CHAPTER 8: Who’s in Charge?: Examining the Complex Nature of Student Voice in Service-Learning Projects

Service-learning projects offer students opportunities to study and take action in reference to a range of authentic social issues, including pollution, voting rights, and school policy, exercising the skills of engaged citizens. Despite the potential for service-learning to ignite and sharpen students’ empowerment, these projects do not automatically grant students opportunities to meaningfully use their voices, due in part to teacher authority and other systemic obstacles to student agency. In this chapter, I focus on the complex nature of student voice in service-learning projects. I open with a discussion of the literature and theories on student voice in schools and service-learning projects in particular. Then, I present and analyze two cases of youth civic engagement. Scott Rosner,¹ an eighth-grade English and Social Studies teacher in the Norman Rockwell School, initiated a social justice writing assignment in which students developed print and visual documents to raise their classmates’ awareness of various social problems. Tanisha McGuire led ninth-grade students in the Leadership Academy to develop a safe sex health fair. Both projects reveal the possible allowances and limitations of student voice in civic work and can provoke teachers to question their roles in promoting students as active decision-makers. I conclude with a series of recommendations for teachers.