Work that Matters: Activating Student Voice to Codesign Antiracist Schools

Abstract

The story of High Tech High (HTH) is an extraordinary startup story. After opening a single high school in September 2000, HTH has evolved into an integrated network of 16 charter schools, serving approximately 6,350 students in grades K-12 and have established themselves globally as one of the exemplars in the deeper learning education movement. The HTH Graduate School of Education (HTH GSE) opened in 2007 as the first graduate school of education in the nation, fully embedded within a K-12 learning organization. Seeking to help districts across the nation redesign their schools with antiracist project-based learning, HTH launched the Center for Love and Justice with a partnership with a rural district just outside the capital of the former Confederacy, which has a majority Black student population and a majority white faculty. The task of creating this center began at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and during a national uprising for racial justice. In this capstone, I describe my process for co-leading a redesign to help teachers move from a prescriptive model of education where teachers occupy the role of expert and engage in rote learning to a problem-posing pedagogy that positions teachers and students as partners who share decision-making power and take action on work that matters to students and to their communities. Through this process, teachers struggle with the conflict between trading predictability in the classroom and other traditional practices for more democratic structures that require teachers to be in relational solidarity with their students, necessitating support of student voice and agency to commit to action and reflection with methods that address race, power and class. I explore what happens when teachers have to face the cultural conflict between themselves and students in their classrooms, the traditional school systems where they teach, and the “unlearning” required to shift from the established conceptions of teaching and learning to structures that allow students to develop critical consciousness through inquiry, experimentation, and reflection as members of the global community.