Student Voice, All Grown Up

By: Keaton Wadzinski

I was a student voice once.

I was named to dozens of youth advisory committees in high school and college. I was recruited and promoted to a leadership role at national by-the-students, for-the-students nonprofit, Student Voice (also known for #stuvoice) at age 18.

I’ve been working in the world of education innovation since my start as a student activist. Now, I’m “all grown up,” as they say. I’m in my early thirties, and I’ve experienced much of what life has to offer, in all its highs and lows.

I’ve spent many years now reflecting on my experience on all sides of youth voice work, from being a student voice myself (in some cases, a token one, and others, an authentically empowered one) to being the adult in youth-adult partnership work. I’ve also experienced everything in between, including acting as a “near-peer” supporter, a college student teaching my own experimental education innovation curriculum, and a young professional “reverse mentor” for district leaders.

I’m grateful that many people now recognize the importance of student voice and seeing school through the lived experience of youth. But well-intended student voice endeavors can quickly slip into shallow, or worse, harmful territory— both of which I have experienced myself.

I’m writing this piece in hopes that those who are championing student voice, agency, and co-design might listen and avoid some of the pitfalls and pains I’ve experienced firsthand. But more importantly, I write this in hopes adults reading it may create conditions where student voice initiatives are meaningful and genuine opportunities that honor lived experience and chart new paths forward for the future of learning.

To that end, I am asking education leaders to think critically and think bigger about what it means to invite young people to step into their agency.

Thinking Critically

In my time as Director of Campaign Strategy at Student Voice, we organized on a national level to make the case for why young people deserve a seat at the table and real influence in decision making about their own education. Fortunately, that case is more broadly accepted now, thanks in part to the many incredible young and adult advocates of this work (e.g., the Kentucky Student Voice Team and the Nevada Future of Learning Network).

But too often, big aspirations for engaging youth are often shrunk down to tokenized speaking opportunities or superficial advisory committees. In my experience, the most effective student voice initiatives require several deliberate considerations.

The first of these is deciding who is even offered a chance to participate. Many education leaders I have worked with tend to default to convenience samples of straight-A student government members, or use competitive applications to select student voice representatives. This leaves out the essential perspective of students who feel like school isn’t for them. In my experience listening to disengaged young people, I’ve heard what really matters in their lives, and seen how insightful their commentary can be.

After thinking through who is included, the best student voice initiatives I’ve witnessed considered how to position their young people to take real action. They weren’t a one-off, flash in the pan. Adults demonstrated the commitment on their end by naming how they intend to support student ideas (events, policy proposals, design challenges, community projects, etc.) through to implementation, and saw real results.

The final consideration goes even further, posing a unique challenge. How do we help young people find their voice on topics for which they are rarely consulted? I’ve learned many students benefit from explicit permission and encouragement to go beyond saying what they think the adults in the room want to hear. My primary strategy for this is to ask them to speak from their experience and make space for them to challenge the underlying thoughts we hold about school, the education system at large, and the world as it is today. 

Thinking Bigger

To go beyond the world as it is today, we need to start by being more honest with young people.

As adults, we don’t know everything. We hold expertise, but the structures that we know can bias our thinking and limit our creativity.

Leaders in the education innovation sector at large are, at best, unsure what the future of education may hold, and at worst, fearful of dystopian possibilities. To imagine and move towards a more hopeful future, we need to work with students to collectively unlearn the common heuristics and “grammar of schooling” as we know it.

I’m hoping for a day where we teach young people about the honest history of schooling, and invite them into a metacognition-based curriculum to help them imagine and build alternatives.

I’ve piloted pieces of that vision, teaching a course on education innovation that featured “unlearning” sessions and facilitating intergenerational design workshops to envision new school models. These experiences were participant-driven and had many co-designed elements.

In practice, I’ve found it’s less about upholding co-design as a gold standard, which has its own limitations and “blurs in theory and practice.” It’s more about being purposeful and clear about which mode of learner agency (on a spectrum from facilitator-led to co-design to learner-led) is the best fit for the situation.

Utilizing multiple modes of agency allows us to acknowledge the different forms of expertise each stakeholder holds and the complexities of the power dynamics at play.

There’s also a hefty (often unacknowledged) burden of expectation that comes with the responsibility of co-design and learner-led initiatives. If we want to help young people step into their agency to shape the world around them, we can’t put the full weight of the world on their backs. Otherwise, that weight can be crushing. I’ve felt it.

The question becomes how do we create opportunities for young people to dream of what education could be, while meeting them where they are at and prioritizing their wellbeing.

What would it look like if young people were actually given the opportunity to build the future of education?

A Student Questions the Purpose of Education

In 2013, I had a bad case of “senioritis.” My attempt to cure that affliction was to blow off classwork by watching many of the now infamous TED talks about how schools kill creativity and steal dreams.

Rallying myself and friends around a common cause, I tried, and frankly failed, to start a student organization with a radical mission. We called it WISF (“What is school for?”). We had a two-pronged guerrilla marketing campaign planned to spark student and staff conversations, complete with a video we recorded in a buddy’s garage where we hid our faces as anonymous students petitioning the system.

This was back in the day of Auto-Tune edits on YouTube and spoken word rap poetry about how education is broken. If we had pulled it off, maybe there’s a chance we could have added to the canon of viral videos calling for new education paradigms. But unfortunately, the brand WISF doesn’t necessarily roll off the tongue, and I knew very little about how to mobilize my peers to action (especially considering the emotional labor that comes with a project like this).

That attempt may have failed, but it introduced me to what it could be like if we (students) had a voice contributing to conversations about education reform and innovation.

This fed my curiosity. As a student, I felt the education system wasn’t living up to an unspoken social contract (see UNESCO’s publication and Kim’s Smith’s piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review for more) about what school is for, in part, because we weren’t even asking the question of school’s purpose. I obsessed over bringing that question up in as many spaces as possible over the past thirteen years. I’ve since facilitated countless casual conversations, workshops, community dialogues, and more on the topic.

Every time, the question elicits far more answers and far different answers than most people expect. It often looks like a whiteboard filled to the brim or post-it notes covering an entire wall. I’ve posed the question in enough spaces, with enough different stakeholders, to start to identify key insights.

What I’ve Learned from Asking “What is School For?”

From these conversations, one insight was particularly resounding. When reflecting on a whiteboard full of varied and equally important expectations for what a “good education” should deliver to our young people, as facilitator, I point out:

We expect so much of education, and yet our system only prioritizes a few of these purposes (e.g., academic knowledge + college and career readiness) over the purposes most critical to human development and flourishing (e.g., figuring out what you want to do in life).

I don’t think it’s a bad thing that we expect so much of education. I am a believer that with the right support, our education system can be capable of achieving all of those varied purpose statements, from childcare to enlightenment. That’s what many passionate educators already work so hard to do in their classes, while often being underpaid, underresourced, and underestimated.

But when the overwhelming majority of time and resources are spent prioritizing content acquisition, we miss out on what matters most.

I’d like to imagine one day, instead of test prep, more parents will be hiring a young person down the street as a passion tutor to help their child discover, explore, and deepen their interests.

It’s a vision my team and I prototyped back in the day, with our signature “Interest Mapping” activity that we trained college students to run in area high schools. It worked incredibly well to help local students build interest-driven projects for the Youth Summit each year (and I’m sharing one of those activities freely here in hopes it might help educators who might also want to do interest exploration projects but aren’t sure how to start).

But I was only able to create that curriculum and offer that experience to other young people because I had found my “thing.”

Thinking back in retrospect, I was lucky. I had uncovered an interest in my final year of high school, ironically, in the form of a mission to reimagine education.

That interest grew and deepened into a lifelong passion, thanks to the adults who believed in me and gave me genuine opportunities to make a real impact.

It was a unique journey that not every student gets to experience. It felt like I found my calling, and I ran at that sense of purpose with full speed ahead. But that drive is just one variable of the equation. It can’t sustain on its own without support.

Support Structures for Young Dreamers

I lived through what many people in my generation call “gifted kid burnout” (which hit particularly hard in tandem with the high rates of burnout in the education field and that of working on a startup nonprofit). I’m also one of many people in my generation who have come to terms with my neurodiversity late in life. I’ve had my own severe mental health experiences to navigate, and learned many hard lessons the hard way.

Many people poured belief into me while I was struggling to live up to the expectations I imagined for myself.

That’s why, at the age of 31, I’m looking back on my journey as a young innovator and thinking about support structures more than anything. I’m thinking about how grateful I am for mentors in my life, including Dr. Pam Moran, whose philosophy of “getting to yes” when young people came to them with an idea has opened so many doors in my life by believing in me and genuinely supporting the ideas I had to share.

I also am imagining new support structures for young people in their journeys to finding agency, passion, and wellbeing. I’ve run Youth Dreaming Sessions to invite young people to contribute ideas for the future of their schools, as part of a broader strategic planning process I call Strategic Dreaming.

I’ve also begun designing a storytelling game system to help people of all ages imagine more hopeful futures, and then bring them to life in both fiction and reality. I’ve found the medium of tabletop roleplaying games to be a particularly compelling environment to practice agency in lower stakes, fun environments, and I have learned much from the TabletopEDU community and others passionate about game design and player agency.

As I do so, I’m thinking about “Structure, Not Control,” a personal mantra I developed over the years and spoke about at the University of Virginia Education School’s “What the Innovators Do” course (which also was one of my favorite courses as a student). “Structure, Not Control” looks like designing and implementing metaphorical on-ramps for our young people to join us as authentic collaborators in reimagining education.

In my mind, it’s like the trellis on which my mom used to grow massive tomato plants growing up, in the perfect balance of shade and sunlight. “Structure, Not Control” means creating the conditions and process where you can invite young people in for the big conversations about the future of education, nurture their creativity, and see what emerges.

A Call to Believe in the Wisdom of Young People

Young people are rarely asked to examine or weigh in on the purpose of the thing that they’re required to attend for thousands of hours.

They’re assigned to the role of passive participant in school by default, when we could be giving them a full spectrum of ways to develop, practice, and express their agency.

You may think my story is an exception, and that most young people are too disinterested to imagine the future of learning, outside of perhaps a select few overachievers. But some of my biggest insights have come from listening to in-school suspension students, and as I’ve shared, I’m a firm believer that youth voice efforts work best when they are intentionally inclusive, not just limited to the most engaged students.

In my experience, all young people are more than capable of discussing school’s purpose and function with insightful commentary. When given prompts that respect their lived experience, and a space where they feel their voices actually matter, they rarely jump straight to “asking for less homework” (and if they do, it’s followed up with the “why,” leading to thoughtful conversations about how much school stress is impacting their mental health).

More often, they ask to be taught taxes.

I find this to be a beautifully poignant commentary that speaks volumes about their interest in learning things that matter, including topics that they feel intimidated by and unprepared to handle as an adult. It illuminates the reality that preparation for the “real world” is yet another purpose of education that too often goes unaddressed, or gets muddled by adult jargon and policy over practical implementation. (Notably, it also raises the question of what we define as the “real world.” Is it the broken systems and fractured job economy we currently have? Or could we help learners develop durable skills to help shape new “real worlds” in more deliberate visions?)

This is merely one of dozens of insights from the 550+ young people my team and I have listened to that has changed my worldview and personal theory of change for education.

Young People as Builders of the Futures of Education

Young people can dream big about the future of education. But they may need guidance to bring those dreams to life strategically, and test the core aspects of their idea.

I recently served as Innovation Lead at 4.0 Schools. Prior to joining the team, 4.0 was one of the first places I felt like people believed in my potential as a young person to build a future of education. They invited me to interview for the Future of School Challenge at age 19, and I’m an alumni of multiple programs including the inaugural cohort of Community Catalysts for regional innovation ecosystem leaders.

This medium article by 4.0’s founder has helped me strategically build and test so many of my dreams: What if we tested schools the way chefs test new restaurants? 

In this piece, Matt Candler suggests that perhaps big dreams don’t have to start with big implementation. In fact, you might learn more by intentionally starting with a miniature version of the big dream. In Matt’s article, he draws inspiration from food: you don’t have to jump straight to brick and mortar to pursue a dream of starting a restaurant, you can start by having your friends over for a pop-up dinner to test your menu, or build a small business around a food truck.

I think of this as: “what’s a smaller version of the dream that still holds the core aspects of the vision?” I like to picture these dreams as an atom that still holds the attributes of an element, or a fractal that repeats its pattern, as adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy.

With this approach, I’ve found it helps dreamers to see the big picture even while testing more approachable versions of the dream. It’s different from the conventional startup wisdom of failing fast or making tiny bets. It’s more deliberate, focused more on how to explore an emerging possibility than how to solve a problem.

As a serial practitioner of this philosophy, I’ve taken it further in the processes I’ve created to make big dreams buildable. For example, I like to present dreamers with an activity to visualize their big dream on multiple time horizons: the ten-year “dream come true” version, the pilot program that they could run to test their hunches, and the conversation they can have with someone within a week to make meaningful progress. As they work on their dream, I also encourage them to challenge their own beliefs about dreaming, such as:

Dreaming doesn’t have to be relegated to some far-off fantasy of “if I won the lottery…” You’re capable of creating a buildable version of the big dream by getting creative with the assets you already have within reach. This principle is rooted in Effectuation, a framework for teaching entrepreneurial thinking that starts with “Who am I? What do I know? Who do I know?” to construct imagined ends.

Your dream doesn’t have to be one singular idea that’s set in stone, like creating an app or an AI tool; it’s far more productive to approach dreaming as an exploration of all the possible ways of creating the future you want to see, and testing underlying hunches as you go.

We might tell ourselves that dreaming about the future is irresponsible when there are pressing issues in the present. But in the words of Robin D.G. Kelley, “Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us.”

Like many educators, leaders, and community organizers around them, young people rarely have time or permission to imagine a better future. As such, their big dreams of what school could be are currently unwritten.

That untapped potential may be exactly what we need to truly reimagine and build the plural futures of education that can change the world, from the ground up.

Keaton Wadzinski has developed unique insight into how to dream big and make big dreams “Buildable.” Where most innovation frameworks orient around solving problems in the world as it is, Keaton’s Buildable Dreams framework instead explores emerging possibilities of what the world could be. You can learn more at buildabledreams.com.

Keaton offers strategic planning services to help organizations engage their stakeholders in dreaming big about what’s next, along with project-based consulting to support programs, events, and initiatives. Keaton welcomes new connections and offers a free sample Dreaming session and consultation call for any prospective clients.

In college, Keaton founded a nonprofit in Charlottesville, VA to support the local education innovation ecosystem, including leading an annual 600+ attendee Youth Summit for young people to talk about their passion projects and be inspired by young changemakers. His nonprofit has also led workshops, focus groups, and interviews with 550+ students to hear their perspectives on the future of education for a top 50 XQ Super School finalist application and a 2016 report co-authored by students summarizing insights from focus groups responding to the Virginia Profile of a Graduate.

Keaton has worked in public schools as a Youth Entrepreneur in Residence and Design Project Facilitator, and led collective visioning workshops and immersive “escape room” experiences for school leaders and educators. Keaton has also served for five years as the Learning Experience Manager and Innovation Lead at national education idea incubator 4.0 Schools, where he supported 600+ education entrepreneurs in the early stages of idea development, and codified 4.0’s approach to teaching innovation mindsets.

Keaton can be found on LinkedIn, Substack, and in his upcoming virtual course on Dreaming at the School of Radical Imagination. He welcomes conversations with anyone with whom his message resonates.