School Climate as “Common Good”: Urban Middle School Student Civic Engagement for School Improvement

• In Event: Youth Civic Engagement and School Community, Climate, and Culture: Reciprocal Possibilities

Abstract

Objectives. This study describes a youth civic engagement program—the Huddle Factor—designed for urban middle school students to become agents of change in their schools. Urban middle schools oftentimes fail to realize positive outcomes for their students, disadvantaging them before they embark on secondary education and increasing the likelihood of later-career dropout or failure. Negative school climate has been identified as an important setting-level contributor to the struggles of urban middle school students, and myriad efforts have been launched to improve school climate to, in turn, improve urban education. The Huddle Factor creates a space for students to work with adults using a dialogical process to engage in improving the climate of their school.

Theoretical framework. Two theoretical frameworks drive this study. First, Bronfenbrenner’s2 ecological theory of human development has been used extensively by youth development researchers to understand how elements of young people’s environments influence their outcomes. The effect of environment on individual youth is only half of the theory, however, as he also posited that youth can influence their environments. The Huddle Factor may be a mechanism through which young people do so. Second, Dewey’s pragmatic idea of community and deliberative democracy underpin the approach employed by the Huddle Factor. Dewey believed that creating spaces for multiple stakeholder voices to dialogue on issues of public concern was necessary to correctly identify and solve social problems. The Huddle Factor attempted to include youth voices in the effort to improve the common good—in this case school climate.

Methods and data. We employ a case study approach to examine the process and outcomes of the Huddle Factor program that took place in an urban middle school in the southern U.S. Analysis of school administrative records, both in the intervention school and five other district middle schools help to understand the school-level changes that occurred. Further, a pre-post test was administered to examine change in participant outcomes, including self-efficacy, sense of school community, relative to a control group. Finally, participant observation and interviews with participants helped to capture the dynamics of the program at the individual student and school levels.

Results and conclusions. Results are triangulated from these multiple data sources to understand how providing youth a structured opportunity to engage in a dialogical process of school climate change may influence outcomes for students and the school. We found that participants experienced a greater sense of school community and of self-efficacy to change their school. A primary driver of school-level change was program participants’ strengthened networks of relationships with adults in the school. Participants also described a radiating effect of self-efficacy and responsibility from themselves to their peers as they became more engaged in school improvement. Finally, school administrative data indicated an overall reduction in disciplinary problems with the introduction of the Huddle Factor. This change may be verified in future work through a quasi-experimental approach.

This study may help educators understand how to engage students in the process of making their school environments healthier places to learn and grow.

Author

• Adam Voight, Cleveland State University