Literacy is at the heart of Meaningful Student Involvement. Literacy is more than simply reading; its understanding, interpreting acting on, assessing, and critiquing what’s been read, learned, reported, researched or promoted.

What It Is

For one hundred years, educational thought leaders from John Dewey to Paulo Freire encouraged teachers to consider the depth and breadth of literacy. Today, its widely accepted that everyone in society is affected by their levels of literacy in different areas, including their literacy in school knowledge; consumer consumption; social creation; family implementation; and cultural critical thinking. In schools, students experience varying amounts of true literacy education. Its been shown the amount of comprehensive literacy education are affected by the:

• Political backgrounds of educators and politicians who make decisions for students
• Socio-economic backgrounds of learners
• Cultural influence over students’ families
• and other factors.

According to UNESCO, “for individuals, families, and societies alike, it [literacy] is an instrument of empowerment to improve one’s health, one’s income, and one’s relationship with the world.”

How It Works

Literacy affects every part of every person’s life from the moment they awake to the time they fall asleep, and even the hours in between. Their level of literacy is a humongous determining factor for how comfortable, successful and rewarding those hours are. From the Internet to text messaging; from advertising to packaging; from cultural traits to personal behaviors; from law enforcement to legal jurisdiction, all communication is driven by literacy. Additionally, all politics is driven by literacy and the ability to critically confront power and authority throughout life.

In highly literate communities, there is a constant, healthy and substantial exchange of ideas and debate. Illiteracy can breed exclusion and violence.

Where Meaningful Student Involvement Fits

With its learning cycle and outcomes firmly based in research and practice, Meaningful Student Involvement can provide useful frameworks for teachers to engage student voice beyond simplistic and tokenistic measures. It can help administrators facilitate further inclusion for students throughout the education system. Ultimately, it can reframe discourse around learning, teaching and leadership throughout education.

Rather than being a passive model for educators to simply implement in schools, Meaningful Student Involvement insists on literacy by positioning Student/Adult Partners in critical relationships with each other, with the frameworks, and with each other. The outcomes include highly personalized, high-ownership environments where students and adults co-facilitate each others’ personal growth. Educational literacy is a unique outcome of SoundOut’s frameworks; every school should include this as a goal of every students’ formal educational experience.

Related Articles

• Tools for Teachers
• Tools for Communities

Elsewhere Online

• Meaningful Student Involvement at Riverside Secondary School in Windsor, Ontario

Student empowerment is any attitudinal, structural, and cultural activity, process or outcome where students of any age gain the ability, authority and agency to make decisions and implement changes in their own schools, learning and education, and in the education of other people, including fellow students of any age and adults throughout education. There are countless ways this can happen as well as many potential outcomes, all of which feature learning, teaching and leadership. Student empowerment happens in schools; child empowerment and youth empowerment happen outside of schools. 

How It Happens

Throughout our society, adults act as the apex (top) power holders, using adultism to enforce their power. This is true within schools, too, where adults are ultimately responsible for all activities, outcomes and processes. Student empowerment happens when adults share any amount of that power with students.

There are times when students can attempt to grasp the power of adults without adults sharing it willingly, too. However, these are fleeting because of adults ultimate grasp on power.

Student empowerment generally happens through student authorization and student action. Student authorization, which is part of the Cycle of Engagement, happens when students acquire the knowledge and positions they need in order to affect schools.

What Stops Empowerment

As reflected elsewhere on this site, there are many barriers to school transformation reflecting student empowerment. They include the culture of schools; structures within education; adults throughout the system; and students themselves. There are also many ways to overcome these barriers.

However, one of the barriers to student empowerment is the concept itself: By dispensing their power without discretion or well-informed intentions, well-meaning educators can actually do a moderate-to-severe disservice to students themselves. Placing students on a pedestal, the behind these actions is often that any power is better than no power, and that students are devoid of power within schools right now. However, that’s simply not the case, and learning about student empowerment before taking action can do a lot to improve students’ experiences with this approach.

What many educators are actually striving for is not student empowerment at all, but Meaningful Student Involvement.

Where Meaningful Student Involvement Fits

When student empowerment activities are most effective, they reflect Meaningful Student Involvement. Students’ ideas, knowledge, opinions and experiences in schools and regarding education are actively sought and substantiated by educators, administrators, and other adults within the educational system. Adults’ acknowledgment of students’ ability to improve schools is validated and authorized through deliberate teaching  focused on learning about learning, learning about the education system, learning about student voice and Meaningful Student Involvement, and learning about school improvement.

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• Example: Youth Empowerment Project
• Lesson Plan on Power, Trust and Respect
• Example: National Student Power Convergence

In the summer of 2002, SoundOut presented a series of professional development sessions on Meaningful Student Involvement in Career and Technical Education in a Western Washington school district.

Scott LeDuc, a master teacher/trainer with SoundOut, and myself spent two days with teachers in Spanaway, Washington, covering this powerful integration of new roles for students as partners with lifelong learning and livelihood education.

Here are the descriptions from the district’s professional development catalog. Participants may attend both sessions, but it is not necessary to attend both because they are not sequential.

Engaging Students as Partners in CTE

This session introduced participants to SoundOut’s nationally-recognized “Frameworks for Meaningful Student Involvement.”

Participants explored the main elements, principles, key characteristics, and barriers to engaging students as partners in CTE. Participants used our popular “Strategies for Meaningful Student Involvement” and learn about our evaluation tools.

Throughout the session, participants examined real classroom case studies where students were powerfully engaged through Meaningful Student Involvement to meet 21st century learning goals through CTE. Hands-on and interactive activities, practical exercises, and meaningful examples allowed participants to draw on their own knowledge and experiences to enhance student engagement in their classrooms.

Integrating Student Engagement into CTE

Participants in this session explored the relationship of Meaningful Student Involvement to 21st century learning goals. Focused on SoundOut’s nationally-recognized “Frameworks for Meaningful Student Involvement” and 21st century skills, participants identified how to practically incorporate these skills into existing classroom approaches.

The session were very interactive, emphasizing classroom applications and shared knowledge. With Meaningful Student Involvement as a recognized high-quality standard in schools across the US and Canada, participants explored how to infuse practical standards into their classroom design and implementation.

By the end of this session, participants gained new abilities focused on teaching 21st Century Skills, discovered new avenues to promote positive, powerful student behavior, and learned effective ways to integrate feedback from students into classroom activities. They also began focused planning to apply this new knowledge.

As SoundOut moves further into CTE, we learned a great deal from these workshops. Scott’s experience as a CTE teacher for over a decade matched a passionately commitment to move the field forward. These workshops built on past CTE and STEM-related work we have done, including working in the fields of technology education, student leadership organizations, and others.

SoundOut has always been about real world and real life skills, and we look forward to connecting schools to the tools and training they need to bring students on board as partners in this field.

Related Content

• Issues Affected by Meaningful Student Involvement
• Meaningful Student Involvement Handbook