uLead 2017

This session will provide an overview of an international initiative to bring together young people as full participants in school development. Going beyond the growing cottage industry of student engagement surveys and measuring ‘student voice’ or tokenistic influence on their school, as yet another product of contemporary schooling, our focus is on involving students in the challenging work of strategic foresight regarding the global influences shaping their current and future lives and how this might or should shape their lived educational experience. Our particular interest is in engaging students in ways that avoid co-opting them as cheerleaders for marginal educational reform efforts that Pasi Sahlberg would characterize as “policies that help us do the wrong things better.” Thus the questions can be posed as: how, and in particular, why, should we involve the students themselves in forming or influencing the content and form of their educational experience? But we also need to ask how realistic are such efforts within an educational edifice controlled by higher level institutions, traditional and standardized curricula and testing regimes?
The presentation will invite participants to consider the possibilities for their involvement as school leaders in an international summit scheduled for early October in Reykjavik, Iceland. The summit will explore these questions: What is a public school education for?; How do we think about the future beyond a nostalgia for a better version of yesterday?; and, How should education respond to help create the future we want?