Youth Voice in Action: Indigenous Students’ Leadership in Systemic Transformation at a High School

• In Event: Youth Voice, Agency, and Activism as a Future-Making Tool to Reimagine and Enact Inclusive Futures

Abstract

Purpose
The colonialist and white supremacist foundations of the education system in the U.S. pervades public schools today. When schools undertake change efforts to address anti-Indigeneity in school discipline systems, attendance codes, and teacher-student relationships, young people are rarely included in conversation or policymaking, despite their lived expertise of school systems. To counter both racism and adult-centered decision-making in schools, we include Indigenous youth in a research-practice partnership, Indigenous Learning Lab. Young people contribute systemic analyses, valuable expertise, and creative problem-solving to school change efforts. However, there are barriers to young people’s participation with adult educational stakeholders related to power dynamics, time, and voice. This longitudinal systemic transformation study aimed to facilitate Indigenous youth’s participation in whole school change at a rural high school.

Theoretical Framework
Indigenous Learning Lab is grounded in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and Decolonizing Epistemologies (Engeström, 2016; Tuck & Yang, 2014; Smith, 2012). Our approach to collaboration with Indigenous youth builds upon asset-based understandings of Indigenous youth (Cajete, 1994) and leverages university-school-community partnership toward “resistance, reclaiming, recovery, reciprocity, repatriation, [and] regeneration” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 244).

Methods & Data Sources
Indigenous Learning Lab featured a multi-year collaboration among Indigenous youth, educators, parents, community members as well as White-settler school administrators and teachers. Members participated in video-recorded Learning Lab sessions and follow up interviews. The study followed a cycle of expansive learning actions consisting of questioning, analyzing, modeling, testing, and implementing new solutions to resolve the systemwide problems of practice (Sannino, Engeström, & Lemos, 2016).

Results
Indigenous youth participants contributed vital perspectives that forced the adult members to reckon with the micro- and macro-level harms perpetuated by teachers, disciplinary staff, and the reactive and punitive discipline system. Students contributed solutions rooted in their daily experiences in various school spaces, which grounded the group’s systemic school change efforts in relationship-building among teachers and students, support for 8th-graders’ transition to the high school and infusing disciplinary conversations with humanity. Indigenous students refused to be understood as a monolith and shared diverse perspectives on the issues facing their peers, community, and school. Some developed confidence and leadership within the school. Others, who had adopted more assimilatory approaches to surviving school, critiqued those students who did not “behave.” Overall, it was difficult to sustain student participation in meetings as the Learning Lab members navigated coordinating across multiple schedules, internet connectivity, power dynamics among administrators and students, and youth silence and refusal. Creating small, affinity group discussions with researchers including Indigenous scholars or trusted teacher protected space for Indigenous students to share freely and participating with a parent or trusted teacher or mentor also supported student attendance.

Scholarly Significance
To offset the cumulative effects of colonial harms and dispossession of Indigenous youth in both education systems and school change efforts, Indigenous Learning Lab facilitates a collaborative approach to whole-school change that includes Indigenous student expertise and imagination in the creation and implementation of an inclusive, just, and decolonizing school system.

Authors

• Aydin Bal, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Morgan Mayer-Jochimsen, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Linda Orie, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Jahyun Yoo, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Dosun Ko, Santa Clara University