Student Voice and Lived Experience
Buenos dias mi amigas y amigos. What a lovely winter day we’re having. I write this morning from an airport, awaiting my boarding time bright and early. It’s been a time for traveling. I spent a bit of this past week in Cambridge, MA visiting with the brilliant and passionate Kaia Stern and Aaron Bray with Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. How cool and rejuvenating is it to spend time with like-minded colleagues and friends? Listening to different points of view of the same mission is invaluable in our growth as individuals and professionals. This trip, and other events of the week, reminded me of the importance of incorporating our students’ voices in everything we design and implement.
One of the invitations extended to me on the Harvard campus was to attend a lecture given by a Radcliffe Institute fellow, Brittany White. Ms. White spoke of her time spent incarcerated, the toll it took on her and her family, and her journey back to her community. None of it was easy, as you can imagine, and some folks don’t navigate it as well as Brittany, but hearing her experiences, her take on what they mean to her and to others like her, what she has learned that can help not only justice-impacted individuals but those of us who are not, made me think hard about the collective work we do around system survivors. And what we do to keep young people out of that system.
In a discussion forum this week with the fabulous Eden Badertscher, Terrell Blount, and Jessica Hicklin, Eden commented that justice-impacted people can’t single-handedly reform how we provide education to incarcerated students, and people without that lived experience can’t do it alone either. In other words, it takes a village.
We are that village. All of us. Public school educators, foster care systems, correctional educators, corrections professionals, policy-makers, higher education institutes, and the list goes on. Frequently, one group or another makes a push to change things for the better and as frequently there’s some group somewhere pushing back, or just sitting still. There’s never a time to sit still, though. The way we educate and the way we incarcerate young and not-so-young people in our country should always be evolving and growing and improving. If the pandemic didn’t teach us anything else, this we should have learned: schools and prisons aren’t going to be able to function the way they always have. What a great time to make a change!
One of the ways we can design and implement improvements is to utilize our students (traditional and incarcerated). Who better to voice issues and possible solutions than those who are directly impacted? I’ve used this widely in every work space I’ve inhabited…as a public school administrator, we won a state-wide award for a successful anti-bullying initiative that was student-led. In prisons for juveniles and adults, I’ve led initiatives that created community problem-solving committees, peer mentoring, and student councils that were student-led. I staffed a correctional professional team that was 50% returning citizens…some had been out for a while and some were still on paper.
What better partners and advisors can we have to initiate change than our students?
We should be tapping into the wealth of talent and knowledge at our fingertips when we want to improve an organizational system. Or the world. Whichever.
Have a warm, caffeinated (or not) day that energizes you and fills your love tank. We have a world to change, after all.
