Fiat engages students to activism, spills up to participatory democracy

The interdependent relationship between youths’ political engagement, their development, and societal health is the central focus of this book. Youth and societal institutions are strengthened when young people, particularly those most disadvantaged by education inequity, turn their critical gaze to education systems and participate in efforts to improve them. The book’s case studies of youth organizing and student activism analyze what these experiences mean for young people and why they are good for a socially just democracy. This research is motivated by questions about the relationship between youth activism, human development, and democratic renewal: What is youth activism and how does it contribute to youth development? How might collective movements of young people expand educational opportunity in the United States and resuscitate participatory democracy? The practical need for such research is stark. The long-standing practice in American schools has been to treat high school students as dependent recipients of services.7 This status, while providing important legal protections, reinforces social constructions of youth as immature and restricts them to limited forms of participation.8 How might schools become places where student voice is part of the fabric of institutional decision making? What kinds of learning ecologies are necessary to support youths’ engagement in public work with their teachers? Similarly, although youth development programs have adopted rhetoric that emphasizes young people’s assets and strengths, youth-adult partnerships are still the exception rather than the norm.9 Youth-adult partnerships call for a more radical engagement with youth as people , by building sustained intergenerational collectives that deliberate and act together around an issue of shared concern.10 This book pushes and extends the asset-based approach by providing evidence about young people as partners in decision making rather than just targets of remediation. Rich examples, grounded in the exigencies of practice, are provided that generate tools and strategies. What roles do organizers play? How do young people, who are typically novices in the political realm, learn the necessary skills for participation?