Books
Transformative Student Voice
Partnering with Young People for Equitable School Improvement
In Transformative Student Voice, Shelley Zion, Ben Kirshner, and Carlos P. Hipolito-Delgado introduce readers to Transformative Student Voice (TSV), a framework that promotes student agency and activism through youth-adult partnerships, with tangible outcomes for school improvement. Grounded in fifteen years' research on youth voice in school reform in urban, suburban, and rural schools and districts, this revelatory work illustrates the benefits of the TSV framework as a strategy for both student development and systems change. Zion, Kirshner, and Hipolito-Delgado advocate this student-led, bottom-up approach as a means of raising critical consciousness, encouraging civic inquiry, and promoting engagement in school and community reform efforts. Each chapter showcases a specific, real-world application of TSV, identifies possible tensions, and provides evidence of the framework’s effectiveness. Together, they explore how TSV can be implemented at the district level as well as in classrooms and curricula and in extracurricular settings such as afterschool clubs and summer programming in a way that prepares students to claim their power by identifying problems, proposing solutions, and driving change. This book gives school leaders, administrators, and other stakeholders a host of conceptual and practical tools for making student voice a core feature of decision-making and equity-focused transformation.
Transformative Student Voice for Teachers
​A Guide to Classroom Action
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.
