Community schools are grounded in the belief that the school belongs to the whole community—students, families, teachers and staff. At the inception of the Community Schooling Journal, our team conceptualized each of the four features to be written from the perspective of key members of the school community. The School Case is created by school faculty, Teacher Scholarship by teachers, Youth Research by students, and Policy ABCs by policymakers or administrators. As reflected in the name, our youth-focused feature was originally conceptualized as focusing specifically on students’ engagement in research. This narrow focus aligned with the experience of our Journal’s original editorial team, and the specific mission and goals of the schools featured in the Journal’s first few issues.
In the subsequent years, as our Journal’s reach has grown alongside our Center’s work as the State-Transformational Assistance Center for the California Community Schools Partnership Program, we have collaborated with various and diverse schools and local education agencies and have recognized that schools engage a myriad of strategies for fostering youth participation. These strategies are informed by the strengths and needs of the students, the capacity of the faculty and staff, the mission and values of the community school, and the resources and constraints provided by the educational systems within which the schools operate. By learning from each of the partner organizations that are featured in our Journal, we have come to recognize that youth research is only one of many practices that community schools utilize to engage youth in a process of co-creating solutions to the challenges their communities face.
As a result, we have decided to change the name of this feature from Youth Research to Youth Voice. In so doing, we aim to acknowledge the diversity of community schooling practices for engaging youth actively in their own education and to more accurately reflect the content of the features created with our partner schools and local education agencies. We remain committed to seeking out stories of youth research as we believe strongly in producing scholarship that demonstrates youth’s capacity to produce knowledge, provide critical insights into the issues faced by young people and offer important perspectives regarding how we can work collectively to solve those issues. Nonetheless, by expanding to Youth Voice, we will be able to provide examples of the possibilities for youth participation in schools or local education agencies wherein youth research may not serve the community’s current needs, or may not be feasible due to capacity or structural barriers, or any number of other reasons. Overall, our goal for this feature has not changed. On the contrary, we see this change as an opportunity to model community schooling in action by being responsive to the specific needs and assets of our community (in this case, our partner schools, LEAs, and readership) while remaining committed to our core values and mission. We look forward to this new iteration of our student-focused feature with optimism and anticipate powerful stories told through Youth Voice(s) in community schools across the nation.
For questions or to provide feedback, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Thank you,
Marisa Saunders, Editor
Lauren Kinnard, Associate Editor