Authorizing students’ perspectives: Toward trust, dialogue, and change in education

Since the advent of formal education in the United States, both the educational system and that system’s every reform have been premised on adults ’ notions of how education should be conceptualized and practiced. There is something fundamentally amiss about building and rebuilding an entire system without consulting at any point those it is ostensibly designed to serve. The inefficacy of this approach becomes increasingly apparent as we move into the 21st century. As the pace of life accelerates, as the population becomes increasingly diverse, and as the media through which we teach, learn, and work become more complex, more than ever before, those of us who count ourselves educators and educational researchers must seriously question the assumption that we know more than the young people of today about how they learn or what they need to learn in preparation for what lies in the decades ahead. It is time that we count students among those with the authority to participate both in the critique and in the reform of education. At the root of the terms that underlie the following discussion — authorize, authority, author, and authoritative — is power: “the ability to take one’s place i