Building democracies in K-8 schools is a promising approach to increasing young people and educators' civic knowledge, skills and dispositions. The Rendell Center for Civics and Civics Engagement leveraged strategies and concepts from the fields of civic education, student voice, and distributed leadership to build a youth-adult school governance…

In positioning student voice within the Irish education policy discourse it is imperative that this emergent and complex concept is explored and theorized in the context of its definition and motivation. Student voice can then be positioned and critiqued as it emerged within Irish education policy primarily following Ireland's ratification of the…

On 26 and 27 September 2014, 43 students from the "Profesor Isidro Burgos" Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico, disappeared, and six people died. In this article, I analyse the event as the result of long-term historical processes, from the perspective of the social mobilisation that caused the students' disappearance on…

Purpose: Participation is a core value for health promoting schools. Student participation at schools is often implemented in various forms of councils. The aims of this article are to summarise the effects of student participation in student councils, to show who benefits most and to discuss characteristics that make student councils effective.…

The Academy for Educational Development (AED), with funding from the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), supports the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Yemen in the establishment of the Student Councils Project. The program works with a number of schools in the Republic to establish student councils that are democratically elected…

According to social scientists Herfried Munkler in Germany and Colin Crouch in England, major developments in Western industrial societies--individualism, increasing social complexity, globalisation--present serious threats to basic requirements of stable societies and expose democracy to the corrosion of its socio-moral resources such as social…

Education for citizenship is firmly on the policy agenda throughout Britain, and there is an expectation that teachers will create a participative, consultative ethos in schools. This paper identifies three main vehicles for pupil consultation: elected pupil councils, democratic and participative classrooms and opportunities for pupils to engage…

Using panel data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), this study empirically analyzes the relationship between two forms of civic engagement--student government and community service--and educational progress made after the eighth grade by addressing the following questions. Does civic engagement affect academic progress…

Many at-risk students face myriad problems that are pervasive, multifaceted, and socio-historical. These problems sometimes lead them to anger, frustration, hate, hostility, and rage. In the educational system, these problems frequently lead to stigmatization as well as misidentification, mislabeling, misplacement, and misinstruction. Ironically,…

In the Fall of 2004, after many years of discussion by adults in the City of Somerville, Massachusetts, the Somerville Youth Council started. For several months, a youth planning group met weekly to craft the mission of the council and the by-laws. There was a critical need to create a process to enable youth of the city to explore possible…

In the report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1914 is the statement that so far as the-number of secondary schools is concerned the great majority are undoubtedly continuing traditional activities without consideration of the needs the pupils or the results actually obtained. This same assertion can be made today of many…