Getting to “Real-Real” – Youth-Adult Partnerships for Empowerment and Impact
In 2017, when the idea of the Burlington City & Lake Semester [BCL] was first evolving, the program’s founders crafted a mission statement: To empower young people as citizens, students, and community members through authentic, collaborative real-world learning experiences in and around the city of Burlington. For years, this has been our north star. The heart of any mission statement, of course, is its predicate. Verbs embody action; they clarify what is happening. But in our case, we chose a doozy of a verb. What does it mean to empower young people?
Whether it is through student-led meetings, inquiry projects, or collaboration with community partners, the goal is to create the conditions for young adults to have their voices heard, and to be taken seriously. This requires a variety of ongoing investments: context-building, so that students feel informed and ready; trust-building, so that students feel ready to take risks; and community-building, so that students can engage in authentic relationships with adult professionals.
After visiting a local park with city planners, students reimagined and redesigned the space.
Many teachers strive to make learning relevant, but in a traditional classroom setting, the system erects an invisible ceiling. It can be hard to discern, but it’s there. Years ago, I remember walking down a high school hallway with a former colleague, Nadya, listening to the sounds emanating from classrooms. We were curious if we would hear the voices of teachers, or the voices of learners. Without a doubt, the most vibrant classes were ones in which students were evaluating, synthesizing, or debating. Energy poured out of these rooms. But although these are high-level skills, Nadya didn’t miss a beat, noting that even though students were active, the teacher remained the architect, as well as the sole audience. Students may have crafted a proposal, but it was still a simulation. They may have grappled with a genuine case-study, but the only people who heard their analysis were their classmates and their teacher. Nadya summed it up by channeling the thinking of Dennis Littky: “There’s a difference between real-real and ‘fake-real.’”
How can teachers get closer to “real-real?” One high-leverage approach is to create space for students to help solve bona fide, real-world problems. These problems are everywhere. They exist in every region, every city, every town, and every neighborhood. The world is full to the brim with issues that would benefit from a new set of eyes, and an infusion of energy. Anything that is contested is fair game. Wherever people disagree about the solution–or even about the problem itself–is the perfect place to lean in. Even if the path is clear, and an issue seems to lack controversy, it’s still nearly always missing youth perspectives. Offering this insight to decision-makers is always a win-win: students get to break the invisible ceiling and experience something truly “real-real,” and the future is informed by their unique wisdom.
Students at City Hall, consulting on the city’s Equity Report
It’s not hard to find a real-world problem that needs attention. The trick is how to approach this problem in a way that is empowering to learners, and mutually beneficial to all stakeholders and collaborators. Often, well-meaning adults end up unintentionally tokenizing young people. Countless times, students have been invited to a board meeting or a public forum, even though the culture in the room remains firmly adult-professional. The younger participants listen and do their best to engage, and then a moment arrives when a beneficent grownup turns and says “What do you think about all of this?” The room goes silent. Heads swivel. The student awkwardly shares a response, and the adults in the room are immediately sated, confident that they’ve checked the box. The intentions may have been good, but without leveling the playing field or meeting young people where they are at, a moment like this one ends up codifying the adults’ role as gatekeepers.
Having students felt heard requires creating the conditions for deep listening.
For years, research, essays, and popular publications have promoted the idea of “amplifying youth voice,” but merely turning up the dial doesn’t ensure that anyone is listening. To do that, teachers and learners need to build deliberate relationships with community members. Interestingly, it often takes just as much time to onboard these partners as it does to build context for students. This may feel tedious, but it’s worth the effort. When both groups arrive ready to get to work, we have set the table for something far more powerful than merely merely “amplifying youth voice.” Young people are heard precisely because we have helped create the conditions for adults to truly listen, and professionals gain true partners with wisdom that they would never have otherwise harvested.
Youth-adult partnership can take many forms, but one of the most impactful, reciprocally rewarding approaches is for students to consult on real-world dilemmas. The inspiration for BCL’s student consultancies began in 2012, in a course called School Innovation Seminar. A social studies elective, SIS was a course in which high school students studied the sociology of education and then actively engaged in school redesign. Over the course of six years, students consulted on issues as diverse as Advisory design, heterogeneous grouping, tardiness policy, and personal learning plans. Students helped redesign coaches’ feedback forms; they addressed the lack of diversity in student government; they analyzed Youth Risk Behavior Survey data and advised our student support team. For the years that the SIS course ran, the school had an R&D arm – and the engine was students’ own insight.
“I really liked being a part of something bigger than yourself, and meeting with people whose decisions really matter. I also liked how they reached out to us and actually wanted to hear what we had to say. Usually at these kinds of meetings/conversations the students just listen to officials talk about something, but I liked how this was different. We went to City Hall not just to listen, but because they wanted feedback from us, and this made me and my peers more engaged. I observed students not just asking questions, but following it up after an answer because they actually cared about the question.”
The best dilemmas have a variety of potential solutions, and often every one of them is problematic. The easy answers aren’t obvious, and the obvious answers aren’t easy. This is how the world works, of course – which makes dilemmas a sandbox for numerous transferable skills: open-mindedness and inquiry, complex systems thinking, empathy and perspective-taking, collaboration, etc. In a simulation, the teacher knows the answer, and students clamber to get as close as they can; in a real-world quandary, everyone at the table–students and adults alike–are facing the unknown together.
Open-ended inquiry can be overwhelming. One way to organize that process is to use a consultancy protocol, in which community partners are the dilemma-bringers and students are the consultants. In SIS, we quickly learned that no matter how large or how small the issue, successful youth-adult partnership calls for preparation, on both sides. Students need context for the dilemma – the history of the issue, the values spectrum, and the potential impact of different solutions. Adult partners need active support as they frame their dilemma and hone their question. They also benefit from proactive reflection on ways to level the power differential in the room.
“It was really cool to share my input on a space that I have grown up using. There are so many different opportunities that could come from that building, especially places for youth. It made me realize how often decisions are made with only input from the city’s adults, but changing that could have such a beneficial impact.”
Ideally, the best dilemmas meet three key criteria:
They are authentic, real-world problems – not invented by the teacher as a way to apply or practice skills. (In other words, they are “real-real,” not “fake-real.”)
They are within the dilemma-bringers’ own agency. (That is, the consultee can actually do something themselves; the dilemma doesn’t require someone else to change)
The dilemma is something to which young people bring unique insight and wisdom. (It’s not something you could get the same perspective about from a colleague down the hall.)
If those three criteria are met, then the stage is set for the consultancy to be valid, impactful, and empowering.
Students making their mark
Building on the success of SIS’s model, the Burlington City & Lake Semester program has adapted student consultancies to be public facing. Instead of engaging in school transformation, students in BCL focus their time, energy, and wisdom on the future of their city. Since 2018, students have engaged in a wide range of consultancies, including:
Helping establish and augment the City's first Equity Report
Envisioning the future of Moran Frame, an architectural urban design project
Informing the design of a new high school
Convening a variety of community partners to discuss the future of the Urban Reserve
Consulting on transportation plans, and helping ensure that marginalized voices are included in the planning process
“I felt like I was on the same level as the city staff. They were looking to us for feedback and really valued our opinions and took all of them into consideration. They were not only asking our opinions on it, but asked specific questions. This showed that they really care about what we think and were eager to hear from us. I was very glad that we had background knowledge of the Equity Report document going into the meeting. Often in meetings between youth and adults, the adults feel they have something to teach the youth. This was not the case in this meeting. Our preparation and engagement gave us the chance to be on the same level as them.”
Over the past few weeks, BCL students have partnered with city departments to reimagine a neighborhood park; they have helped redesign of a once iconic and now decommissioned civic building; they have consulted with educators from across the state, and across the country, about increasing access to place-based learning; they have added their perspectives to a research study devoted to increasing equitable access to parks; and they have consulted with our district’s equity team on the utility of district-wide disparity data.
Youth-adult partnerships like these don’t allow anyone to phone it in. Invariably, they stretch youth and partners alike. Students need to step out of their comfort zones, but so do community partners. After all, it’s not every day that adults sit down with teenagers and dig into problems that are vexing even to seasoned professionals. These collaborations ask everyone involved to dig deep, and to draw on skills that rarely show up on a classroom rubric: humility, courage, ideation, deep listening, and the ability to search for commonality. The good news is that the world desperately needs more of every one of these things, and by working together, we can nurture them all.
Youth-Adult Partnership and Consultancy Protocol Best Practices
Build context. Help students feel informed enough so that they can ask better questions, and practice deeper thinking.
Invest in relationships. The best consultancies grow from active collaboration with community partners.
Craft a fruitful dilemma. Use the three criteria listed above, to help ensure validity, impact, and empowerment.
Flatten the hierarchy. Use protocols to level the default youth-adult power structure.
Don’t rush it. Build in enough time to extend the protocol if/as needed. (Sometimes clarifying questions require more time; sometimes discussion requires more time.) Ideally, the protocol requires at least 80-90 minutes.
Practice. It’s worth taking the time to run through the protocol beforehand, with a benign and low-stakes dilemma.
Write-to-Think. Whenever it feels valuable, consider giving students even a few moments to write down their thoughts before they are asked to share. This equalizes airtime, and allows slower processors to fully participate.
Circle up. When the protocol is over, carve out at least 5-10 minutes for students and community partners to circle up. This should be a time to step away from the content of the consultancy and reflect together on the value and impact of doing this work together.
Reflect, reflect, reflect. When? Before, during, and after. Anything and everything is worth reflecting on, but it’s never a bad time to reflect on the experience itself, using a key experiential-learning prompt: “What is/was it like to do this?”
Invest in gratitude. Students can write thank you notes, or convene a brief follow-up session. It is both meaningful and empowering to hear partners reflect back what they are taking away, and how the students’ insights will have real impact.
Tell the story. People need to know about the power of authentic community engagement. Consider a variety of audiences – and invite students to be the storytellers.
