Today’s post is an interview with the authors of the book, Pedagogies of Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency. The book argues that students learn better when teachers take their ideas and experiences seriously and give them meaningful opportunities to help shape what happens in the classroom.

Educators Shane Safir, Marlo Bagsik, Sawsan Jaber, and Crystal M. Watson respond to my questions as a group.

LF: You contrast “teaching content” with the idea of “Pedagogies of Voice.” Can you explain what you mean by each?

A question we asked ourselves as we wrote Pedagogies of Voice is how powerful would it be if academic skills and intrinsic value converged in our learning spaces. This is the heart of a student-agency framework and is animated by our credos: Every part of you is welcome here, even those without words. You are seen and loved here. Your ideas matter here. You can make a difference around the things that matter to you.

When we refer to “teaching content,” we are describing an instructional orientation, delivery, and mastery of predetermined knowledge and skills. Often, this is done in a way that does not take the identities or lived experiences of students that are being served into consideration.

Content-centered school spaces often treat curriculum as neutral, fixed, and universal. Success is often measured through coverage, compliance, and performance on standardized indicators. In these classrooms, students are positioned as receivers of information, “empty vessels,” as the late educator Paulo Freire called the notion, and learning is disconnected from identity, lived experiences, or true purpose.

While content knowledge and skills are important, when focused on in isolation, they work to inculcate caste system labels leading to the ranking and sorting of students, upholding and reinforcing the status quo signaling who belongs and who does not, according to prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson. By teaching like this, we reward those whose language, culture, and ways of knowing already align with cultural norms, widening already existing opportunity gaps.

The concept of Pedagogies of Voice reorients the dynamic by humanizing education. Rather than asking how efficiently content can be delivered, the idea behind pedagogies of voice asks whose knowledge counts, whose stories are centered, and how do we cultivate a strong sense of identity, belonging, a desire for inquiry, and unapologetic self-efficacy? Learning experiences are animated through student identities, questions, and aspirations. Knowledge becomes something students actively partake in as they interrogate, remix, and apply in service of meaning making and community impact.

Teaching content asks students, “Did you learn what was taught?” Pedagogies of Voice asks students, “Who are you becoming, and how will what you learn help you make meaning, claim agency, and act with purpose in the world?”

LF: What do you mean by “street data” and can you share specific examples?

Street data are qualitative data that emerge at eye level and on higher frequencies when educators train our brains to discern it. In Chapter 2, we unpack three main types of street data—stories, artifacts, and observations—at the classroom level. We also outline examples of street data at the classroom, school, and district level:

LF: How does “street data” connect to the idea behind Pedagogies of Voice?

Pedagogies of Voice’s seeds were planted in and grew from our previous book Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy and School Transformation.

The sequel emerged from readers’ appetite for more exploration and unpacking of the epistemologies, beliefs, data sources, approaches, and teacher “moves” that animate an equity-centered pedagogy of voice.

We leveraged the power of the Street Data model to gather rich data from 25 educators across North America about what type of book would be most useful and compelling in this post-pandemic, politically divisive, teacher-undervaluing era. Together, we designed and led five focus groups to listen to teachers on the ground and tap into their pedagogical expertise and dreams. Listen to them here!

Readers will not only understand why a pedagogy of voice is crucial in this historical crossroads for racial justice and democracy, they will walk away equipped with tools for how to vividly imagine and take up these ideas.

LF: Why do you think supporting student identity is so important, and what do you mean by “storientation”?

Meeting this socio-political moment in our time and preparing students to find their voices as global citizens requires educators and schools to adopt a liberatory stance in their institutions and practices. When students are invited to enter school spaces as their full selves, they begin to see school not as a place of compliance but as a place of becoming, a place of possibility, a place for actualization. They are able to express themselves fully; their cultural, linguistic, historic, and religious identities are honored, and so are their values, feelings, and emotions.

So many schools today replicate society by suppressing and invalidating student identities and perpetuating curriculum violence through standardized testing, cultural erasure, or deficit mindsets. We define harmful practices that hinder student voice and agency as toxins. In contrast, affirming identity transforms learning from transactional to transformational.

Identity-affirming school spaces invite and honor the stories people carry. Ultimately, humans are a product of the stories they carry; those passed down to us by our ancestors and those we develop through our own lived experiences. Stories pierce people’s hearts and change their minds. Marginalized groups have never owned or told their own stories.

This is why storientation, “a pedagogy that awakens learner identity by centering the role of narrative in our classrooms” is essential in all classes at all levels. Students engaging in the practice of storieintation are reflecting on the narratives that define them—those told about them and those they tell about themselves. They reclaim their authorship over those narratives, especially when dominant narratives work to distort who they actually are.

LF: Thank you!