Youth Voice

'Youth voice' is a remodelling of the term 'youth participation', as teachers, the thought of student voice can raise hairs on the back of your neck when thought of in the wrong context, Friday afternoon, end of a 12 week term, student voice may cause all sorts of anxiety.

 To reduce your anxiety, the context we are looking at this week is participatory approaches to Health education. Promote students to be a part of, share something, be empowered and take ownership of actions. Participation is more than involvement, it is involvement with connection and influence. 
Cheryl Kane's work shop providing fantastic evidence of youth voice in the difficult context of drug education. The idea of students leading conversations and questioning drugs when relating to their own demographic.
Tokenism: Adult describes what they would like from a youth perspective.
Youth informed/youth consulted: students attend a drug education program with interactive intentions.
Youth and Adult equality: Co-designed fashion show- creating a runway of ideas and thought around youth drug education. The show is to be directed at parents and careers.
Completely youth driven: The students completely ran the show and had control over all raised topics. students showed peer conflict resolution in order to reduce de valuing their project.
Harts ladder wasn't designed to be a linear process, students can move up and down the varying levels of participation (Hart, 1994). 

 Shape up: was a project ran in Europe in 2006-2009, the project aimed to increase physical activity and healthy diet within a school setting. Participation was interpreted as the pupils influence on the project. Clear framework was provided by adults at every stage, this was done to increase participation from students with a variety of interests. Pupil council was the main area for student influence, allowing them to take action individually and together to actualize their ideas (Simovska, 2012). The study showed positive impacts when students deal with real life problems.
Cheryl Kane describes another example within the Health education context, senior health students volunteering their time to run health education workshops for the younger years. For example year 11 health students teaching year 7. Cheryl mentioned that students have complete power over the decision making process of what they are interested in learning about. The learning opportunities gained by senior and junior years in this particular environment are endless, complete youth driven workshops about relevant topics has the potential to create strong connections to learning and participation.

 Below are some key knowledges and there associated skills and how we can adapt these into an effective participatory approach. One of the contradicting factors we face when promoting youth voice, is Harts (1994) sense of tokenism, within a school lesson setting, tokenism is often a natural instinct of a teacher 'to direct education', this is of course setting dependant, there are situations where youth voice occurs organically. Take the school shootings in America, and how the students stood up against gun laws. Youth voice needs culture, whether it be school, class, sport or family environment the culture and environment has to transform organically. Kane states in her podcast that participatory action is a slow process and to see the fruits of your labour may take time. Example: year 11 health educators to year 7s, when those year 7s reach year 11, will we see a cultural shift and potentially a true representation of youth voice.
Reference list:
Hart, R. (1994). Children's participation. Florence, Italy: UNICEF International Child Development Centre.
Simovska, V. (2012). Case study of a participatory Health Promotion Intervention in School. Democracy in Education, 20 (1), 1-10.
Kane, C. (2018). Youth Voice. Work shop at: Monash University, Melbourne.


Photo: Monash University leaflet.
Photo: Monash University digital poster.


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