Deep, Sustainable Partnerships: The Case of a Multischool Youth-Adult Partnership Network

• In Event: The Roles of Student Voice, Participation, and Youth-Adult Partnerships in Promoting Student Development

Abstract

Purpose: Activities that foster student engagement and voice can lead to young people increasing their sense of efficacy, their feeling that they can make a difference in their own lives and those of their peers (Eccles & Gootman, 2002; Kirshner, O’Donoghue, & McLaughlin, 2003). However, one of the greatest struggles that initiatives meant to elevate youth voice face is how to encourage and enable such activities to occur and to last, especially given the usually limited time and resources of the school, its teachers and its students (Camino, 2005; Mitra, 2009). Few examples exist of youth-adult partnerships that have been able to successfully integrate themselves within schools for a sustained period of time; fewer still are examples of networks of schools engaged in this type of work. This paper examines the work of one organization, Youth and Adults Transforming Schools Together, which provides technical support to 14 high schools’ youth-adult partnership groups engaged in action-research to promote student engagement. Specifically, we examine how youth-adult groups’ engagement with the action-research process contributes to the institutionalization and long-term sustainability of their efforts.

Framework: Drawing on the organizational change literature, our paper focuses on identifying the constituent parts of the YATST life-cycle and the processes that support the long-term integration and sustainability of both the YATST groups themselves and the products of their multi-year action-research projects. We use Coburn’s (2003) measure of depth to discuss the ways in which groups leverage opportunities within the YATST action-research life-cycle to achieve a high-level of organizational integration and transfer of reform ownership.

Method and data sources: We review four years of work by 14 schools across Vermont that participate in the YATST program. Results are based on the analysis of 25 hour-long semi-structured interviews with educational leaders and participating teachers, data collected through approximately 80 hours of observation of youth-adult group work and training, and analysis of over 150 organizational and school-based documents.

Results: We find that youth-adult partnership groups must attend to a changing set of processes throughout the action-research cycle. The priorities of a first year school in establishing their legitimacy and creating a niche for themselves while concurrently collecting data are distinctly different from a second or third year school interested in using their established legitimacy to push at the boundaries of school practice, using the strengths of their school to address the challenges that they have identified as a group. We explore the implications of these differences for the establishment of long-term youth-adult partnerships within schools.

Significance: This work has implications both for educational leaders and practitioners who are interested in working towards elevating the voices and experiences of students within their school to create more meaningful long-term opportunities for youth voice within their schools. The processes by which these schools have achieved long-term sustainability for these initiatives are discussed in-depth within the paper.

Authors

• Catharine Biddle, The Pennsylvania State University

• Helen Beattie, UP for Learning

• Dana L. Mitra, The Pennsylvania State University