Student voice and school change: Why not ask the kids what they think?

Vanessa: 00:00

Hello, and welcome to ChangEd, a podcast that lifts the curtain on educational change and brings you into the room with the people doing it. My name is Vanessa, and joining me in the studio are Joe,

Joe: 00:10

Hello.

Vanessa: 00:11

Aron,

Aron: 00:11

Hey!

Vanessa: 00:12

And introducing Dr. Lynn Butler-Kisber.

Lynn: 00:15

I'm Lynn Butler-Kisber, and I'm a full professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, and I've been here for quite a few decades. Prior to that, I started an elementary school and taught there for four years, so I have a little bit of history in the teaching in public schools and a lot of history here at McGill. My research focuses on multiliteracies, qualitative research, particularly arts based research, and leadership.

Vanessa: 00:50

We're all here today to talk about student voice and how especially that's related to NEXTschool and why it's important. So, to jump right into the first question guiding this episode. 01:00 Question one. What is student voice?

Aron: 01:03

Well, it's certainly not our voices.

Joe: 01:05

Well, wait a second. It depends upon how you define student.

Aron: 01:08

Like, because we're lifelong learners?

Joe: 01:10

Yes.

Lynn: 01:10

And we're all students of life, so we could all be considered students.

Aron: 01:14

It's true. And I guess I just brought it up to remind ourselves that in this conversation about student voice, we are the people trying to elicit, uh, student voice from, uh, research participants, but sometimes in research, uh, the adults in the room, quote unquote, or the, uh, the researchers sometimes speak for students. So, I think it's important that we keep that in mind as we have this conversation today.

Joe: 01:34

We can also remind ourselves that Aron did get his PhD, so now no longer is technically a student. We should call him Dr. Aron.

Vanessa: 01:40

Dr. Aron.

Aron: 01:42

Although I heard that in Québec, you can't call PhD people doctor, it's against the law.

Vanessa: 01:46

You call them fffd.

Aron: 01:47

Yeah, fffd.

Vanessa: 01:52

But still, we have not actually said what student voice is, so I'm going to pass the mic to you, Joe, because you...

Joe: 01:57

I wrote the book on it?

Vanessa: 01:58

Because you wrote the book, that's right.

Joe: 02:00

So very technically, being a student is a role that an individual takes on, it's an identity. So, student voice means that you're working with anybody who is in the positionality or the role of a student. This usually means that they are people between the ages of six to 21. But oftentimes when we talk about student voice, we implicitly mean primary school students and secondary school students. However, it is important to recognize that the reason that student voice is so important and the way that we engage with students for educational research is that they have a perspective that is unique because they are in the positionality and the role of student. And so even if a student is 65 years old because they're enrolled in some kind of continuing education, their perspective as student is the core foundation of what it means to do student voice research. And so it's that positionality and that perspective of the experience of being a student that we talk about when we talk about including the perspectives of students. So anybody in that role is a member of that identity group.

Aron: 03:04

When I think of the best way to elicit student feedback or student perspectives, it's actually like a balancing act between the teacher or researcher and the student.

Joe: 03:12

Right. And I think that's a key point of being a student, even if, you know, if you're six years old or if you're 18 years old or if you're, you know, 35 years old. A key part of being a student is that the epistemological gap between who you are as a student and the people who are making the decisions usually are people who are considered administrators or teachers or professors or whatever. There's an epistemological gap between what it means to be a student versus what it means to be a person in charge.

Vanessa: 03:37

Let's explain epistemological gap to our listeners.

Joe: 03:41

Okay, we can do that. So, epistemology, if you want to break it down in terms of etymology, 'ology' is study of. ‘Episteme’, which is the first part, is knowledge. So, the study of knowledge and what it means to know.

Vanessa: 03:54

So, when we're talking about the epistemological gap between students and those in positions of power, it's that there's a gap between what students know and what...

Aron: 04:03

Teachers, or researchers,

Vanessa: 04:04

...teachers...

Aron: 04:04

Admin,

Vanessa: 04:04

Yeah, what they know.

Joe: 04:06

Exactly.

Lynn: 04:06

And how they know. It's the ways in which they know, which are often very different and not recognized. That's another aspect of student voice, is how they portray things in terms of their work, and how teachers allow or do not allow that to happen.

Aron: 04:23

Yeah, I think that brings up the idea that student voice isn't always voice. Like, you can have a non-verbal student whose voice, quote unquote, is also really important to include. So voice, in this context, I think means, their standpoint, their perspective, how they're coming to understand a situation.

Joe: 04:38

Yep. And I think that's a really, really important point, both of those points, because how students come to know is really at the core of what we're trying to do when we engage in education. But oftentimes how they come to know is not understood or recognized or considered when people are making decisions.

Vanessa: 04:54

And people making decisions assume they know how kids know.

Lynn: 04:59

And they make about 100 million decisions every day about that.

Vanessa: 05:02

Yep.

Aron: 05:03

And the assumptions that teachers and, and admin make about students, uh, a lot of times because they've worked with students for their whole careers, they feel like, okay, I'm making an assumption based on student voice. But from some of the activities we've done as part of our research, we've found that teachers and admin can be quite surprised when you elicit student voice and share it back to them.

Lynn: 05:21

And it's often relegated, if it's included, to the teen years, not to the young years. And young students can be very, very... uh, big contributors to helping us understand how they feel, how they're engaged, how they work. And I have actually have an example of that.

05:40 I was studying, uh, collaboration, pure collaboration in a split grade one and two class. They worked together under the guidance of the teacher, but they did a lot. And this one day, It was a different situation, and I had a video camera going, and, uh, they were doing a mural on a large, um, sheet of that brown paper that you roll out. And, uh, I noticed something peculiar, and it was that one student was at the top, positioned at the top of the paper, if you were putting it on a wall at the top. The others in the group, and it was a large group, it was probably about, eight, nine students, were on the other side, and my video camera sound didn't work. So, when I got to this, I said, this isn't what I usually see, and what's going on here? And the teacher, she didn't know either. We couldn't guess. So, we took a few students aside, played the video, and said, what's going on here? And one person just shouted out, Lisa's trying to be the boss, referring to the person at the top of the page. And then the discussion, uh, went on and said, and we don't like it when someone tries to be the boss. And so when asked, well, what's a good number of people work, to work together, they said three or four. So, that was a, such an eye opener into their insights, what was going on there, that I never would have had any possibility of knowing except that I invited them to tell me and they were very, very able to do so in a very interesting way.

Vanessa: 07:18

Mm hmm.

Aron: 07:19

I love how simple that is. How do you elicit student voice? You ask them.

Vanessa: 07:28

Question two. What are some of the ways researchers and practitioners conceptualize or think about student voice work?

Joe: 07:35

Well, I can only speak for some of the practitioners that I know, but a colleague of mine, Marc Brasof and I have been working on a student voice research framework along with Vanessa and Ellen and other folks who contributed to the book about how to conceptualize the principles of practice and the principles of research and the principles of epistemology of student voice research. So we have four major principles. One is a shared understanding or intersubjectivity, which means mutual understanding. Because it's important for students to know as well as the adults to understand what's going on in each of the worlds. Because there are some things that students may want that aren't possible. And if they understand the context of why it's not possible, then they won't be upset about it because they understand that it's not possible. Equally so, adults often don't understand students or children. And so, if we can build mutual understanding, then we will be better able to make those thousands of decisions that Lynn mentioned on a day-to-day basis that's actually informed by empirical and relevant information.

09:13 In order to get there, there are three things that need to happen. One is to understand the context and contextualize the research methods and the research approaches to the students’ realities. You can do that a variety of ways. You can do interviews, focus groups, you can do activities, arts-based projects are great, you can do project-oriented activities, photovoice, photo-queued interviewing, to build this mutual understanding. In order to get there, and this is what we were talking about, you need to understand the power dynamics at play because students often will, if they don't feel like they're in a space where they can really speak their mind, they will fall into a mode of performativity. So, they'll say what they think the adults want to hear rather than actually saying what's on their mind. Or they'll just not say anything. Or they'll be goofy, you know, that's, those are all very common responses to unbalanced power dynamics when you don't feel like your voice is going to be heard or taken seriously.

Vanessa: 09:42

You don't take it seriously.

Joe: 09:43

You don't take it seriously. But if you understand that your voice is going to be taken seriously and really heard, then students really can engage in, in the deep work of trying to understand what it is that they're experiencing and what that means to them and what that means for their educational practices and processes.

Vanessa: 09:59

And to just paraphrase, part of doing that requires a deep sensitivity to the context in order to build mutual understandings that respect power dynamics.

Joe: 10:08

Yes. So, you have the four principles of student voice research. So, the first one is understanding those relational dynamics through power analysis. So, understanding how to balance the power dynamics to build that kind of relationship that is full of trust, that is full of, uh, the ability to take risks, uh, full of being able to be authentic and honest.

10:30 Then there's also understanding the context. So different kinds of art, for example, if we're going to use the example of art, will be more relevant to some students than others. And it's going to be important to understand that you're not, you know, if you try to say, okay, we're going to create art projects that are going to be displayed to everybody, then you will create this high likelihood that students are going to want to perform in some way. Instead of contextualizing what you want to gain in terms of knowledge or collaborative knowledge, or the key principle which is the ultimate goal of student voice, which is mutual understanding or intersubjectivity.

11:03 In order to get there and now we're talking about the people who are engaging in the research as well as the students but it's harder to do this work with students in terms of their own reflexivity if you're not being reflexive yourself. So let's talk, I'm talking more towards the researcher oriented more kind of researcher role identity people when I say that reflexivity is the other principle that is essential for student voice research because people need to be reflexive in order to understand how to contextualize and how to build those relationships.

Vanessa: 11:34

What is reflexivity?

Joe: 11:36

Another important question for definitions. So, people talk about like reflection, which is more like looking at yourself in the mirror, right? And you see yourself in the mirror. That's a reflection. Reflexivity adds a layer of analysis to that of self-awareness analysis of what are my values here? What are my goals? What are my assumptions? What are my biases? What are... asking these kind of reflexive questions adds a layer of not just, like, who am I in terms of reflection, but reflecting what is inside of me and how does that impact and influence the way I make decisions in the world and how I relate to people and how people relate to me.

Aron: 12:11

I don't know if this is accurate, but I always think of reflexes. When I think of thinking reflexively, I think of being more... responsive than just reactive. So, you're thinking about your reflexes and thinking, oh, where did that come from? How does my relation to the other people in this room impact how I'm acting? So it's, uh, I loved your analogy about the mirror. Cause it's not about just like, what do you see, but it's about how am I operating in this context and how it is, how does the awareness of that, how might that allow me to be a more responsible researcher?

Joe: 12:38

Exactly. So how do I interpret information? You know, what in my past may have primed me to interpret somebody's head nod as a yes versus as a no. Um, you know, these kinds of things are reflexive questions.

Lynn: 12:50

Really, really important to be documented on a regular basis. Always documenting questions and assumptions as the research proceeds early on and walk around it from different aspects to probe it more deeply. I think it's a critical aspect of qualitative research.

Vanessa: 13:10

We've been talking about these four pillars of doing research with students, but I don't think reflexivity is exclusive to researchers and can be extended to anybody.

Joe: 13:19

Yes, that is absolutely the case. For student voice research specifically, there are certain reflexive questions that are necessary because of the unique positionalities and roles of students and researchers. For example, what were my experiences as a student? And how does that inform what I think about students, like the roles and responsibilities of students? What was my experience of schooling? And how does that assumption, based on my experience of schooling, impact how I think schools should be? What are my values about the importance and value of students in the school? And this may or may not be relevant to somebody who's being reflexive about, for example, a sociological study on how people experience a museum in their 80s. All of those kinds of questions are really important to think about when we engage in student voice research, because if, for example, one's assumptions about students are that they basically just want to have fun, push the boundaries, and not be in school, that's going to determine how you interact with students and that may or may not be true about the specific students that you're working with. And so when you start to think about what your assumptions are, you know, if you liked school and you thought that sitting at a desk and doing a worksheet was a fun thing, that's going to affect how you think about what you're going to do in terms of the activities you do with students. So that level of reflexivity specifically designed for student voice research is really, really important because students are not a monolith, as, uh, people want to say for varieties of groups. And thinking through, how do we get out of our own assumptions so that we can actually engage with students to change the power dynamics is essential.

Vanessa: 15:00

It's all interconnected. There's lots of layers. Um, and those are kind of the four pillars of research with youth. Intersubjectivity, which is mutual understanding, reflexivity, power dynamics, and sensitivity to context.

15:17 Question three. What does student voice look like? We've kind of hinted at this. And also, what are some ways students can be involved in decision making processes, specifically in the context of school change?

Lynn: 15:30

Well, I think through various forms of art, multi-modal kinds of portrayals is a very good way to get involved. I mean, in Next School, you've done a photo voice. There are lots of other things that can be done, and I think choosing various things that maybe all the voices take part in, but they're varied so that you ,you know, manage to engage some more than others at certain times, but you always have all the voices. So you can do any kind. Drama is fabulous. You know, any kind of visual artwork. Poetry, that's done orally especially, um, it really allows for variety, different perspectives coming together, and as exercises. One of the things that, are done with people sitting around the table here is River of Life to get your orientation to where, how you got to research in the first place. And this can be repeated in a classroom with students, their school, et cetera. And then maybe using another way of looking at that, another, um, multi modal approach, like doing a concept map of that, and then maybe doing a collage of that so that you get. The various modalities contributing additional information to the common understanding of what's being learned.

Vanessa: 16:54

I think it might be helpful to explain the River of Life. I think it's a great reflexive activity. Would you mind?

Lynn: 16:59

I don't mind at all. I did not invent it. I adapted it and started using it in my classes, both undergraduate and graduate. In the graduate research courses, uh, it's about how did you get here in your PhD, at this moment. And don't look when you decided to pursue a PhD. Go back in life, go back as long as you can, and plot these pivotal moments on your river. And then let's see what it says. And it's very, very interesting, because there are always things that people, the narrative that they have about how they got there, but then when they plot it, they realize there are other influences that have a big impact on what they're doing at the current moment. And that changes. Identity always changes. It's fluid. But it, it's a good way of saying, I didn't just decide willy-nilly to be a PhD student, I, I actually have some inkling of how the influencers, events, or people in my life drove me in that direction.

Vanessa: 18:06

So, if you wanna do that at home, take out a piece of paper and some markers or pencils, whatever you got, draw a little river or a line, whatever suits you, and then mark out some pivotal moments in your life that led you to wherever you are now.

Aron: 18:19

You may wonder why on a podcast about student voice, we're talking about the researcher or the teacher's life story, and I think that. Uh, personally, when I think about how my research journey has gone, I, you can't ignore the way that you're, as a researcher, how you have come to the research. And I think too often we try to be like, quote unquote, objective and be like, Hey, we're going to get student voice without any of the guiding input of our own life or experiences. But this focus on reflexivity is an important point to acknowledge because if you ignore that you're actually going to probably be more inclined to include some of your own biases like by acknowledging your own journey, you're actually able to, uh, I think, honor the students voices more authentically.

Lynn: 19:02

Another thing that I wonder about is, how do we get, in a research context, uh, access to student voice incorporated in a more participatory form of research that really does give them Uh, a piece of what's being done. And I feel that most of the studies that one reads about, where voice is incorporated, is kind of thought through by the, the researcher, because you have to have a proposal, et cetera. And so, the students aren't there in the design process. It's presupposed, even like photovoice, there's a, a way to do it, and you... Give the, the voice to the students with through the cameras, but it's, if you take a step back, they're still not full participants. And if you take a step forward, they're not full participants in the dissemination of work. So, I think we have to broaden the parameters of how we include student voice from the inception to the conclusion.

Vanessa: 20:08

I completely agree with you. And something that I found within the literature review that I did on leadership and student voice within school change contexts is that even the way we conceptualize students as leaders within most writing doesn't think about them or position them as leaders. When you think about leadership, you think of administrators, parents, teachers, adults. The framing of leadership in general does not position students as leaders, and that's what I hope to do within my work.

Joe: 20:39

Yes, and not to make a shameless plug for the book, but the book does cover some of that, and how do we engage with students in a position of emergent leadership, rather than having researchers design whatever they want to do and then try to sell it to students. And one of the ways to do that is to engage in community meetings where there are a few questions and, uh, students have the opportunity to raise their own questions and then do some research on their own questions and then bring some of that research to the group and then come up with a decision to further that research or, uh, try something else.

Vanessa: 21:18

Question four. Within the particular context of school change, which is what this podcast is all about, why should we be involving students in change? And why might this be important?

Lynn: 21:29

Change will never be authentic if you don't have the voices of students who are part of that change involved.

Vanessa: 21:35

Yeah, I mean if you think about it they are the largest consumer of the service of education and they have their finger on the pulse of what's going on in schools in a way that nobody else does without that positionality or identity of being a student. So not consulting or seeking students input and involvement in change processes seems like a gap.

Aron: 21:55

I mean some would argue that they're the only consumer, that teachers and administrators and researchers are trying to support students. So yeah, it's definitely a big gap if we don't include their perspectives.

Joe: 22:06

If we're gonna do student voice in an authentic way, we need to think about students as participants because that uh, allows us to understand that as participants, they're going to be the most directly influenced by varieties of participation beyond themselves. And because they are the essential focus of the educative process, they should be active participants if we want them to be active participants in their lives. One of the interesting things about education is that there are things that adults need to pass on to youth and to students, or experts need to pass on to non-experts or emerging experts. Part of education that is essential is not just that students have all the answers, it's that both together have more answers than one or the other.

22:56 One of the classic assumptions that happens in student voice research is that students are always right and the adults are always wrong. And that's not the case. Both groups can be right and both groups can be wrong. But in the process of discussing and questioning and having equitable power dynamics so that the questions can come out so that the perspectives that aren't usually heard that can actually transform or change a school can actually come out.

That's what needs to happen. The facilitation of that process and student voice research.

Lynn: 23:24

Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Joe. And also, I think that we think so much in binary terms and if we could step back as Gregory Bateson has written about years ago, if you step back from two binary positions and go wider, you see connections, and we don't tend to do that. It's either you're in or you're out or whatever, and so it's to interrogate the binary perception that we have about learning and researching and identity.

Vanessa: 24:02

Question five. What are some of the ethical considerations when engaging in student voice work?

Aron: 24:08

Ethics.

Vanessa: 24:08

Ethics. Why are they important in general?

Joe: 24:12

What are ethics?

Vanessa: 24:13

Do we have them?

Joe: 24:13

How do you define ethics?

Lynn: 24:15

Ethics is the way we value what we believe in and practice it. In research, ethics depends on research ethics boards, which is really a very small portion of ethical stance in research. Ethics is an ongoing negotiation throughout the research process. It's not just the one... stance thing that happens and it's to renegotiate and have what a lot of indigenous scholars would call relational ethics that values that relationship more than anything else.

Joe: 24:53

And I want to highlight something you said, Lynn, I think is really, really important. The ethics board, the REB, is a legalistic framework for ethics. It's explicitly not a relational framework for ethics. And when you're constantly negotiating and making sure that everybody is okay, which is part of the kind of baseline of a relational framework for ethics, it can go against sometimes what the legalistic framework for ethics means because the power dynamic of legalistic frameworks is that there are binaries, like this is right and this is wrong.

Lynn: 25:22

Binaries.

Joe: 25:23

Binaries. Very difficult to work with binaries because they don't encompass the entirety of reality and in fact erase a lot of it. There are often, very often, almost always, going to be tensions between ethics as is practiced in humanity and ethics as is practiced within this ethics board, which can lead to unethical behaviors for the ethics board or for the practices that you're engaging in, which is why it shouldn't be in a binary because you need to be thoughtful about that. And ethics boards should hopefully be thoughtful about that as well.

Vanessa: 25:57

I think it might be helpful for our listeners to understand a little bit more about why research ethics boards exist. So how about a quick kind of overview of why it's there and why it's important?

Joe: 26:09

Okay, so back in the day, there were people that would poke other people with pointy sticks, and that wasn't very nice. And sometimes they'd poke them with pointy sticks, and they would have diseases in them without the people knowing, and that was a big problem. And so all of a sudden people realized, oh wait, we should not do things to people without them knowing about what's going on with them, and we should not hurt them consciously. And if you're going to do something that could potentially hurt somebody, you need to have very rigorous, legalistic... safeguards to make sure that that doesn't happen because there were cases where, very literally, people poked other people with pointy sticks and put diseases in them and then did not treat them once a treatment came out and people died because of it and that was wrong.

Vanessa: 26:50

And this is particularly important in research that is with and about humans.

Joe: 26:54

Yes.

Aron: 26:55

Especially vulnerable groups like young people.

Lynn: 26:58

Yes.

Joe: 26:58

Yes. And there was another experiment in which they, uh, a person psychologically damaged a bunch of people in an educational setting because of putting them in very extreme situations. There's the Stanford Prison Experiment, which is another one that's a case. And then there's the Tuskegee experiments.

Aron: 27:15

Right, that's the stick poking one.

Joe: 27:17

Yes, that's the stick poking one.

Vanessa: 27:18

So, that is why ethics are important and why we have them.

Joe: 27:22

Because people are jerks.

Vanessa: 27:25

Anything else we want to add about ethics?

Aron: 27:27

The ethics boards are around for legal reasons to protect the university from lawsuits.

Lynn: 27:31

Absolutely.

Aron: 27:32

And I think that's something we have to keep in mind as researchers, because our concerns ethically probably aren't about the, whether our university will be sued. Our concerns are whether our participants will be supported. And so that's why we have to go beyond just the ethics board to think about ethics with a lowercase ‘e’.

Lynn: 27:47

Ethics boards and the Tri Council of Canada, which upgrades the ethics standards on an ongoing basis, uh, they're established to protect people. You have to have consent. And, you know, then, how do you get true consent is the other thing. Not everybody understands consent the same way, so it's a complicated area. It is a bit frustrating at times for people, but I think, uh, bottom line for the extreme cases that could occur and also to protect the university, which can understand it's important that it's there.

Vanessa: 28:19

Yeah. And particularly with research with youth is, um, like we were talking about with those four different pillars, having an understanding of the power differentials and making sure that kids are protected from extractive practices or from practices they don't understand or being misled in any sort of capacity is really important. The power of the context. Like we said, intersubjectivity, making sure there's mutual understandings and relationship building so that kids are not used.

Joe: 28:45

And part of those reflexive questions are like, to what end is this research being taken place and for whom? And if that can't be answered for the people who are involved, then it's probably an iffy proposition. If it's to your, for yourself, for your own career at the expense of others. I mean, it can be at your, for your own career with in, in collaboration with others, but there are questions about, like, how do we engage in research and why are we engaging in research, which are fundamentally ethical questions, and that has a lot to do with reflexivity. I think that one of the things that we should think about is that educationalists, people who study education, are very concerned with ethics generally, I think, in general. Not everybody, because we're not all monolith either. But I think that there is a real thoughtfulness about what it means to do good work well, and what it means to engage with people who are interested in changing schools for the better. And, of course, there are different degrees. It's not, you know, we were talking about binaries. There are degrees of good, and there are degrees of effectiveness, and it's not either or. And I think that one of the things that student voice research done well can be really helpful for when we think about these principles of power dynamics and relational ethics and intersubjectivity and contextualizing the research process and reflexivity in particular is that we can have, we have ethical considerations running throughout all of those and it's important to be thoughtful in every step that you take and every way you engage with people that you're uh, engaging in a, in a good way.

Aron: 30:22

It's so important to acknowledge that as researchers, especially when we have these, like, we have to write a grant proposal that explains what we're going to do before we've actually…

Vanessa: 30:30

Exactly!

Aron: 30:31

…met with the students, or we have a time frame that isn't realistic. Like, I think when we want to do authentic student voice work, we actually have to start with the students, and that's...In the structures of university life, that's really difficult. It doesn't really, um, like if you want to submit an ethics application to work with young people, it's quite a high bar of what you need to prove. And if you're going to say, oh, I'm going to just work with them to figure it out, the ethics, uh, officer will say, no, you need to tell me what you're going to do before I can give you the ethics. But you're like, no, but I need to work with the students before I can tell you what I'm going to do…

Lynn: 30:59

Yes. We get stymied because you can't get the voices in when you want them, but I think we could be a little bit creative without being unethical in terms of REB people by working with students not in a research capacity to get to know them and build trust and then opening it up into the research world where you have to have the ethics in place.

Joe: 31:23

I want to add one point about student voice research, because I think it's important, mostly for the listeners, because there's a, there's an assumption that student voice research has to be starting from the students. There's no one right way to do student voice research. There are right ways, there are multiple right ways, and there are ways that can not be effective. When we want to start with students, we get much more effective and agential and engaged student voice research. However, there are some questions at times that you may want students voices in issues of practice or issues of policy that could be like, Hey, this is happening. We want to engage with students. We need to engage with students. The students may not even know that this policy exists, but it may be impacting their lives. So sometimes there are contexts when that is important to recognize that you know, something as simple as a survey with students can count as student voice research for specific instances, but not all instances. But it is important just in terms of like, I don't want listeners to think, Oh, I guess I can't do student voice research because I'd have to start with students. I want to make sure people understand that you can still take the kind of principles we talked about and the questions that people might have and engage with students. There's a spectrum of engagement. And that'll depend upon the question.

Vanessa: 32:35

Seeking student involvement and their ideas about change is one of the cornerstones of NEXTschool, and we're really excited to see about what happens with that in the future. So, thank you very much for joining today, and I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Aron: 32:52

Thanks, Vanessa.

Lynn: 32:53

Thank you.

Joe: 32:54

Thank you.

Vanessa: 32:56

Those were the not so fast five questions for today’s podcast on student voice. We’ve reached the halfway point of this season of ChangEd and we’re going to shake up our regular programming with a special episode featuring some of the team members you’ve heard from so far. See you next time and thanks for listening!

Vanessa: 33:13

Tune in to ChangEd every third Friday of the month for more content on educational change. You've been listening to ChangEd. My name is Vanessa Gold and I'm your host. I'm a PhD candidate and part of a research team at McGill University interested in educational change. Each of us brings diverse experiences and expertise to an ongoing investigation of this topic within a current school change initiative being piloted in Quebec called NEXTschool. You can find more information about this initiative and the work our research team has done on our website at www.nextschoolquebec.com. Part of our goal in producing this podcast is to share what we're doing and involve you, our listeners in the research process, speaking with members of our team, other academics, experts, and practitioners amongst others, each episode explores one of many complex facets of educational change. You can expect topics like how to lead change, getting past inertia, the politics of change, and people's lived experiences of school change as it happens all within, but not exclusive to the NEXTschool context.

Spearheading the initiative is Noel Burke. Dr. Lisa Starr is the principal investigator of McGill's Research Team and Dr. Joseph Levitan, Dr. Lynn Butler-Kisber, and Dr. Bronwyn Low are co-investigators. Five graduate students round out the research team, including myself, Ellen MacCannell, Aron Rosenberg, Anna Villalta, and Natalie Malka. You'll be hearing from all of us as we explore the tricky and important work of making schools better for everyone.

This podcast and our research about NEXTschool is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. ChangEd is produced by Vanessa Gold. Music is by Neal Read. He's at nealread.ca. A transcript of today's podcast, citations and additional information are on our website, www.nextschoolquebec.com. Thanks for tuning in. We're looking forward to engaging with you.