Transformative Student Voice for Teachers: A Guide to Classroom Action

A step-by-step guidebook for teachers on how to build a classroom community that empowers students through critical reflection, inquiry, and action to drive school transformation

In Transformative Student Voice for Teachers, Dane Stickney, Ben Kirshner, Carlos P. Hipolito-Delgado, and Shelley Zion offer clear frameworks that support student agency and center the voices of young people in the process of school improvement and transformation. They illustrate how the frameworks, Critical Civic Inquiry and Transformative Student Voice, give educators the tools to adopt a youth-centered approach to learning that runs counter to the top-down leadership and behaviorist and adultist practices common to the US K-12 educational system.

This practical companion to Transformative Student Voice guides teachers and other adults to cultivate self-awareness and recognize unearned power, form authentic student-educator partnerships, facilitate critical inquiry in student groups, and sustain this work. Each chapter highlights a specific, real-world application of these approaches in a classroom community that organizes student learning around cycles of critical reflection, civic inquiry, and action. Each also identifies challenges, cautions against common pitfalls, and provides key questions and takeaways to aid implementation.

These actionable guidelines help set the course for adults and young people to develop critical consciousness and capacity for engagement in sociopolitical activism, transforming both themselves and the settings where they live and work.