Youth Participation in U.S. Contexts Stu PDF

CHILDREN & SOCIETY VOLUME 28, (2014) pp.
292–304
DOI:10.1111/chso.12005
Youth Participation in U.S. Contexts:

Student Voice Without a National Mandate
Dana Mitra*
Department of Education Policy Studies, Penn State University, University Park, PA, USA
Stephanie Serriere
Department of Curriculum & Instruction, Social Studies, Penn State University, University Park,
PA, USA
Ben Kirshner
School of Education, Penn State University, Boulder CO, USA
Unlike the United Kingdom and other nations that mandate youth participation to some
degree, U.S. policies instead tend to inhibit child participation rather than encourage it. Given
these policy contexts, it can be challenging to locate spaces where robust opportunities for
democratic participation and student voice exist. We use this article as an opportunity to
examine the disciplinary, philosophical and methodological approaches that have framed
youth participation in youth contexts. We conclude by identifying critical issues of citizenship
and belonging that must be considered in participatory research. © 2013 The Author(s).
Children & Society © 2013 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited.
Keywords: citizenship, decision making, participation research, social activism, student voice,
United States, youth, youth leadership.
Introduction
Unlike the United Kingdom and other nations that have developed formal systems to encour-
age youth participation in decision making, U.S. policies tend to inhibit child participation.
Given a lack of a national mandate for youth participation, policies in the United States tend
to emerge from ‘bottom-up’ policy contexts. In particular, we explore three types of partici-
patory activities that occur in the United States: youth activism, youth leadership and carpet-
time democracy. Through these examples, we explore the implications of U.S. student-voice
research for European contexts.
In European nations, youth participation has been reinforced by formal policies and national
educational structures. Influenced by Articles 12–15 of the Convention on the Rights of the
Child (CRC), youth participation is defined as series of rights, including access to informa-
tion, expression of views and freedom to form collective organisation (United Nations, 1989).
The CRC highlights the need to bolster the capacity of young people and adults to enable
child participation and the need for strong standards and accountability to guide this pro-
cess, and European policies have aligned with these goals.
Nationalised curricula, testing and other educational policy structures increase the mandates
for youth participation in most European nations (Lundy, 2007; Shevlin and Rose, 2008). For
example, the Swedish national curriculum includes formal standards for children to express
© 2013 The Author(s)

Children & Society © 2013 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited
Youth Participation in U.S. Contexts 293
views in matters that concern their learning (Sheridan and Samuelsson, 2001). Teachers in
Swedish schools are encouraged to work ‘together with the pupils develop rules for working
and participating in their own group’ (Skolverket, 2012).
Despite the formal structures that signal the encouragement (and requirement) of youth
participation, the implementation of youth participation into practice has occurred
begrudgingly in many contexts, such as in the United Kingdom and Australia. Often, such
participation is merely tokenistic or symbolic, rather than manifesting a true act of collabo-
ration with young people (Fielding, 2006; Lundy, 2007). Tokenistic or symbolic youth
participation can be damaging to young people, as the promise of voice without actually
being heard can lead to increased alienation and disconnection from schooling (Fielding,
2004; Mitra, 2009).
United States as an outlier in youth participation

In marked contrast to European nations, the United States lacks any formal policy to spur
youth participation. While the democratic foundation of the United States rests on the idea
that participation is the fundamental right of citizenship (Ochoa-Becker and others, 2001),
many U.S. policies inhibit the voices of young people. The United States is soon to become
the only nation that has not ratified the CRC.1
Additionally, the United States lacks national standards to structure educational curricula. In
fact, the concept of education is not even mentioned in the U.S. constitution and thus all
legal control of schooling is delegated to state governments.2 At the heart of this policy is
the belief that education fundamentally remains a local issue — yet not necessarily an issue
that should include youth participation.
Recent policy efforts to develop a stronger national presence in schools have sought to
reduce youth participation rather than to increase it. The No Child Left Behind Act signed in
2001 has led to a narrowing of the curriculum nationwide as schools face great pressures to
increase student test scores on math, reading and science. Schools are at risk of being closed
and teachers are at risk of losing their jobs if their school regularly falls below adequate
yearly progress. Additionally, while each of the 50 states maintains its own set of curricula
standards and standardised tests, recent efforts by the Obama administration have created
incentives for states to want to align to Common Core Standards (http://www.corestandards.
org 2012).
As of 2012, all but five states have agreed to participate in the Common Core movement.
Youth do not have an opportunity nor have they been offered an opportunity to participate
in this process of developing the Common Core standards. Moreover, the standards narrow
the curriculum by highlighting the value of mathematics and English language arts and
deemphasising subjects such as history and civics that may frame an idea of youth participa-
tion as crucial for democracy.
Given these policy contexts, it can be challenging to locate spaces where robust opportuni-
ties for democratic participation and student voice exist. As is fitting with bottom-up reforms
or reforms that emerge from practitioners, these opportunities tend to be context-specific
and more deeply embedded into practice (Darling-Hammond, 1990). Yet, despite the research
© 2013 The Author(s) CHILDREN & SOCIETY Vol. 28, 292–304 (2014)
294 Dana Mitra et al.
occurring only in isolated contexts, a strong tradition of scholarship related to youth partici-
pation has developed in the United States.
Youth participation efforts in the United States take on many names; however, the most
commonly chosen term is student voice. This term describes the many ways in which youth
have opportunities to share in the school decisions that shape their lives and the lives of
their peers (Author 1, 2008). This article offers illustrative examples from our own research
projects to share what this student-voice research looks like in a national context, which
lacks encouragement for such activities. In this article, we explore three types of bottom-up
participatory activities that occur in the United States: youth activism, youth leadership and
carpettime democracy.
When we use the term, youth activism, we refer to cases where young people take collective
action to challenge injustices that they experience in their schools or neighbourhoods. Stu-
dent-voice efforts working from this paradigm teach young people to critically assess the
institutions in their lives, to identify injustices and to take steps to highlight and to remedy
these injustices.
Youth leadership explores the many ways in which young people have or could have opportu-
nities to share in the school decisions that shape their lives and the lives of their peers. Within
this context, students have the agency to participate in discussions on the core operations of
schools, including teaching, learning and class or school-wide decision-making practices.
Carpettime democracy describes a form of classroom-level practice in U.S. elementary3 class-

rooms in which students are involved in ongoing enquiry at their most local context for
civic engagement. Such a classroom space, generally created in younger primary classrooms
(K-2) in which students sit together, usually in a circle, and talk about a variety of aca-
demic/non-academic topics or concerns, has also been called Circle Time especially in the
UK (see Mosley, 2005), daily meeting, classroom meeting and (class) ‘assembly’ (as translated)
in Sweden. Most commonly discussed in the fields of social studies and civic education, this
form of research and practice explores instances of teachers engaging children in considering
multiple perspectives as a process for students to make decisions necessary to solve problems
of their lives, their society and the world. By discussing these three bottom-up strategies, we
hope to raise potential differences in the implementation of student-voice activities that
could help enable the growth of youth participation in European nations. The following
sections describe these three perspectives in detail.
Community impact: youth activism

Minority youth growing up in under-resourced neighbourhoods, especially those who are not
attending college or who were born outside the United States, face significant barriers to
civic integration and political power. They experience fewer civic learning opportunities in
their schools (Kahne and Middaugh, 2008) and neighbourhoods (Hart and Atkins, 2002). Fur-
thermore, young people who do not attend college (disproportionately African American and
Latino) are excluded from a range of opportunities to be recruited into political parties or
civic organisations in the United States (Flanagan and others, 2009).
In this landscape in which schools fail to serve the needs of minority youth, community
organisations have flourished as settings that nurture youth activism (Kirshner and Ginwright,
forthcoming). Youth activism is defined here as a form of civic engagement in which young
people identify common interests, mobilise their peers and work collectively to alter power
relations in ways that lead to meaningful institutional change (Warren and others, 2008).
The language in such organisations focuses on ‘acting on’ organisations, including schools,
to raise the awareness of injustice.
Youth activism across the United States has received the greatest attention in urban commu-
nities with a strong tradition of social movements and social action, such as New York,
Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland. They tend to be run by non-profits or
community-based organisations4 or, in a few cases, by a university-based research centre.
These types of collective movements have been defined as social movements or ‘collective
challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with
elites, opponents and authorities’ (Tarrow, 1998, p. 4). Research on youth activism suggests
that participation contributes to youths’ civic and personal development (Social Policy
Research Associates, 2003). For example, an evaluation of eight community-organising
groups found that youth members reported higher civic and political engagement than a
comparative national sample, as measured by participation in events such as protesting, con-
tacting public officials and working on community problems, as well as aspirations to partic-
ipate in future (Mediratta and others, 2008).
One strategy that has gained traction among activist groups is youth participatory action
research (YPAR), which refers to an approach that invites young people to research their
lives and use research as a tool for informed action (Cammarota and Fine, 2008; Rubin and
Jones, 2007). YPAR groups are typically composed of intergenerational collectives or part-
nerships of youth and adults (Nygreen and others, 2006). YPAR members choose methods
depending on their goals, questions and skill sets, ranging from oral history to digital story-
telling to statistical analysis. The abiding focus is action: research is collected in the service
of a socially relevant goal, such as improving the quality of one’s school or challenging ste-
reotypes in the media. YPAR projects typically engage young people who are marginalised
because of race and class, groups whose experiences and struggles are poorly understood in
mainstream research.
Research example
One YPAR project, Tracing Transitions, offers an example of participatory research in which
university researchers collaborated with young people and community members to speak out
about a public issue (Kirshner and Pozzoboni, 2011b). In this case, a local high school was
shut down because it was a persistently low-performing school.5 In the case discussed here,
most students were opposed to the decision. [The author] worked with a group of nine stu-
dents who were motivated to find out what happened to the displaced 9th, 10th and 11th
graders. The group collected a range of data about the experiences of displaced students,
including peer interviews, surveys and focus groups (Kirshner and Pozzoboni, 2011b).
The Tracing Transitions project illustrates three compelling reasons for YPAR research. The
first reason is moral. Students were upset about a decision that was made for them, rather
than with them. Consistent with principles articulated in the CRC, youth should have a right
to give their opinions about a decision that affected their lives. YPAR offered one way to do
this. As one young person said:
Once Jefferson closed…I had kind of an anger and it was like I have to get my way… The only way
I was going to get my way is if I say something.’ Another said, ‘I was like ‘yeah, I’d like to be on
this because I know how it feels and it doesn’t feel good to be kicked out of your school like that’.
The second reason is methodological: student participation in the research increased the
quality of findings about the impact of school closure. For example, student researchers were
more likely to find and gain rapport with respondents, particularly in this case, because of
stigma that many displaced students felt about attending a school that was shut down
because of low performance. As one student said: ‘The school was closed on us; we were the
ones who weren’t going to be able to graduate… It was happening to us. We were the ones
directly affected by it’. Just as important, by participating in coding and analysing data,
student researchers shaped the way the data were interpreted and presented to the public,
which contributed to the validity of the study’s findings.
The third reason for YPAR stems from its richness as a learning environment. YPAR learning
environments promote important developmental competencies, such as analytic thinking,
teamwork and critical consciousness about sociopolitical issues (Cammarota, 2008). Youth in
the Tracing Transitions project reported that they learned a mixture of cognitive skills, includ-
ing how to manage biases and civic skills, such as public speaking and group decision making.
The terrain of youth activism and participatory research points to two lessons for research
on student voice in the United States. The first is the importance of going outside the school
walls to community organisations. Radical and innovative efforts to engage young people as
political actors often take place in non-profit community organisations that are not burdened
by ‘business as usual’ approaches to young people. Such groups have developed new models
of youth–adult partnerships and have begun to develop toolkits showing ways to engage
young people (e.g. Zeldin & Collura, 2010).
A second lesson pertains to the role that researchers can play in designing and facilitating
new roles for young people. Public universities such as UCLA, Arizona, CUNY and Colorado
have begun to develop partnerships with schools and community organisations that engage
youth in participatory action research. This partnership requires the academic researcher to
be able to maintain a dual focus on working with young people while also learning from
them, which is a set of roles to which most university systems are not accustomed.
Organisational-wide impact: youth leadership

The second, and perhaps most common, framework for U.S. student-voice research emphasis-
es the connection student-voice activities within youth leadership. Within this framework,
research has found that U.S. schools often try to involve young people in democratic activi-
ties such as community service (Flanagan and Faison, 2001). Although schools tend to fall
short in preparing young people to develop and lead such activities (Westheimer and Kahne,
2004). Much of the research on youth leadership occurs in the domains of human develop-
ment, prevention science and agricultural extension education. While most often occurring
in schools, such research also occurs in after-school programmes and community-based
organisations such as 4-H (a rural-based organisation promoting youth leadership).
Youth leadership efforts tend to focus on examining the process and outcomes of engag-
ing young people in shaping the organisations and schools that are intended to serve them
(Pittman and others, 2000). Similar to the work of Fielding (2001) and others in the United
Kingdom, U.S. student-voice initiatives can lead to positive organisational outcomes, such as
the development of standing committees on curriculum planning and staff development
(Mitra, 2004). However, such activities tend to be more limited in scope than examples from
the United Kingdom. Few such activities are youth-led or youth-initiated.
Often, a focus on youth leadership tends to be paired with the term ‘youth–adult partner-
ships’ rather than student-voice initiatives. Indeed, student-voice initiatives can be consid-
ered youth–adult partnerships that occur in school settings (Mitra, 2009b). Youth–adult
partnerships are defined as relationships in which both youth and adults have the potential
to contribute to decision-making processes, to learn from one another and to promote
change (Jones and Perkins, 2004). Collaboration comes with an expectation of youth sharing
the responsibility for the vision of the group, the activities planned and the group process
that facilitates the execution of these activities.
Providing youth with opportunities to participate in school decision making can shape their
lives and the lives of their peers. Students often become re-engaged in the school community
and are also simultaneously more attached to their schools (Author 1, 2004). Youth leader-
ship initiatives therefore tend to highlight the culture of a school.
When asking student opinions, a common theme is students’ desires for positive, strong rela-
tionships with their teachers as opposed to the isolation and lack of respect and appreciation
that students reported they often feel (Yonezawa and Jones, 2007). Also, young people expe-
rience increased levels of civic engagement and report a stronger belief that they are capable
of making a difference in their own lives and the lives of others when schools recognise stu-
dent voice (Mitra, 2004; Eccles & Gootman, 2002). Student-voice activities can also serve as
a catalyst for fostering diverse positive changes in schools, such as improvements in instruc-
tion, curriculum, teacher–student relationships (Rudduck, 2007), teacher preparation (Cook-
Sather, 2006), assessment systems (Colatos and others, 2004; Fielding, 2001), visioning and
strategic planning (Eccles & Gootman, 2002).
Research example
One example of a school-wide student-voice initiative occurred at Hillside — a struggling
secondary school in Northern California, which was composed of first-generation immigrants
from Latin America and Asia, as well as working-class African Americans and European
Americans. With dismally low graduation rates and high teacher turnover, the student-voice
group ‘Unity of Youth’ developed campaigns to address concerns about school-specific
issues, such as lobbying for cleaner, open bathrooms. The group also developed a long-term
project to create a Student Unity Center that provided students with health services, aca-
demic tutoring and mentoring, after-school programmes, job placement, an ethnic studies
library and conflict resolution resources.
One of the most striking features of Unity of Youth was the way in which youth were at the
forefront of these initiatives, which is extremely rare in U.S. contexts. When outsiders called
to request information about the group, youth answered the phone. When it came time to
apply for grant funding, youth wrote the proposals. Regina Johnson, a Unity of Youth stu-
dent leader, explained, ‘Adult advisors can only do as much as the youth do. If we don’t do
our part, then they don’t have a job. We are the ones who do the most work’.
The group’s adult advisor, Elsa Managua, demonstrated that youth leadership required that
she consciously step back to allow young people the space to lead (Mitra, 2005). As an adult
advisor, she focused on being clear on her role as a facilitator of youth development. She
explained,
I’m clear about, ‘What are my objectives? What are my motives?’ I tell them, ‘If I’m doing what I
intend to do really well, then you guys will have this job in four years’. That’s the leadership devel-
opment … If we wanted to open up a center, all the adults could get together and open up a center
in six months, but that wasn’t the process. It was the process of getting them to understand, ‘What
do people want in the center? And then having [youth] talk to people’.
The goal of Unity of Youth was centred on the process of developing youth leadership much
more so than accomplishing any specific task, such as the Unity Center or cleaner bath-
rooms. While even if such specific goals might be accomplished, if youth were not growing
in their own development, then Unity of Youth had not accomplished their most important
goal.
Classroom impact: carpettime democracy

A large body of research documents the value of student-voice initiatives improving class-
room practice (Beck, 2005; Daniels and others, 2001). Often, this form of student voice is
termed ‘consultation’, which is defined as teachers partnering with students to discuss teach-
ing and learning, including inviting students to provide feedback on instructional styles, cur-
riculum content and assessment opportunities (Rudduck, 2007). Much of the work on student
consultation has occurred in the United Kingdom as a part of the Consulting with Pupils on
Teaching and Learning project. Researchers worked with teachers to identify what consulta-
tion looks like in classrooms, what students say about their classroom experiences, and the
impact of consultation on student learning and teacher practice (McIntyre and Rudduck,
2007). Increasing student consultation in decisions about teaching and learning has increased
student agency, self-worth, respect and a sense of membership in the school (Rudduck and
Demetriou, 2003).
In U.S. contexts, classroom consultation usually occurs with the youngest children6 (Ochoa-
Becker and others, 2001). Classroom consultation is most often framed as a social studies
and civic education practice (Beck, 2005; Parker, 2008). It seeks to create public places in
which multiple social perspectives are brought into direct and daily contact. Eliciting
students’ opinions and voices has been conceptualised as a way to foster participation in a
pluralistic democracy (Parker and Hess, 2001).
Conversations in elementary classrooms often occur in the common area of the classroom
rug, coined circletime in the United States and many other countries, a form of democratic
deliberation and negotiation, which we characterise as ‘carpettime democracy’. In the ele-
mentary years, ‘playtime in particular must be negotiated with a greater number and variety
of others; new norms are introduced, and others must be improvised by the children them-
selves’ (Parker, 2008). Through teaching or action research, adults play a part in orchestrat-
ing diverse opinions, considerations and status dynamics that can pervade classrooms.
Perhaps the most renowned U.S. research of carpettime democracy is that of Paley (1992),
who led conversations with her kindergarteners, wondering aloud and together how their
classroom would be if they could agree on the social contract of ‘you can’t say you can’t
play’. They discussed the proposal and alternatives over the course of much of the school
year. Research on high school classroom discussions also demonstrates students’ capabilities
of becoming personally vested in issues, even controversial subjects (Hess, 2009).
Findings on classroom meetings suggest that U.S. elementary students are capable of keeping
an agenda and leading meetings in an atmosphere of perceived fairness and collective prob-
lem solving (Angell, 2004). Opportunities to talk in class meetings help students build posi-
tive relationships and a sense of identity within the group (Battistich & Horn, 1997). Open
dialogues on classroom policies in early elementary years, from ‘carpettime’ talk to more for-
mal classroom meetings run by students, help students consider conflicting priorities of self
and others as well as practising a process of listening, deliberating and considering all sides
(Beck, 2005; Paley, 1992).
One of the most widely implemented programmes across a range of schools is Caring
School Communities (formerly, The Child Development Project of the Developmental Studies
Center), which focuses on children’s academic, ethical and social development through four
main components: class meetings, cross-age buddy programmes, home-side activities and
school-wide community projects. Studies of the programme indicate that students had
more positive attitudes towards school and learning than comparison students. Former pro-
gramme students also had higher performance in classes and on standardised tests and
were less involved in problem behaviours during middle school (Battistich and others,
1995).
Research example
More contemporary work from the second author (Serrie, 2010) examines peer culture in
classrooms (Corsaro, 1997) and methods of promoting student voice within it. First conceived
as ‘photo-talks’ with individual children in international preschools in the United States and
Japan, Serrie describes a group exploration with large projected digital photographs of class-
room life as the springboard for a ‘carpettime democracy’. In this case, carpettime democracy
was conceived as a rehearsal for or de-briefing on the most common activity in early child-
hood classrooms: play — playtime does not exist in a vacuum without any preparation or
reflection, such a time and space within the school day position young students as capable,
agentic and reflective citizens (Serrie, 2010).
In the scene below, the author noticed that one girl, ‘Nicole’, who wanted to play with a
group of boys was often told to ‘be quiet’ or called ‘stinkerbell’ (instead of ‘Tinkerbell’ as she
wanted to be called). The researcher captured a digital image of this scene and used its pro-
jection to facilitate a conversation with several children about this common occurrence.
Here, Nicole offers the researcher her opinion and alternatives when the boys tell her to be
quiet. In turn, the researcher learns that Nicole had additional ideas about how to change
her situation, and that she did.
Researcher: Here you were playing as Tinkerbell and Ryan and Evan told you that
Tinkerbell does not talk so you would have to be quiet. You chose to be quiet. What other
choices did you have?
Nicole: I don’t know… I want to be Tinkerbell… I want to play with them.
Stephanie: You looked sad when they kept telling you to ‘be quiet!’
Nicole: I was (sad).
Researcher: So you want to talk and you want to play with them. What can you do?
Nicole: I can just talk anyway.
Researcher: Mmhmm (as if agreeing), you can walk away.
Nicole: No, I said I can just talk anyway.
Researcher: You sure can.
Like most student-voice efforts, carpettime democracy involves researching not only what is
but what is required to move us toward what is not yet. As a method or pedagogy, the idea
is framed in the critical liberatory theory of Paulo Freire (1987) who believed that to change
the root causes of social injustice, people must describe their own social reality, analyse the
root causes of the situation and act. In response to Freire’s work, Augustus Boal (1995)
created the Theater of the Oppressed in which participants use acting as a methodology of
re-envisioning solutions to the injustices in their social lives. The second author refashioned
Boal’s tradition with digital photography to initiate a new form of student participation in
the classroom. As students re-enacted scenes, Author 2 discovered various perspectives on
what happened and children’s visions of a more ideal world. Students found new modes of
playing in their preschool classroom and the evidence showed that they were often empow-
ered with the new words or phrases to utilise in future play episodes. As in the case of
Nicole, above, she indeed refused to give up joining in the exciting play of the boys and told
them that she was a ‘special Tinkerbell who can talk’.
Whether led by a classroom researcher or teacher, eliciting students’ voices in classrooms can
reframe traditional hierarchical relationships of teacher with student or researcher with stu-
dent and may disrupt peer-to-peer recurrent power dynamics. Classroom-focused research can
acknowledge or promote spaces for even the youngest students to have a voice in a process of
schooling that often is something that just happens to them, rather than because of them.
Developing themes of youth participation

These three examples exemplify bottom-up examples of youth participation reform in the
United States. They were initiated from teachers, students and non-profit organisations seek-
ing to help youth to find their voice in classrooms, schools and community settings. In addi-
tion to these established domains of research, new fields continue to develop. This section
highlights emerging research. We expect that these themes may connect to work occurring
in European contexts.
Measuring youth participation outcomes

The previous 15 years of U.S. research on youth participation have focused particularly on
conceptualising the concept of ‘student voice’. Recently, discussion in journals and at
conferences has indicated the need for a new level of precision regarding student-voice
research, including development of survey instruments to measure outcomes of student-voice
efforts for academic climate and student performance, rigorous longitudinal studies and
quasi-experimental designs (Yonezawa and others, 2009). This push for quantitative evidence
in the United States also is encouraged by a shift in funding priorities of federal institu-
tions and major foundations in which experimentally designed research is considered
the ‘gold standard’ and case study research has lesser status. With a push for quantitative
work, the field must consider how youth are positioned in our research as potential change
agents or as mere informants. Furthermore, student-voice researchers must investigate
whether these new forms of data collection value and explore the concepts that the research-
ers and practitioners believe to be most meaningful to the values behind student-voice
efforts.
Digital participation
Scholars focused on the new ecology of digital media have begun to look at ways in which
youth can develop their own voice and expression via new forms of social media, such as
You Tube and Facebook (Ito and others, 2008). These digital platforms are valuable settings
for youth self-expression and can be connected to student activism or classroom assign-
ments. Future research may include the ways in which peers critique, support and challenge
the writing, reflections and expressions that are shared through new media.
Explore the range of voices among youth

As global demographic changes contribute to greater amounts of inter-cultural communica-
tion, we hope that participation research can increasingly draw upon the experiences of
young people from non-dominant cultural backgrounds. Additional methods are needed to
discuss ways in which particular forms of student voice are privileged based upon race, class,
gender, academic performance, language proficiency, nationality and more. Any effort to
promote student voice must take care that it is not a mechanism of further privileging the
privileged within a school or city (Fielding, 2004).
Conclusion
This article has sought to explore the fields of research examining youth participation in
U.S. contexts. With a lack of national policy to formalise youth participation and a lack of
capacity to implement educational changes quickly, youth participation reforms in U.S. set-
tings tend to emerge from the bottom of the policy system. By naming and describing partic-
ular strands of participation (or ‘student voice’) research, we seek to encourage the
exploration of parallels and contrasts between scholars across nations and contexts. We have
found that bottom-up initiatives tend to have a level of authenticity that leads to strong stu-
dent-voice outcomes. They struggle, however, with sustainability of work as they lack the
institutional support for continuity. As we have established international connections as
scholars, we wonder how we might support teachers and students in similar cross-culture
ventures to converse about what works for student-voice efforts.
Notes
1 Somalia — the only other nation that has not ratified the CRC — indicated its plans to
begin ratification in 2010.
2 However, the federal government can exert great pressure on states through spending
power and on interstate commerce issues.
3 The term ‘elementary’ is analogous to the term ‘primary’ school or education in Australia,
Canada, UK and most other countries around the world. However, ‘primary’ in the United
States refers to only the first 3 years of public schooling (kindergarten through second
grade).
4 In the United States, such organisations tend to be called non-profit or community organi-
sations; in other parts of the world, these are often considered non-governmental organisa-
tions (NGOs).
5 Temporary closure and reconstitution have become strategies common in the Obama
administration to try to ‘turn around’ failing schools (Author 3, in press). Schools targeted
for closure are disproportionately populated by low-income African American and Latino
students. Emerging evidence suggests that they create hardships for displaced students (Sun-
derman and Payne, 2009).
6 New research is also beginning to explore classroom consultation at the post-secondary
level (Cook-Sather, forthcoming).
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Accepted for publication 21 August 2012

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CHILDREN & SOCIETY VOLUME 28, (2014) pp.

Youth Participation in U.S. Contexts:

© 2013 The Author(s)

United States as an outlier in youth participation

Carpettime democracy describes a form of classroom-level practice in U.S. elementary3 class-

Community impact: youth activism

Organisational-wide impact: youth leadership

Classroom impact: carpettime democracy

Developing themes of youth participation

Measuring youth participation outcomes

Explore the range of voices among youth

Accepted for publication 21 August 2012

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