Youth Voices: Learning Amidst the Conflict Campaign

• In Event: Teaching, Learning, and Leading Amidst the Conflict Campaign: Voices From Educators and Youth

Abstract

Objectives

Recently, the nation has seen intensive adult efforts to limit what students can learn in U.S. schools. In this presentation, we put youth voices directly in conversation with their state’s restriction legislation. We share analysis of seven interviews tapping youth voices from six states – two states where politicians and officials have already restricted race- and/or LGBTQ-related learning via state law and policy, and two states where politicians are pursuing such bills to restrict learning.

Framework

We build here on an analytic framework attending to school communications (Author 1, 2017, 2004), which taps many research traditions to argue that to support all students’ learning, skill-building, opportunity access, and basic belonging in school, educators must build skills for talking about real experiences of diversity and inequality in our society and schools. We explore initial patterns in youth experience regarding restrictive legislation’s explicit goal: limiting school talk with and by youth about race and LGBTQ experience.

Methods/data sources

We invited interviews from student participants in two past years of #USvsHate (usvshate.org), a national project inviting youth to make “anti-hate” messages embracing diversity and inclusion for schools and the public. All youth had indicated individually on submission forms or voting forms that they were willing to be contacted for research and had provided an email address. Interviews explored students’ learning desires and invited reactions to any state and local efforts to restrict learning. We then chose, from a slightly larger sample, all interviews from states with restrictive legislation passed or proposed. We analyzed these interviews seeking palpable, illuminating stories (Small & Calarco, 2022) of learning desired, offered and restricted.

Results/significance

Students described their desires to learn in classrooms, clubs, and school activities from a diversity of perspectives and experiences; to learn about contributions from all – their communities and others’ communities; and to learn about the history of inequality shaping the present, to improve the country collectively today. They also indicated that adult efforts to support student belonging in schools were crucial to enable students’ learning and well-being. Youth also wished their educators would improve their own skills in supporting diverse populations of students to analyze, empathize, feel belonging, and think critically.

Youth also described how restriction effort emanating from state laws and localized responses from local school boards, school leaders, and teachers were directly threatening these very desired efforts to learn, develop skills, and belong. In some cases, politicians’ restrictions were fundamentally starting to limit the ability to talk through complicated ideas, ethics, and facts in school with skilled adults. While conflict campaigners have positioned race- and LGBTQ-related talk and learning as harming youth, youth indicated how adults restricting such talk in schools themselves actively hurt youth by denying students adult supports for learning and belonging in school.

Their voices lead to our final symposium presentation on the experiences of district leaders. Following Presentation 4, we will engage the audience in small group dialogue on data examples, then large group dialogue on how our field should respond.

Authors

• Chenoa Pellytaay Aschoff Musillo, University of California - San Diego

• Emilie Homan, University of California - San Diego

• Lillie Ko-Wong, University of California - San Diego

• Reed Kendall, University of California - San Diego