Essential Elements for Promoting Student Voice: An Expanded Framework for Critical Service Learning

Abstract

This critical service learning (CSL) model has youth voice as the cornerstone and places it at the center of the approach. The term youth voice describes a strategy in which young people are authentically engaged in working toward changing the systems that directly affect their lives. Instead of their input remaining at the discussion level, youth conceptualize, research, and develop action plans to make recommendations to policymakers. This places youth in a unique position to advocate for their communities, which provides a real- world opportunity for them to learn components of the change process. Practitioners must create a safe and supportive environment to encourage youth voice. The practice environment, including the culture, structure, and group climate, must be intentionally created and sustained to make youth feel safe and supported enough to raise their voices. The youth’s voices, strengths, talents, actions, and achievements are continuously integrated into the CSL approach and are infused throughout all components of every activity, including brainstorming ideas (community web mapping), research, planning, evaluation, decision- making, advocacy, and reflections. In this model, the community web mapping (Lantieri, 1999) is central to the develop¬ment of the students’ voice. The practitioner facilitates the brainstorming for community web mapping. This activity may span three to five sessions and encourages youth to brainstorm about what they would like to change within their communities (or within their schools). The brainstorming session is youth centered and involves little to no adult redirection. This provides a chance for youth to verbalize their ideas without adult censorship. It allows youth to engage in active construction and integration of problem-solving, decision-making, and conflict resolution and may enable them to explore and confront social injustices on behalf of themselves or others. The literature suggests that when youth have authentic CSL experiences, academic achievement and civic competence increase (Howard, 2006; Kielsmeier, Scales, Roehlkepartain, & Neal, 2004). Youth who have these experiences develop a stronger sense of community, improve their prosocial attitudes and behaviors, and learn powerful lessons through social action.