Transformative Student Voice for Teachers: A Guide to Classroom Action

A step-by-step guidebook for teachers on how to build a classroom community that empowers students through critical reflection, inquiry, and action to drive school transformation

In Transformative Student Voice for Teachers, Dane Stickney, Ben Kirshner, Carlos P. Hipolito-Delgado, and Shelley Zion offer clear frameworks that support student agency and center the voices of young people in the process of school improvement and transformation. They illustrate how the frameworks, Critical Civic Inquiry and Transformative Student Voice, give educators the tools to adopt a youth-centered approach to learning that runs counter to the top-down leadership and behaviorist and adultist practices common to the US K-12 educational system.

This practical companion to Transformative Student Voice guides teachers and other adults to cultivate self-awareness and recognize unearned power, form authentic student-educator partnerships, facilitate critical inquiry in student groups, and sustain this work. Each chapter highlights a specific, real-world application of these approaches in a classroom community that organizes student learning around cycles of critical reflection, civic inquiry, and action. Each also identifies challenges, cautions against common pitfalls, and provides key questions and takeaways to aid implementation.

These actionable guidelines help set the course for adults and young people to develop critical consciousness and capacity for engagement in sociopolitical activism, transforming both themselves and the settings where they live and work.

Dane Stickney is an assistant teaching professor in education at the University of Colorado Denver, where he supports teacher development and conducts YPAR research. Through the Transformative Student Voice research collective and the Action Research Network of the America, he supports YPAR initiatives across Colorado, the US, and parts of Europe. Ben Kirshner is a professor of education at the University of Colorado Boulder and faculty director of CU Engage: Center for Community-Based Learning and Research. For the past two decades, he has worked collaboratively with educators, community organizers, and students to design and study learning environments that support youth development, social justice activism, and transformative student voice. Carlos P. Hipolito-Delgado is a professor in counseling at the University of Colorado Denver. His research examines the sociopolitical development of marginalized youth and training to improve the cultural competence of counselors. Shelley Zion is professor of urban education in the Department of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Research at Rowan University, where she directs three research labs. She leads training, research, and community partnerships focused on issues of access, success, and equity.