Beyond Bathroom Passes: A Conversation With Young Adults About Their Earlier Out-of-School-Time Experiences as Co-Designers of the Kentucky Student Voice Team

Comprising approximately 100 self-selected students from across the Commonwealth, the Kentucky Student Voice Team was co-founded in 2012 by a small group of Central Kentucky young people as a program of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, a citizens’ education advocacy organization. The Team spun off in 2021 as an independent youth-led, intergenerationally-sustained nonprofit dedicated to supporting students as research, policy, and storytelling partners in the efforts to co-create more just, democratic Kentucky schools.

‍Because its members cannot possibly represent the full diversity of Kentucky youth themselves, at the heart of everything the Kentucky Student Voice Team does to integrate meaningful student voice into education decision-making is listening to other students. Consistently since its inception, the team has found that peer-facilitated roundtable discussions lower barriers to participation and ensure that the focus of the work revolves around lifting the voices of others, well beyond the members of the Kentucky Student Voice Team themselves.

Those are among the reasons why for this chapter, we chose the roundtable format for our exploration of out-of-school time.

Following are edited excerpts from the transcript of a May 17, 2023 virtual roundtable I facilitated with undergraduates, graduate students, and young professionals. This subset of our larger young adult network answered the call to reconnect and reflect on the long-term impact of their out-of-school high school experiences with the Kentucky Student Voice Team. From developing a sense of self and community to honing college, career, and civic skills and from intergenerational collaboration to the out-of-school-time binary and the value of values-driven work, the conversation touches upon an array of themes.

For some of the participants, the exchange marked the first time in years they had seen each other, and their range of ages meant that they had not all been in high school and working together at the same time. But the opportunity to look back on their experiences co-designing and contributing to our singular vision translated into a near-instant bond, one that also served to fill this facilitator’s cup to the brim.

–Rachel Belin, Roundtable Facilitator and Managing Partner, Kentucky Student Voice Team
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Participants:

‍Meredith Crockett, 23, rising third-year law student at University of Mississippi focusing on civil rights law‍

Pragya Upreti, 19, rising sophomore at University of North Carolina, public policy and journalism major

‍Meghana Kudrimoti, 26, rising OBGYN resident at Yale University

‍Will Powers, 23, rising Harvard Graduate School of Education student focusing on education policy

‍Sanaa Kahloon, 20, rising Harvard junior, biochemistry and women’s studies major

‍Laney Taylor, 24, research assistant at University of Kentucky

‍Emanuelle Sippy, 19, rising junior at Princeton University

‍Andrew Brennen, 27, rising law student at Columbia University, focusing on civil rights law

‍Connor Flick, 19, rising sophomore at Brown University, computational biology major

‍Ari Srivastava, 18, rising sophomore at Pomona College, economics major

‍Michaela Bowman, 25, communications coordinator for the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra

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Voice, Agency, and Community

Andrew: I think that the Kentucky Student Voice Team just felt more real than anything else did. I just remember feeling like I was able to do things or be seen in a way outside the classroom that was kind of taken away when I was inside the classroom. Like, you know, I would be contributing in a substantive way to a policy discussion at this fancy education conference. And then I would go back to high school and have to wait for someone to come back with a bathroom pass so that I could go pee after lunch. And for those of you that know me well, I just have to use the bathroom a lot. And that was a really frustrating aspect of being in school. So I think it was just like the way in which I felt like I was almost treated differently as a human in different spaces and like made me realize how dehumanizing some of the spaces that I was existing in were. And I think I started seeing that difference everywhere in terms of how young people are kind of treated as dumb or incapable. I just started seeing that everywhere.

I think actually being involved with the Kentucky Student Voice Team and at the time, (KSVT’s parent organization), the Prichard Committee, and being part of Kentucky history and Kentucky politics and really trying to be part of a community, I think it just gave me a sense of belonging. And also, it just felt much more real than anything else that I was doing in my extracurricular activities or at school. And I was really looking for that at the time. Cause I think I was kind of getting burnt out or maybe just, kind of tired of some of the things that I was doing in high school at the time. And so this was a nice reprieve to that.

Michaela: [When I was in high school, the Student Voice Team] allowed me to take ownership of my future. Before then I was just kind of in this holding pattern, like going through the motions of being a teenager in Appalachia. I'm originally from Eastern Kentucky. There was a path set out for me, whether it was verbalized or not, it was there. And when my mom introduced me to the Student Voice Team, I was like, oh, this'll be cool. I'll check it out. And then once I started getting more involved, it was like, oh, I can actually like, have a stake in what my future looks like, not only in the commonwealth that I live in, but nationally too. It really set that in motion for me. And I still remember the Powerball Promise, (KSVT’s advocacy campaign which ultimately restored $14 million in previously diverted lottery funding to needs-based college scholarships). Just being able to go to the Capitol building for the first time and physically being there and [feeling] like, oh, this, this is my house. This belongs to me. I should be able to have a say in what goes on here. So that kind of started the path of civic responsibility, civic advocacy, and all that kind of stuff.

Emanuelle: It's so fun to reflect on this with this group because I feel like it comes up almost every day, but I'm [typically] explaining it to people who had very different experiences. I think going off of what Andrew was saying, there could not have been more of a gap between my experience of SVT and being in the world through the team and the confinement and kind of everyday dehumanization of public school in Kentucky. 

I guess one thing that just sticks with me really, it's random, but I just remember sitting in my French class and there being an influx of like a hundred Slack messages in a couple minutes. I'm just trying to read and catch up to what was going on. It was probably in the midst of a legislative session, and in the winter if I remember correctly. But it was that kind of everyday experience of feeling like I could be focused on French grammar, which does not feel applicable to the world, or I could be helping to shift the realities of our state and particularly those who tend not to have a voice in these types of arenas.

I think that if I have to boil that down to a few things, it's about power and it's also about community. In the way that our schools were structured, almost all of our agency was taken from us, whereas through the team we were given opportunity after opportunity and eventually creating opportunities for ourselves and for others to actually feel and lean into and recognize all the ways in which we had power to influence not only our own experience or the experience of people in our county, but the experiences of students across Kentucky and the country.

And then in terms of community, I think high school was often an alienating place if you were different in some way or another. If you cared about politics, if you held identities that weren't the mainstream. And so getting to be in a community where that was actually the norm and not the kind of outlying experience, was really huge. I think that experience shifted and shaped the way I saw my trajectory. If I had just been having the Kentucky High School experience without SVT, I truly don't think I would have been on the path that I am now. And a lot of times at institutions focused on achievement, we're very individualized. And if it wasn't for the experience I had in high school, I wouldn't push back on that and, and think about it as much as I possibly can, what it means to be part of a collective and what the kind of work that I want to do is long term.

Meghana: I strongly agree with what Emmy said about feeling alienated in high school and feeling like I didn't really have a group that I fit in with in high school, but then when I came to SVT meetings I had a bunch of friends and everyone liked that I was a loud brown girl that said what was on her mind and people like loved that about me and I felt so accepted. 

And then [another] thing that I got out of like roundtables and being able to lead those things in eastern Kentucky was developing a sense of love and commitment for Kentucky. Like I don't think that I would have that without Student Voice Team, honestly, because when we went to Barbourville, and we spoke to those students, I saw that they were just like us, but their schools, their textbooks were tearing apart.

Their schools were like, you know, they didn't have the same tools and the same feeling. I didn't have a lot of agency in high school, but I still felt like I had more agency in some ways than people living in Eastern Kentucky. And to see that those students cared about these issues and that they could advocate for themselves and they had things to say and things to write about, that made me feel like, okay, it's not so much about giving a voice to the voiceless as it is, making sure that everybody has a voice at the table and like bridging that gap between Lexington and Appalachia and Eastern Kentucky. It's huge for me. And I even see that today in reproductive rights and also in healthcare disparities as well. Just making sure that people in Eastern Kentucky have access to reproductive healthcare services is something that's gonna be really important in my future career, as an OB GYN. So those are the things that I feel like from high school I've been able to carry with me. And I'm super, super grateful for this group and for everybody on this call that has been a part of this work for so long. And I think that when you empower students, you make really amazing advocate badass adults out of them.

Will:  I think all of that really resonates with me, especially bridging the gap between more urban areas and areas in Eastern Kentucky. Emmy made the point about how SVT was such a good version of a strong community that supported one another and allowed one another to flourish and to learn. And I think most people kind of focus on the process of learning. How do we develop these new skills within an organization, whether it’s public speaking or organizing or outreach or fundraising, whatever they may be with SVT?

And I think I got a lot of that learning, but I think the most important thing for me was the community. And concretely what that looked like. I was probably 15 or 16 when I first engaged with the Student Voice team. I had never met a single person who was openly gay. I had never met somebody who had scored above a 30 on the ACT. And a lot of these things I had never really seen as absences in my life or, or noticed their absence or their presence in my life until I began to meet people who kind of just saw these things as really ordinary in their lives. And that allowed me to not only expand my conceptions of Kentucky and the students that are living within Kentucky and just to, we talk about it all the time, the zip code discrepancy and I guess it was kind of the inverse of what you all were feeling where like, oh my gosh, I'm going to Eastern Kentucky and I'm seeing this great inequity in our schools.

And for me it was like, wow, I'm going to Lexington and I'm going to Louisville and I'm seeing these possibilities that I had no clue existed at, let alone 30 or 45 minutes away from where I'm from. And that was super empowering for me. I know that I would've never left the state to go to college had I not met people from SVT that had left the state. Nobody had left the state to go out of college or go to college from my high school in eight years. So I wasn't exposed to that at home at all. I think it's easy to focus on professional development, professional growth and all these skills that I learned academically, but I think personally it just allowed me to view myself and my fellow students in a much, much different way. Especially in the sense of what is possible and what we can achieve. And I take that with me. In writing my graduate school applications, that was something that I really was reflecting on a lot–just what makes me feel that I can aspire to this place or aspire to this work or these changes. And it definitely stems from the students that I was able to work with and work for at SVT. So that was really big for me.

Meredith: Um, this is so emotional. Oh my goodness. Just hearing all y'all’s stories, this is so lovely. It’s so funny being in a different southern state. People tell me all the time that I talk about Kentucky, like it's an old lover. Like I long for Kentucky, I hope for Kentucky. I have things in my house just to constantly remind me of my home. And I think that's almost entirely because of Student Voice Team and the way that I was able to fall in love with the place that I live. And I think first and foremost the thing that I take away from SVT is, I grew up in a very oppressive religious environment where adults were above me. They knew what's best for me, they decided my future, they decided my everything. I think especially as a woman and an outspoken woman, we are supposed to be really deferential. And when people are like, you're really good at that, we're supposed to be like, no, no, no. 

Laney: So I was the first person in my family to graduate from college and my first semester and really all of high school, I could not understand why school was so hard sometimes, like why x person felt like they were decades ahead of me or why I was looking up instead of laterally when thinking about and just feeling constantly behind because I think Meredith and Will have touched on some beautiful points of what, how culture can shape your academic experience.

And I just remember being at Centre (College), not knowing if I should raise my hand, not knowing if I should go to office hours, like, what were office hours? And to have that light bulb moment that there's a structure of policy around you at all times that shapes your feelings, your behaviors, your trajectory, all of these different pieces of who you are that you can really internalize. To know that there is an external environment that you are existing in. I always kind of chalked it up to like, I'm not good enough, I am not smart enough, I am not inherently in whatever dimension enough, but to know like those barriers or not just a Laney thing. They are systemic, cultural. There are barriers that can be invisible.

I didn't know until I graduated that one in five students at Centre were first gen [like me]. There was no way to know that. But I wonder how much was internalized throughout that entire population of we aren't enough, we will never understand and that's an inherent, we haven't worked hard enough, we haven't done x, y, or z. And the Student Voice Team is just a beautiful reminder and just a complete inflection point in my life of knowing that it's not all internal. It’s just you are part of that integrated policy context. And that's just something I will always take with me.

College, Career, and Civic Skills, Too

Meghana: I really wanna talk about roundtables and the importance of having students lead roundtables because I think that that was one experience that I had that will stick with me forever. There were so many skills and things that I developed out of being able to lead roundtables in eastern Kentucky. I remember when we went to Barbourville, Kentucky. I remember we went all the way down there and we spoke to the students there. That experience for me is something that will stick with me forever. And there's just so many good things that came out of that. 

I don't think that I would be able to do a lot of the advocacy I do around abortion without having the skills that I learned through Student Voice Team, particularly bridging gaps, having difficult conversations, being able to reach across the aisle, hearing diverse perspectives, humanizing and storytelling. The issue is a really big thing that we use in abortion advocacy to destigmatize abortion. I felt like a lot of the work that we did in Student Voice Team back in high school was destigmatizing student voice. Honestly. It was a lot of like bringing young people to the table and you know, 16 year olds can also have a voice. They also have opinions. So kind of like breaking down those like taboos or those barriers was something that we did a lot, and I feel like I've taken a lot of that with me into working specifically in abortion. 

Meredith: [As a lawyer working on affordable housing issues], I think still to this day there's this sense that if you let clients into your heart and into your spirit, that they're taking advantage of you or they are trying to get something out of you. But their stories matter to me and I'm able to receive their stories and feel them for myself in a specific way from doing the roundtables in SVT and obviously as an attorney being able to speak publicly is a huge skill that I was able to learn. [Another thing] I think is just huge is I remember going to these conferences and I didn't know what the word “plenary” meant. I did not know what a salad fork was. I did not have any professionals in my life let alone parents or family members who were academics or a part of this world. And I think going to these conferences and learning to not drink what my neighbors drink or use their fork, as silly as that sounds like, that prepared me to be in spaces in college that I would not have been prepared for if I had just gone straight from high school. So, I think that's what speaks to me.

I think from SVT, I learned what I'm good at, and what I'm really, really good at is working with clients and sitting with people and in particular low income clients. I am by far the most qualified public interest person at my law school. I'm pretty widely recognized for doing, having this very palpable love and care for the people that I'm serving as a student attorney in the clinics that I work in. And it's the thing that people note about me. And it was also the thing that was considered my biggest weakness when I was in high school.

Will: I think there are definitely hard skills that I've gotten down. I think that's probably a universal experience that everyone gets a lot more practice with public speaking with SVT. I remember the first time I think I was with Meredith, we went to Asheville, North Carolina and spoke [to the Appalachian Education and Workforce Network about Ready or Not, KSVT’s book of stories of students struggling to navigate life after high school], and I was so, so nervous. And I remember specifically saying “30 decades” instead of three decades. And I was so appalled that I had said that and like that for me in a previous or in a different learning community, learning environment, that would've killed me. But, I think it speaks to I guess the kind of dynamic that we had going with one another and that even that you, Rachel, had with us as students.

And any time I messed up or fumbled in public speaking, it didn't knock my confidence down. It was such a great environment to have those experiences in that one that I don't think could be replicated within a school. And I think that's important to point out that you don't get the type of experiences to do public speaking where you feel like, okay, I'm not just getting up in front of a class and reading a piece of paper that I've written down for a specific public speaking class. You have purpose and you also have an audience who are there with like-minded goals and team members who are there for the same reason as you and to support you. And I think that's super rare in high schools and very, very rare, especially for public speaking experiences in high school.

Pragya: I didn't know that young people had agency in any of the high level work that we were doing. I didn't know that we would, you know, get handed these opportunities to speak in front of people, organizations that are doing such interesting work, and high level work in this space. And so I think for me it was a total mindset shift to know that like this space really does exist. I don't even think I fully reckoned with it, until we were so far into the work and I was really getting involved with some of the Coping with Covid research we were doing.

Right now I'm working as an undergraduate research assistant at Epic. It's the education policy initiative at Carolina. And the work that we're focused on is surrounding strategic staffing, and we're on the teacher retention side of things, very heavy on education policy. And I think working with that team and reflecting on how things, how much of my perspective and work there has been shaped by SVT makes me realize that spaces like this are so rare. I mean, to know that the intergenerational spaces that we facilitated and cultivated at SVT are the way they are now. And, I'm in college, I'm around so many new people and working in this research space that's also very high level with the Department of Public Policy, so much red tape around it naturally. And even for me to get that job, it took months, even though it's work that I think if I was doing here in Kentucky, it would be so easy to get involved in just because that's just the nature of this work.

We live in a world where everyone has something to say and to criticize and to speak about how things are in the South and oh, well, you know, it's the South and that's why things are the way they are. But there isn't some outside hand that's doing it, it’s us. We are doing this work because we really do love this state and we care about it and we know what it means to change things.

When we were getting involved with the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) stuff and talking about Critical Race Theory and so many other things, this group reminded me that dirty politics is politics that isn't rooted in storytelling and the work that we were doing. And, it's politics that's not talking to people and leaning on their experiences and using that to shape policies. We say we want to democratize our schools, and that's essentially the end goal here.

Sanaa: I feel like for me, school was kind of like the baseline, like you gotta do it, you know, it's the law and then what you do after school is maybe a better indicator of what forms your values or what things you're actually interested in, or at least a space to explore your values and what you're interested in. So I am going into a career that is not related to education policy or public policy or law or anything, but I think that so much of my commitment to serving people in general in any way comes from the things that we all chose to do out of school. 

Choosing to make myself available for the legislative session and to meet with legislators is not like what was helpful to know, how to talk to people is not like directly applicable to the skills I'll need later in life. But the fact that I spent the time to do it, to care about what was going on in my state and to act on that care, I think is probably the most valuable thing I did between the ages of 14 to 18. Lots of things happened in high school and I technically on paper learned a lot and did the exams and passed them and got into a college. But the most valuable thing I learned was that I need to put my energy into things that actually benefit the people around me. And that's something that's not gonna leave anytime soon. It's gonna stick with me for the rest of my life. And I think other people have mentioned that only in doing this work that I really realized how much I loved Kentucky and how much I feel like I owe it and how much I want to come back and give back.

And I don't think I would've gotten to this level of like, oh, this is how committed I am to my state and to my communities had I not had this moment of experiential learning. We talk a lot in school spaces about how you learn by doing, and this is always in the context of like, if you're studying for a chem exam, you should teach your students or like teach your classmates about the concepts and then you'll know them yourselves. But really [at SVT] we just put that in practice by learning public policy and learning politics by just doing it or like learning research by just doing it. And that is like a really important lesson that's also stuck with me in terms of how I approach different problems, at work or at school. Just knowing that I do actually have the tools to just jump in and do it. It's just a matter of really not being afraid, which I learned from the SVT because I was really afraid when I was 14. Now I'm not, which is nice.

Intergenerational Collaboration

Pragya: When I think back to when I joined, which was I think I was at the end of my first year, beginning of my second year in high school, I saw it as a culture shock if I'm gonna be completely honest. I felt so unprepared to get involved in the work that I didn't know at the time I was getting ready to get involved in. I didn't know, we don't refer to adults by titles or anything other than just their first names.

Meghana: I didn't ever really work with adults in a setting that gave me agency or gave me onus over the conversation that was being had or direction in that. I remember facilitating a roundtable of adults and teachers and administrators. I think it was the Kentucky Association of School Boards. And that was so mind boggling to me cuz here I was a 17 year old, and for the first time I felt like wow, adults are really listening to me, appreciating my perspective. One of them gave me a hug after we spoke and I was just like, okay, this is really interesting. These people do have similar perspectives to me or they're willing to listen to mine and I'm willing to hear theirs. And I think as a kind of an angry young person at that point, like post 2016 election, I was furious. That was a great thing to kind of calm that generational rage and also exposed me to what it means to effectively collaborate with people who don't necessarily think or look like me or are my age.

Michaela: I just wanted to chime in on that point real quickly. For my job, I work at the orchestra. Learning how to talk to older people in SVT has directly helped me work in an orchestra because the predominant demographic of our patrons are older, over the age of 50 or older, actually over the age of like 65. They're like a lot of retirees. And so being able to hold a space just in our office and with our patrons where like I can hold a space of respect. Like yes, I'm a young person but I know what I'm talking about, being able to project that to older people, like I would not have learned how to do that if I wasn't in SVT.

Meghana: I just felt great around you, Rachel, and around a lot of the adults that believed in me. Seeing that there was buy-in from people who were older, whereas in high school and in school growing up, I was told, you're too bossy, you're too loud, you need to stay quiet, stay in your seat.

But then to have like adults, people that I looked up to as role models, even older students like Andrew and peers that I worked with, being able to express myself to those people. And then being told like, we want more of you, we want more of that. That was so validating to me as a young brown girl trying to grow up in a state where less than 1% of the population looks like me.

Meredith: Spending time with you, Rachel, I have never, and probably still to this day, never had an adult treat me with such tenderness and kindness and um, I probably in those long car rides to wherever we were going, said the most radical crazy stuff that I said in my life. And you were always so on fire for what we were thinking, what we were feeling, how we were experiencing the world. And I think having an adult not just look at us and say, can you please follow your role, can you please stop? That's too much. Like we were receiving from church and school and other communities in our lives, I think has radically changed the way that I go about my life. And it shapes the way that I try to talk to younger people and the way that I try to mentor people below me.

So I think that just cannot be undervalued.

The Out-of-School-Time Binary

Andrew: I just wanna [push back on] defining myself in terms of the time that I was spending in school versus out of school. It just doesn't feel like an identity that I embraced with any kind of healthiness at least. The things that we're talking about that were “out-of-school time” I was doing in school. Like I was doing them between classes and I was doing them during class and then the idea that my time is somehow divided up between in school and out of school or that like my identity as a person is defined by my time in school or out of school just feels like a very inauthentic frame for how I was spending my time in high school. So I don't know if anyone else is feeling that, but maybe part of the feedback is just really challenging this idea of defining learning opportunities in terms of in school and out of school because it kind of puts those spaces in opposition to one another when many of us have collapsed a lot of the walls there.

Connor: You already know me. I think the big thing that I would really speak to, especially given Andrew's comment, is just the fact that I really saw school spaces as very institutionalized. Out-of-school spaces were very much a space that I could create and a space that I could co-create and co-design with other people and that I very much opted into rather than opting out where[as] in school spaces very much felt like an institution that was kind of placed upon me and that I was thrust into in a lot of ways, that I cannot affect change within. And I feel like that could be something that [could be] said broadly for a lot of this team, especially before they joined this team. KSVT felt like a space that I could determine what occurred, within and I could really take responsibility and be actionable within, beyond just the kind of remote idea of I'm doing assignments for classes and I'm going through these motions and through the set path that someone else has created for me.

And so that sort of contrast I think is what a lot of people kinda get at when we talk about in school versus out of school spaces and in school versus out of school time. And what this team has really broken down those barriers of, when we were in school, we worked actively as part of KSVT to make those spaces our own and to co-design those spaces as education justice partners. Whereas for a lot of students that isn't necessarily the case. And so especially moving forward and kind of figuring out my own values and figuring out what this team has given me and what I've been able to learn, it's really that building of identity and building of those spaces and how those spaces have built me in return and kind of that cyclical idea of that, I think has really determined what out of school time in our school spaces can be at their peak in a lot of ways versus in school spaces, which are, uh, I don't wanna say formalized cuz this isn't the right word, but it's the only one that's coming to mind. It's a lot more institutionalized and not built to be flexible, to be part of the lives of the people that exist within it.

Emanuelle: I think that so much gets lost with the out-of-school framework. We get [into] these school/out-of-school parallels, [and] I think we lose the part of this work that is in the tradition of community organizing and social movements, historically. It wasn't just that this container was a container for us to learn but also that we ended up being able to teach and to share and to organize. 

Connor: I will actually jump in with a secondary thought. I think one of things too, if we're gonna keep pushing back on this framework of out-of-school versus in-school spaces, is the fact that we also need to acknowledge that not out-of-school spaces are KSVT. Not all out-of-school spaces are co-designed in this way for a lot of students when they enter into an out-of-school time kind of space, especially coming straight out and in school. One, there's really no distinction in how they're going about that process. I knew a lot of students that would leave an in-school space and then immediately enter into an out-of-school, quote unquote space that reflected the same kind of institutions and systems that they were experiencing in their in-school space to where it looked functionally the same in a lot of ways and wasn't cultivated towards them and they weren't able to co-design it.

They weren't able to really dictate what was occurring in that space. They were just present. And so being able to consider what our school spaces are broadly and noting how we're kind of the exception to that in a lot of ways for a lot of students. That's something that I think we also need to acknowledge in a lot of ways of what we're talking about when we talk about out of school spaces and how we break down those barriers to begin with. It looks very different for us than it does for a lot of other groups out there. 

Pragya: I'm not sure if I'd want my high school to look like SVT just because, you know, I obviously wish so deeply that we'd be able to create more equitable schools and that's what we're doing every day through this work and the work beyond this space. But I think there's so much value in that out-of-school time that so many of us are fortunate to have and that we continue to make these opportunities a reality for other students in schools across the state that I think there's just so much value in having that as a separate experience from some of the things that we experienced within the classroom.

The Value of Values-Driven Work

Pragya: I think I'll just say that I think the community offers community. I mean that was something that I don't think I felt to the fullest extent within my high school, even though it was, you know, among the biggest and most diverse in this state. [In the work that we did and do], there was so much. Everything was rooted in community, no matter how high level it was, no matter how many policy makers we were talking to or working with or consulting in this work. No matter how much of it was rooted in real work that was going to change so much of what education looks like in this state, it was always rooted in community. And I think at school, I never, for any of the work that I was ever doing, it was always, there was always an institutional power dynamic or hierarchy. That was the priority.

And then after that, everything else came. So, I don't know, I just feel like that's one of the reasons why it makes the space so different because it's work that isn't being done in so many other places. And replicating that is really hard because it's not necessarily the same recipe that we use to create what SVTs become now. You’re starting from somewhere that's really deeply rooted in kind of siphoning out students who are least likely to speak up and say something about the way things are. So I think there's a lot of complexity within that that our team is still exploring today. That's part of the reason why we do the work that we do. But I think it's just important to name that that community is just what existed within this out-of-school  community that we found.

Michaela: SVT for me, a part of it was the community, but also it was questioning the power structures within schools and how we talked about that kind of stuff. And I feel like it’s a lot to ask whether schools can start implementing things in these spaces. I'm like, well, to implement this kind of space in a school would be to implement a space where it's okay to question power structures, which means that that school is okay with a student questioning the principal, the student is okay questioning a school board member. You're kind of like, how do you encourage schools to add this into their curriculum or into their structures when it would directly go against the institution that they have built?

The student does not question what the authority figure is telling you. That's all to say is that through Student Voice Team being able to identify, oh, that's a power structure, like that I can put a name and a concept to what is going on and being able to recognize that now in the work that I do in like arts ed education and especially in like orchestral world of stuff. Because when you look at the history of orchestra, it is predominantly white and wealthy. And we are going through this transition period of trying to basically chop up the base of orchestra and making it more welcome to people. But one of the big things that we talk about is you don't go to somebody and be like, we know what's best. We know how to play the instrument. We're gonna tell you how to play the instrument and that's the only way you can do music. Instead, flipping it on its head and creating a space for people who might not traditionally be musicians. Like you can explore what music means to you. And so taking the power from us and redistributing it to other people in this situation. 

Laney: I think Sanaa articulated it really well. Talking about the value, the exploration of values in extracurriculars and out-of-school work and the different perceptions. Like I'm in Calculus and I am being serious and I am preparing for my future [but] I also did theater. And that's fun. That's nice to have. And the Student Voice team is such a beautiful case study of what inspires you, values-driven work that doesn't have to be put aside in the name of making it or being professional.

And it just has blown my mind that, I don't wanna say that social science research exists because that's very simplistic, but [that] there is research to be done that actually engages with lived experience and you're not in a lab with a pipette and that's the only way that you do research. And I think that's just been a really big thing for me, especially navigating post-grad transitions. I also think that's a really artificial barrier, our professional lives and our real lives, but if we are using that, just knowing that it doesn't have to be this prescribed ladder with these very finite jobs that are very understood. And maybe like when you're four or five, that's what you say you want to be when you grow up. Like to know that there's a way to build a career out of the values that you find and that's not extra, that's essential. I think the Student Voice Team is the first space I realized that that can be done, like you can actually shape your life around those ideals that you find in spaces like these.