In working with schools to support Student Action Teams on various issues, I’ve become increasingly aware of differences in the ways that such ideas are being addressed. While there has been a heartening growth in references to Student Action Teams as a way of increasing student participation and engagement in schools throughout Australia, this growth has also led to some very different practices.

“I don’t know if what we’re doing is a real Student Action Team,” said one Principal. So what is a ‘real Student Action Team’? And does it matter?

There isn’t a tight and prescribed ‘Student Action Team Program’, but rather an orientation towards a way of learning and teaching. However I think that, to be a Student Action Team, there has to be a team of students working on an issue of concern to them, where they take action to make changes based on the outcomes of investigations they undertake. So there clearly has to be a ‘change agenda’ as well as a ‘doing things agenda’.

This cannot always be as sharply defined as this in practice. In some situations, the scope for change is much more limited or defined. Where a topic is ‘commissioned’ by a community group or by a school, there are immediately constraints placed on the breadth of student decision-making. On the other hand, where students are working in a team to implement something or take responsibility for something, this can still have a strong student participatory focus, while not strictly perhaps being a SAT.

So maybe we need a new label? I suggested to the above Principal that some of what the school was doing could be called Student Responsibility Groups (SRGs). These are groups or teams of students who take on responsibility for the implementation of something eg the school’s publicity or website, the operation of aspects of the library, running assemblies and so on. These students have important responsibilities, have to make decisions and carry out valued roles within the school. But they neither investigate much about their area of responsibility nor are expected (or in some cases, allowed) to make changes. Their areas of responsibility are defined by the school, by teachers or by tradition, and their roles are to ensure that they are carried out.

It is important to recognise such distinctions.

Even within Student Action Teams that do have a strong expectation for investigation/research and change, there are diverse practices. The location of the teams represents one such diversity.

In the ‘original’ SATs, students undertook investigation and action within community settings - outside schools. They worked on community safety, traffic safety, the environment of the town and so on. Other more recent SATs have worked on issues within the school community: transition, student voice, school sustainability practices and so on.  I can see why: these issues are immediate and accessible; they are of importance to students. But they also offer teachers possibilities for easy action; they can be addressed without leaving the school grounds or, in some cases, the classroom. These are totally appropriate issues for SATs to tackle. But these issues are also more easily contained and limited in their impact; they avoid challenges about the roles that students can take within their broader communities.

SRGs and, to some extent, school-based SATs are also more likely to have higher degrees of teacher control and (perhaps as a consequence) ultimately lower degrees of student responsibility and control. They can also be pre-planned and organised by teachers within predictable curriculum requirements and are more certain – and that’s both positive and negative.

To undertake an investigation and then develop action that is really based on that research, means that neither students nor teachers can be certain where the learning will take you. And to do this in a community setting is to increase the degree of uncertainty. The diagram below is a first attempt to think about these comparisons.

Support for authentic student participation within the real context of schools must start somewhere – it must start with the possible.  But if it remains uncritically there, it will stagnate – and that will constrain and minimise students’ real participation. The best SRG and SAT practices look for significant possibilities for a starting point, but then also recognise, create and seize opportunities to push practice further along the continuum of increased student engagement and control. Teachers ask: how can I do less, and support students to do more? How can students have greater responsibility, decision-making and control?

It is to be self-critical and even impatient with limitations.

It is to be willing to invite and embrace uncertainty.

from Connect 185-186, November 2010