Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Recognizing Students among Educational Authorities 745
in educational relationships and institutions that have supported and been maintained by this
disinclination and inability.
Judging from the little but important work that has been done in this area, profound changes
in role and relationship as well as in learning can result when adults listen to students. When
adults listen to students, they can begin to see the world from those students’ perspectives, make
what they teach more accessible to students, conceptualize teaching, learning, and the ways
we study them as more collaborative processes, even change what they teach and who they
are. When students are taken seriously and listened to as knowledgeable participants in important
conversations about schooling, they feel motivated to participate constructively in their education.
Because they experience daily the effects of existing educational practices, students have unique
and valuable views on education that, when elicited and shared, have the potential to transform
schools into institutions responsive to rather than disconnected from the modern world.
Over the last decade some educators and educational researchers have attempted to create
new roles for students and to challenge traditional notions of who has relevant knowledge about
education. These long overdue efforts are important both for the essential ways in which they
attend to student perspectives as well as for the ways they throw into relief the work that remains to
be done. In the following discussion I evoke the historical images of students that have contributed
to their exclusion from conversations about educational policy, practice, and reform. I then outline
a variety of attempts to attend to student perspectives on educational practice undertaken over
the last decade. I conclude with a detailed discussion of how attitudes and institutional structures
need to change if we are to more consistently and fully recognize students among those with
authority on educational practice.
HISTORICAL IMAGES OF STUDENTS
Although it is rarely articulated as such, the most basic premise upon which different approaches
to educational policy and practice rest is trust—whether adults trust young people to be good (or
not), to have and use relevant knowledge (or not), and to be responsible (or not). The educational
institutions and practices that have prevailed in the United States both historically and currently
reflect a basic lack of trust in young people and have evolved to keep students under control and in
their place as the largely passive recipients of what adults decide should constitute an education.
Keeping the young under control and in their place took the form it has to this day after the
industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. The national obsession with efficient production
in all realms plugged learners into bolted-down desks and lock-step curricula through which they
were guided by the teacher-as-skilled-engineer. More progressive, humanistic conceptualizations
of learners based on trust in their capacities and inclinations have always run parallel to the
impulse to contain and control young bodies and minds, but they have remained alternative, not
the norm. Arguments that students should be nurtured and allowed to learn in their own ways
at their own pace, child-centered notions of education, and alternative models, such as those in
Waldorf and Montessori schools, run counter to but do not displace the dominant view of students
and approaches to their education. Even these more progressive approaches do not cede students’
authority comparable to adults’ in imagining and designing educational opportunities.
A COLLECTION OF EFFORTS TO RECOGNIZE AND RESPOND TO YOUNG
PEOPLE’S PERSPECTIVES
Calls to listen and respond to what students have to say about school have sounded intermittently
since the early 1990s. Since then, a variety of efforts have been made to attend more carefully
and to respond to student perspectives. In the following section I will briefly outline these