Leading for Now: Youth Voice and Radical Futuring

• In Event: Standing With Youth, Parent, and Community Educational Leaders: Case Studies in Subverting Systemic Oppression

Abstract

Objective/Purpose
This case highlights how elementary youth of color make and shape radical futures when using their voices to critique inequitable systems and school policies that have failed to support them historically. Since the 1960s, youth like those of The Children’s Crusade have been at the vanguard of civic engagement and mobilizing for change. Presently, youth of color continue to engage in radical change efforts to future new possibilities and outcomes in schools and in society writ large. To future means that we must acknowledge how the past is heavily entangled in our present (Gordon, 1997; Parham, 2009; Mauldin & Johnson, 2021) and continues to shape many systems, policies and practices upheld in schools today. Working alongside ten elementary youth, I examine how elementary youth of color utilize makerspaces and our dialogue group to future new possibilities related to their school’s discipline practices and oppressive labeling of students.

Theoretical Framework
This study and analysis is grounded in a Black futurist framework, relying on the works of Black futurists who are writers and artists that have long speculated about what it means to reimagine our current world and society through time, memory, redesign, and utopian thinking. The works of Octavia Butler, June Jordan, Deborah Roberts, and Alisha Wormsley inform this “utopian thinking” to challenge the status-quo of school leadership and schooling practices.

Methods
This paper draws from data gathered during the 2018-2019 school year where I worked alongside ten elementary-aged youth of color (The Voice Leaders) to capture their insights on creating change and understanding leadership in schools. In doing so, I curated makerspaces with the youth where they were able to engage in the communal practice of artmaking, dialogue, arts-elicitation, and reflection related to these topics.

Selected Results
The youth in this study engaged in radical futuring practices in a variety of ways. First, they utilized their voices as a vehicle to share perspectives on what they believed was possible in their school, community and the larger world around them. They focused on topics related to discipline, labeling of students and the lack of arts and music in their school. Secondly, the youth used their collective voice to create a playbook for teachers and students at their school so that readers would know the issues that The Voice Leaders cared about and observed. Overall, the youth focused much of their dialogue and artwork on reimagining schools, their principal, and how they might take action on pressing social issues they felt impassioned by.

Scholarly importance
This paper offers needed perspectives in the field of educational leadership, especially in efforts to expand our understanding of youth voice and youth leadership. Further, by critically examining these youth of color perspectives in futurist ways, schools and their respective leaders can begin the work of dismantling systems and eradicating practices that have continued harm against youth of color. School leaders can take note from the youth in their schools on how to imagine new possibilities but how to also mobilize and create radically different outcomes.

Author

• Courtney C. Mauldin, Syracuse University