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DA District Administration
How Student Activism guides future Citizenship
Educators can inform students about powerful forms of activism beyond walkouts
By: Matt Zalaznick
January 27, 2020
Outsiders may sometimes grumble that school leaders who encourage
student activism are indoctrinating young people with certain political
beliefs.
While it’s true that students are more likely to take action around
liberal causes such as gun control or confronting climate change,
administrators deliver valuable lessons when they let students promote
their beliefs, says Meira Levinson, a Harvard Graduate School of
Education professor and co-author of Democratic Discord in Schools
(Harvard Education Press, 2019).
“The complaint will be that these schools are inappropriately using
public funds to promote partisan ends,” says Levinson, who researches
civic education and educational ethics. “But it is developmentally
appropriate for young people to be civically engaged and active, and it
is a powerful form of learning.”
Yet, many educators tend to be nervous about student activism active.
And while walkouts may get the most media attention, they, of course,
can also disrupt instruction.
Administrators and teachers should therefore make sure young people are
fully aware of the many other powerful forms of student activism, such
as speaking in public meetings, doing advocacy research and forming
community alliances around an issue, says Levinson, who helped create
Youth in Front, a online resource for student activists.
“We tend to treat civic education as learning about how others do
citizenship, but in almost every other discipline we know the best way
to teach kids is for them to do it themselves,” Levinson says. “We
teach them to do math, we don’t have them read about how other people
do math.”
Student activism leaves a legacy
In Texas’ Round Rock ISD, the student advisory board, which comprises
representatives from the system’s five high schools and 11 middle
schools, takes on an annual service project.
This year, students are mounting an educational campaign about the
dangers of vaping, and in the past, the board organized a community
walk to raise awareness of teen suicide.
“When the’re had been a tragedy, they felt adults were fearful to talk
about suicide, but the kids needed to talk about it,” says Kristina
Snow, the board’s sponsor and district director of talent development.
Snow says her role in student activism is to help students “navigate
the system” by connecting them with district staff who can, for
instance, get the students on agendas for certain meetings or help
arrange parent forums.
“These students really want to have a legacy,” snow says. “They’re very
worried about there being better paths for those who come after them at
their schools.”
In Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools, near Washington, D.C., now
allows students in grades 7-12 a partial absence each school year to
participate in civic engagement activities such as meeting with elected
officials or volunteering for a campaign.
“Civic engagement is something that is emphasized in our government
classes and the new regulation recognizes that our students are offered
multiple opportunities to participate because of our location,” Fairfax
County Public Schools School Board Chair Karen Corbett Sanders said in
a news release.
Benefits of student activism
In the wake of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, some administrators
allowed students to leave class to participate in protests. Other
leaders told students they could be punished for walking out—which
presents a lesson in itself: Activists of all ages sometimes face
consequences for civil disobedience, and students can learn to make
that choice, says Lata Nott, executive director of the First Amendment
Center at the Freedom Forum Institute, Nott says.
NewseumEd’s website has plenty of resources educators can use to teach
the First Amendment, a law that many people don’t fully understand,
Nott says.
“It protects your speech and it protects everybody’s speech,” Nott
says. “If somebody you hate is talking about something you hate and you
take away their rights, that’s making policy that could take away your
own rights.”
Student activism can also support interdisciplinary learning. For
instance, researching carbon footprints requires math and science
skills to analyze climate data and a knowledge of government to know
how and where to begin impacting policy, says Alan Singer, a professor
of education at Hofstra University in New York.
Student activism and productive political discourse will become more
pressing issues during the 2020 presidential and Congressional
elections. It’s an opportunity for students to get involved in
campaigns locally, and learn to listen and base their positions on
evidence as they debate the election and the impeachment hearings,
Singer says.
Administrators can minimize the potential for disruption by maintaining open lines of communications with students, he says.
“Students should feel administrators are on the same team as they are
and on the same team as the teachers,” Singers says. “Students should
be able to walk into a principal’s office and say ‘These are the things
we are concerned about.”
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