concerns. But we’ve mostly seen adults take the results and work without further youth input to develop and implement solutions to the problems illuminated in the survey. In fact, students rarely know how their feedback will be used, if at all. While it’s beneficial for school leaders to consult with students in this way, student voice at the consultation level tends to be more adult-led and responsive to rather than inclusive of young people.

How do students experience this? A high school senior named Zack (a pseudonym), whom we interviewed as part of our research, remembered taking the school perception survey. He recalled it feeling like typical school — sit down, be quiet, fill out the survey — but he was intrigued to share his opinion and took time to fill it out thoughtfully.

Symbolic student voice

The student council initiative is slightly more complex and represents what we call symbolic student voice, which sits at the middle level of the pyramid. Adults again initiated the process by developing the idea and boundaries of the council. School leaders also dictated participation on the council, appointing students who met attendance, academic performance, and extracurricular involvement criteria. Once on the council, however, students had agency and choice to a degree. They planned dances and other events and activities aimed at building school spirit with the guidance of a faculty adviser.

While the students had leadership roles and decision-making agency, their power was limited to student-facing initiatives, which could make the approach seem tokenistic or symbolic. School leadership extended choice and agency only so far (the theme for the dance) and only to a select few (those deemed successful at school). Leadership opportunities, in other words, are offered as a reward, not a right.

Zack also served on his school’s student council. He recalled needing to have a minimum GPA and filling out an application that teachers and administrators vetted. With his strong grades and involvement in sports, he easily made the cut. Zack described the student council’s aim as making school “a little bit better than it is” by “supporting school spirit” and “building fun.” Despite offering more freedom, Zack said, the student council still felt “like a class.”

Transformative student voice

The Student Voice and Leadership class appeared to leverage student voice in yet another way. While adults devised the class and created the curriculum and a teacher served as a facilitator, any student could participate. Students in the class recruited friends to join. Once the class began, the young people were asked to identify problems in the school and create new solutions. They chose to examine their district’s school performance rating system and the disproportionate weight given to standardized testing. They formed research groups to examine the problem, developed research questions, and chose research methods for data collection. The youth analyzed the data with limited guidance from the facilitator and used their findings to inform a policy change recommendation that they ultimately delivered to their principal, a group of school board members, and other district leaders. Students created the presentation, which included a poem written by a sophomore but drawn from various students’ experiences with standardized testing. The youth asked district officials to devalue test scores and consider other, more holistic measures.

While the adults haven’t implemented all the students’ requests, the class’s research sparked a discussion that still echoes in the hallways. We see this as an example of the top level of the pyramid, TSV, where youth explore a school-based concern and participate in policy discussions with adults to make actual change, showing authentic and long-term student engagement. The result, ideally, is students and adults working together to make schools more equitable.

Zack also took the Student Voice and Leadership class after one of his friends recruited him. He described the class’s aim as making “a big difference in the school” by ensuring “the school is safe” and addressing problems that have “big, negative impacts on students.” The work around the school rating and leveraging student experience in the poem made for a trusting and vulnerable learning space. As a result, Zack said, the class felt “like family.”

Toward transformative student voice

In considering these levels of student voice — and Zack’s experience of them — it’s clear that many school-based adults want to engage students and value youth voice. That’s a good thing, and consultation and symbolic student voice activities do hold some value. However, adults rarely allow students to be part of the real decision-making process. Instead, they opt for more surface-level activities that use student opinion or involvement in limited ways.

To move toward a form of student voice that motivates students to be leaders in their schools and communities now and in the future, educators should reflect on the different levels of student voice and consider how they could climb to the top level toward TSV. When making these moves, adults need to consider a few factors that will affect how their student voice initiatives work.

Adult learning and self-reflection

Moving away from consultative and symbolic examples of student voice requires adults to engage in self-reflection and facilitation training. In one school district where community school coordinators wanted to implement TSV, the coordinators engaged in a yearlong community of practice to reflect on how their youth council could become transformative. Many of them identified their schools’ student voice work as consultation or symbolic in that adults defined what youth input looked like and did little to change their position or perspective in response to students’ thoughts and ideas. One coordinator, Giselle (a pseudonym), explained:

So it’s definitely been a journey … I would say transformative student voice was pretty minimal … If it wasn’t, via surveys, or whatever it might be, the typical things you would see in a school. That’s kind of consultation, right? That’s where we were.

Giselle and her fellow coordinators started to shift their mindset on what student voice could be in their schools by engaging in dialogue with each other. They discovered that sometimes they were limiting what students could do or the spaces they could occupy. Adults must question their own beliefs about young people and their assumptions that adults know best and students are too young to participate in certain spaces or conversations (Bell, 1995).

We encourage school staff hoping to move to the transformative level to engage in dialogue with each other about the following questions:

• In what ways can I create space for communication as dialogue where I build trust, openness, and collaboration with my students?
• How can we ensure all students have a voice and leadership role instead of just those who are seen as exemplary?
• In what ways do I see the power relations between myself and my students as unequal? How might this affect how I see and listen to my students and attempt to share power and space with them?
• In what ways do I show my students change is possible? How do I make changes according to what I learn from my students?

These questions enable school staff to engage in self-reflection, dialogue, and collaboration to determine how they can work with students in more transformative ways.

Student recruitment and inclusion

Consultation and symbolic student voice initiatives don’t often take an inclusive approach to recruitment and participation. For instance, consultation student voice initiatives, like surveys, typically expect all students to passively participate. If they don’t, not much is done to include them. In symbolic student voice initiatives, those students who are deemed the best are nominated to represent the school community. These students, however, only represent a limited group: students for whom school is already working. With TSV, school staff should be intentional in recruiting a diverse group who are representative of the school population. This often requires changing recruitment practices.

Giselle took a creative approach when asking teachers for student nominations. She said:

So rather than saying, “What student do you think would be great for Youth Council?” because a lot of times when you ask them that they’re like, “Oh, we’ll give our star student,” we’ll ask some questions like, “Which student has a lot to say?” or “Who is the first student to not shut down an idea, but maybe, kind of question you?”

Other groups turn to students to recruit others using applications, interviews, and invitations. This tends to devalue traditional metrics like GPA or attendance. Intentionality in recruitment will help provide a range of perspectives in identifying school issues that students can address.

Youth-adult participation

Bringing students into decision-making spaces requires that adults position students as active and important partners. This requires meaningful and continuous participation from both adults and students. A common misconception about TSV is that students seize full control while adults watch from the sidelines. While it is true that TSV should be student-led, adults must actively support these young people to build community and help develop critical-thinking and leadership skills.

Any TSV work must have a solid foundation of trust and connection among all students and adults involved. We recommend various community-building activities, such as developing collective norms, discussing decision-making processes and roles, and engaging in activities that invite both adults and students to be vulnerable and open with each other. For example, one group we’ve worked with invites students and adult facilitators to create masks in pairs. They take turns covering a partner’s face with papier-mâché. Once dry, they paint the masks and decorate them with the following prompts:

• Outside of the mask: How does the world view or see you? (Examples: stereotypes, assumptions, judgment)
• Inside of the mask: How do you see yourself? What does the world not see or know? (Examples: culture, interests, passions, ethnicity, identity)

Afterward, everyone shares, with adults going first to model to hopefully allow the young people to feel safe. This activity often is done during retreats where students and adults have ample time and space to connect with each other. Activities like these can help lay a foundation of collaboration and trust, as both adults and students work toward a common goal in their schools.

Student skill-building and adult response

In much of the TSV work that we have observed, students end the experience by presenting a policy proposal that they believe would solve the problem they have been researching. Along the way, youth develop critical-thinking skills through learning about root cause analysis, power player mapping, and partnering with different school and community stakeholders. While this is important youth-led work, school staff plays a role in helping students develop the skills they need to execute the research. Staff help students stay on track, navigate roadblocks, and identify short- and long-term solutions and policies that get at the issues being explored.

Students gain valuable leadership skills when they work on policy development and presentation of policies. Adults also play an important role in this area, as too often adults see youth-generated policy proposals as great for students to develop but not great to implement in schools. We invite school staff who are committed to TSV to engage thoughtfully with the policies and solutions students propose.

Seeing the possibilities

If we truly want to increase student motivation and engagement, we need to think about avenues for meaningful participation. The term student voice conjures images of students vocalizing and taking action. Indeed, the ideal is finding ways for an array of students to actively participate in making schools more inviting, just, and equitable spaces. But not all initiatives that bear the name achieve those ends. While a perception survey is a good start to involve a large number of students, it positions them as passive. Student council provides more active paths to school involvement, but the selection process is often restrictive and the impact narrow. Transformative student voice gives youth more agency in recruiting peers, selecting problems, and crafting solutions on their terms. Students are engaged and motivated long-term. Unfortunately, this type of programming is rare and impacts a limited number of young people.

This transformative approach to student voice is worth exploring, but the initiatives we described require funding and adult support. These programs need time and resources to grow and include more youth. Adults need training and space to plan, implement, and reflect on this work. We envision school communities where all adults are expected to engage with students in ways that center their development and agency. This may require partnering with community organizations that provide opportunities for youth engagement. Intergenerational, collective support is needed to truly realize the transformative possibilities of student voice initiatives.

References

Bell, J. (1995). Understanding adultism: A key to developing positive youth-adult relationships. YouthBuild.

Conner, J. & Rosen, S.M. (Eds.) (2016). Contemporary youth activism: Advancing social justice in the United States. ABC-CLIO.

Cook-Sather, A. (2006). Sound, presence, and power: “Student voice” in educational research and reform. Curriculum Inquiry, 36 (4), 359-390.

Logan, G. (2019, September 30). Student voice — transformative or symbolic? Students at the Center Hub.

Mitra, D. (2007). Student voice in school reform: From listening to leadership. In D. Thiessen D. & A. Cook-Sather (Eds.), International handbook of student experience in elementary and secondary school (pp. 727-744). Springer.

Robinson, C. & Taylor, C. (2007). Theorizing student voice: Values and perspectives. Improving Schools, 10 (1), 5-17.

Zion, S. (2020). Transformative student voice: Extending the role of youth in addressing systemic marginalization in U.S. schools. Multiple Voices: Disability, Race, and Language Intersections in Special Education, 20 (1), 1-12.

Zion, S., Kirshner, B., Sung, K. & Ventura, J. (2021). Urban schooling and the transformative possibilities of participatory action research: The role of youth in struggles for urban education justice. In H.R. Milner IV& K. Lomotey (Eds.), Handbook of urban education (2nd ed., pp. 507-522). Routledge.

This article appears in the May 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 8, p. 14-19.