How Positioning Shapes Opportunities for Student Agency in Schools

Abstract

This chapter shows how student positioning by adults shapes opportunities for students to develop collective systemic agency. Collective systemic agency refers to the capacity to organize others, participate in discussions, develop a systemic analysis, and take action in complex institutions, such as schools. This repertoire can be cultivated by encouraging students to ask critical questions about their educational experiences and to uncover evidence about how policy affects people. In observing this process taking place in schools, we notice that the ways adults positioned students, in part through talk, greatly impacted learning opportunities. To warrant our claims, we draw on data from Critical Civic Inquiry (CCI), a university–school partnership in which teachers guide students through an action research cycle. Our analysis looks at the ways in which school and classroom level positioning of students impacts student experiences and openings for action. Both focal classrooms make space for civic learning, but the chances to express agency are limited in some cases. We argue that these learning opportunities are strengthened when education professionals look beyond curricular experiences and attend to how students are positioned through discourse in the broader context of the school.

Power and Adult Support in Student Voice Efforts for Policy Change

“…Repositioning involves strategies to increase the perceived legitimacy of student interventions in policy conversations. Such strategies may include students claiming subject matter expertise on their own experience (Conner & Rosen, 2015b; York & Kirshner, 2015). Reframing, drawing on Goffman’s (1974) description of frames as “schemata of interpretation” that allow people to “locate, perceive, identify, and label” phenomena (p. 21), involves strategies where students use their unique position to shift policy discourse in advantageous ways by disrupting preexisting interpretive schemes.…”

What Is Student Voice Anyway? The Intersection of Student Voice Practices and Shared Leadership

“…We found that setting can dictate focus. Although examples exist of student voice practices set in the classroom that focus on effecting school or even district policy (Cohen et al, 2020; York & Kirshner, 2015), most of the examples of student voice practices within the literature and shared by students, teachers, and school administrators showed alignment between setting and focus; that is, classroom student voice practices focused on classroom policy and practice, while school student voice practices focused on school policy and practice.…”

“…Critique of student voice scholarship has increasingly focused on how student voice practices may be co-opted to reinforce oppression rather than to focus on social justice (Balakrishnan & Claiborne, 2017; Holquist & Walls, 2021a; McNae & Cowie, 2017; Mayes et al, 2016, 2021; Bertrand & Rodela, 2018; York & Kirshner, 2015; Robinson & Taylor, 2013; Rodela & Bertrand, 2021). For example, Lac and Cumings Mansfield (2018) identified three levers for effective student voice in educational leadership: (a) positioning of students as change agents, (b) school administrators who support the centering of student voice, and (c) the actual creation of opportunities for student voice to occur.…”

YPAR Dreams Deferred? Examining Power Bases for YPAR to Impact Policy and Practice

“…Another approach to broader change through YPAR involves repositioning youth so that they have more power and influence (Bertrand, 2018;Ozer & Wright, 2012;Rodríguez & Brown, 2009). This was shown to be the case in a study of student action research projects facilitated by two teachers in two different schools (York & Kirshner, 2015). One of these teachers repeatedly referred to her students as researchers, while administrators at the school positioned the students as valuable contributors to school policy.…”