For the last year SoundOut has been working with students, teachers and administrators in several Seattle-area high schools and at the district office to examine student perspectives on equity in schools. Its been an interesting project, with a varying amount of resistance and excitement from students, along with a range of roadblocks and embracing from adults.

Going into the project, I was interested in the question of what makes youth voice equitable among young people. In many schools it seems that student governments, leadership classes, all of the supposedly constructive, traditional avenues for student voice in schools belong to students who are privileged enough to have access to them. That access is granted through academic achievement, which in turn correlates to the academic achievement gap. So we have a "student involvement gap" in schools.

What is discouraging about this most, to me, is that educators often talk about student involvement opportunities in terms of privilege: "Its a privilege to be in this class," or "Your peers chose you to be a leader." Neither of these is a particularly useful perspective for engaging non-academically engaged learners. But research says student voice opportunities can engage these learners!

So how can we create more opportunities for more students to experience more student voice opportunities everyday? Coupled with that challenge is the question of meaningfulness: While experience proves that a certain percentage of the student body is sufficed to participate in tokenistic, infantalizing and potentially harmful activities that parade themselves as student voice opportunities, we know that only a small percentage of all students are fooled by this kind of gesturing. What are the new avenues, the new ways that we need to engage students?

The Seattle Student Equity Project has shown me that those avenues are closer to hand than we realize. The "best" teachers - the ones students like the most who seem to be highly effective at engaging the historically disengaged learners - already use these methods daily. Let's pull them out and learn from them. We need more youth voice from more youth.

When people ask me what happened to the youth activism movement of the 1960s and 70s, I usually try to explain that when the protests and picketing and battles of those days happened, the media painted them as the novelty of a wayward generation. This allowed adults to sympathize or empathize, and drove positive publicity towards their efforts as well. While those years were riddled with bad press for young people, from my analysis of a variety of sources the condemnation, alienation and general anger towards youth in those days was almost a reversal from today.

Case in point: In 1968 a low-budget movie called Wild in the Streets was released across the United States. In this movie the oppression of young life overwhelms a suburban-type genius fifteen-year-old lawyer, who decides to throw off the shackles of adultism by launching a campaign to lower the voting age to 14 with the song "14 or Fight!" by his band. Protests supporting the campaign happen across the nation, a 15-year-old is elected to the U.S. Senate, and the long and short of it is that there is a tremendous uprising among youth everywhere. Eventually the lawyer becomes the country's first 15-year-old President, lowering the mandatory retirement age to 30, sending all over 35-year-olds to "re-education camps", and permanently doping all adults with LSD. Eventually armies are disbanded, global society reconfigured, and... other stuff.

This was a wildly sensational movie, even for 1968. It treats any notion of youth empowerment as a crazy, loco idea that can - and likely will - spiral towards oblivion... Which brings me to The Hip Hop Project.

In an era where young African American males are routinely portrayed as incapable learners, criminalized thugs and brutish social miscreants, it is great to see a movie that realizes authentic African American youth culture for what it is: fresh, vibrant, and largely unobtainable to white youth. Its that white kids just don't get it - myself included. The Hip Hope Project is about a group of young people in NYC who use art to change their own lives, and affect the lives of those around them. With Bruce Willis, Queen Latifah and Doug E. Fresh, the movie comes off as fresh, and invigorating.

But the amazing part of the second film is that there wasn't any grandstanding or obvious.

Hello everyone!

My name is Andrea Felix, and in a few months I am joining CommonAction's team in Seattle. I am currently finishing the last months of my two year stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer supporting the National Youth Council of Dominica. Before my time as a PCV I was the manager of Youth Service America's Youth Voice Initiative, working with dozens of organizations and hundreds of young people and adults across the country to promote youth involvement. This is my first entry to the CommonAction blog - so please be nice!

What is community service? “1. Service volunteered by individuals or an organization to benefit a community or its institutions. 2. Similar work performed by law offenders to serve a sentence in lieu of or in addition to jail time.” These are the two definitions of “community service” from the dictionary.

I understand that people in the US still believe that community service is only performed to right a wrong, but a large – and growing – number of people also believe that community service is done out of one’s altruistic sense of giving back to the neighborhood, city, state, and country in which one lives.

While this shift from :bad" to "good" community service might be coming to a resolve in the US, a recent meeting with members of the National Youth Council of Dominica and the Welfare Division led me to feel that I was in a deep canyon with steep walls on either side when the conversation began. And, as I thought we were making strides and could grip on to the slippery, yet thoughtfully positioned walls on the way up and (hopefully) out of the crevasse that seemed to engulf me and delude my very being and how I’ve come to view “community service”... I once again slid back down to the base, as if I had made no advancement to the threshold of what I saw as my achievement within the 90 minute conversation: getting people to accept one definition for a word or phrase, but also noting that there are others that can and do exist.

Please, don’t get me wrong…I do understand that “community service” is used in punitive measures. But, you can’t tell me that when a group of worship, school club, community organization, or others who are just concerned about changing a situation call the “community service” that they are performing “punitive”.

While I knew that the meeting we were having wouldn’t necessarily change the mindset of the entire Welfare Division within Dominica and be able to influence the powers that be. (After all, the paper was raising questions and concerns about the current situation of youth incarceration alongside older/hardened criminals with little to no programming addressing a young person’s specific needs and development processes and the long term effects that being locked up with older criminals could have.) I also didn’t think that the bulk of the discussion would revolve around the definitions of “community service” with one side trying to convince the other that there is more than one way “community service” is seen.

As the outsider coming in, I was in a better position to push the buttons and see where they would lead and not just accept what was coming towards me at face value. It forces me ask the question: “In a country where it seems that most things are taken as they are given, will it ever be possible for things to improve if no one questions the status quo or is labeled “mad” when they do?” Without a rise in the critical mass that seems to be needed for real and lasting change to take place I am left doubtful.

In my ongoing search for foundation funding to support CommonAction, I am constantly find that nonprofits are asked to expound on the "value" of their program. A course I took on grantwriting and a lot of books about foundations say that "value" in this case is a code word that implies economic worth. What is the value of youth voice?

Our society alternates in the way it sees young people, fluctuating from consumer to ward to student to truant to outright criminal. The whole time so many youth are drawn to these flames like moths, compelled to behave one way or another through the influence of schooling, television or popular culture. The alternatives are cast in a variety of lights, and depending on the circumstance, community service can be a punishment or a reward; activism can be heroic or demonic; self-expression can be intrusive or releasing. Perhaps most confusing, sometimes each can be the other, simultaneously.

The value of youth voice goes far beyond any economic indicators or social factors; instead, it jabs right at the heart of possibility and potential that is far beyond the grasp of any measurable outcomes. That is awesome, and daunting, particularly while I'm trying to secure funding that will allow CommonAction to work directly with young people to open up these possibilities.

For now I will concentrate on the qualitative value of youth voice:

• Greater self-confidence and self-esteem;
• Increasing sense of worthfulness;
• Increasing feeling of power;
• A consistent experience of being taken seriously;
• An increasing capacity to function well in the world;
• A growing positive self-concept;
• Increasing constructive acting out;
• Increasing self-awareness in acting out, and;
• Increasing feeling of belonging and engagement.

Maybe I will delve into the quantitative value as well:

• Increasing percentages of participation
• Diminishing negative perceptions of youth among general population
  
• Increasing likelihood of return involvement
• Growing awareness among adults in the general population of the value of youth voice
• Decreasing "engagement gaps" among various socio-economic groups
• Increasing frequency of opportunities for youth voice
• Heightened respect for youth voice among general population
• Increasing returns from youth voice opportunities
  

However, I am still having a difficult time trying to wrap my head around the authentic value of youth voice. Any suggestions?

"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it." - James Baldwin

The power of student voice is waking up in Seattle - again. Student voice has been engaged throughout Seattle Public Schools more than a few times over the last 30+ years:

• Since the 1970s one high school has been completely guided by student/adult partnerships
• In the 1990s students facilitated whole-city forums for students to discuss education with the Superintendent for several years;
• Student activists led a community organizing campaign starting in 2001 to change one high school's traditional racist mascot and won, including a court battle
• In 2004 students worked with the district to extend the curriculum policy to bring in nontraditional American history books focusing on diversity
• Starting last fall SoundOut's Student Equity Project has been working in high schools across the district to engage students in constructive processes focused on equity in schools.
  

Last week a group of students from West Seattle High School met with district administrators to challenge the district to engage students throughout district administration. Today I facilitated a student panel at a district-wide workshop on classroom instructional methodology, and while I had the opportunity to talk with a few officials about the meeting, I mentioned that it would be interesting to see how a district with a mature history of attempting to engage student voice would learn and adapt from its past. The conversation stopped, and there I was, suddenly responsible for educating these folks about the history of their district - just over the last ten years, while they've all been there!

Its funny, but adults in schools often forget students, even though they're surrounded by them all the time. For any of many reasons, we forget that all students have backgrounds and histories and experiences that we can all benefit from, regardless of where we're at. Instead, in the pressures and challenges and intentions and dreams and frustrations and realities adults all feel, we move constantly forward without looking back. The so-called "youth culture" we're surrounded by only perpetuates that, as marketers constantly demand we look at the next gizmo, the next wizbang and the next big fad, and forget that everything - everybody - comes from somewhere...

So I want us to engage students in researching and writing the history of students' voices and student organizing and student/adult partnerships in action... I want them to find the stories, tell the stories and share the stories that matter to them, that affect them, and let these stories and histories stay alive and inform them, inspire them.

People often complain about what I call the "transience of youth", meaning the fleeting-ness and forget fullness of a time of life when the world is huge and the future is a long, long ways away. These stories can help us remember our own youth, and remember the stories of those before us in order to help understand and grow forward in a knowledgeable and powerful way.

Here is some information that might inform your start down the path of writing your own histories of student voice, and working with young people to do the same:

• 1935 - Students in NYC organize a summer program to learn about organizing, including changing schools. The High School Summer School
• 1972 - The earliest-known story about a student running for an elected school board position. The Story of Sonia Yaco
• 1997 - A national campaign to create awareness about BGLTTQQ rights is created by a powerful student/adult partnership. Day of Silence
• 1999 - Young people in the slums of India teach themselves to use technology. The Hole in the Wall
• 2006 - High school students in Chile take control of schools in order to challenge the government to make them better. Chile's Student Protests

Send your history to us and we'll publish it on the SoundOut website. Drop an email to info at soundout dot org or simply reply to this post.

This last week I've had the terrible experience of feeling sabotaged in this work. I've been working closely with a high school in the area, co-facilitating a program for students focused on student voice. For several weeks the school, including two staff advisers and several students, have been gung ho and firing on all cylinders. Then, in the final 7 weeks of school, everything has seemed to fall apart. Without warning students are dropping off from meetings, the advisers have stopped attending, and the program feels undermined. But that's not the sabotage, per se.

Instead, the sponsoring organization that is hosting the program has shown its true colors. Despite initial promises to bring in dozens of schools and to infuse SoundOut throughout their related efforts, and despite ongoing meetings and phone calls that have indicated their interest in continuing and re-commitments and everything, there is still no further movement. Worst still, there seems to be regression, as the very approaches to student voice that we initially discussed defeating through this innovative program have recently been whole-heartedly embraced. Any shared acknowledgment of the manipulation and tokenism inherent in many student voice activities has gone out with the trash, and now this sponsoring org is being vogue and innovative with their peers by engaging students in these ways.

Its a frustrating moment in the CommonAction office, and a time for reflection and re-assessment.

Its important that educators and youth workers move beyond the notion of doing their work for students, and instead move towards doing everything with students. Recently I was reading a blog post that posed the question of how teachers can teacher for student voice. The author got a few convenient answers before someone wrote in and said that its not student voice, but student action. But I would offer that its still one step further.

Paulo Freire challenged that idea of student action. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed he asked us to consider that,

"The leaders [should not] treat the oppressed as mere activists to be denied the opportunity of reflection and allowed merely the illusion of acting, whereas in fact they would continue to be manipulated - and in this case by the presumed foes of the manipulation."

From my work in schools - over the last five years up through two days ago, I have seen that even the most well-intended student voice programs tend to do exactly what Freire saw: Teachers often use student voice to forward their own interests, without building the capacity that students have to flex their knowledge and skills in actual, real change work. Worst still, they manipulate students to reinforce their own self-centered concerns about schools. This is inherently disingenuous because students need more than to be treated as empty vessels waiting to be filled with teachers' knowledge. Students need more than manipulation.

I've been absent this last month. Somewhere between the middle of April and today I've traveled just about 15,000 miles, with flights to New York, Chicago and Denver and what seems like dozens of hour-long trips to and from Olympia to Seattle. CommonAction has put on workshops for just over 500 people in the last month; our new Meaningful Student Involvement Planning Guide was wrapped up; I received an unsolicited request for a book proposal from a major publisher(!); and I've been working on growing out the organization.

CommonAction has brought Amanda Irtz, a spectacular youth voice movement-minded professional, on board as our new Development Director. She'll be working closely with me to identify, develop and secure a variety of funding in order to sustain and expand the work of The Freechild Project and SoundOut. Teddy Wright, coming to Seattle from Miami (and across the nation) is coming around as a trainer extraordinaire, focusing on growing out the Washington Youth Voice Institutes locally and nationally. My new friend Megan Sullivan, right here in Oly, is also going to join our development team by helping us secure local funding for local programs. And of course, I continue to await and prepare for the arrival of Andrea Felix, who is coming towards the end of her experience with the National Youth Council in Dominica through the Peace Corps.

What are we working towards? Survival for our democracy, in its grandest form. Watch this trailer and you'll know where we're going: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8emq1rtBnec