Partnering with Students To Take Action: School Shooting Recovery after Buffalo and Uvalde
Categories: School Crisis Recovery, School Crisis Renewal, School Mental Health, Youth and Students
Student voice and crisis leadership is a foundational and often missing element in how we define crisis recovery work.
Mental health resources are a necessary response to help providers work with students to ensure their acute needs (e.g., after a school or community shooting) are met. And: partnering with students to take action is another way we can ensure safety (empowering and restoring a sense of control) & reconnection (re-orienting purpose with what matters).
As school leaders, it is imperative to listen and learn from and with young people to gain a deeper understanding of how adults and systems can create the cultures and conditions that center recovery and renewal (to see an example of how powerful asking former students/young adults what helps and what harms crisis renewal, check out our What Helps & What Harms Students’ Crises Recovery? Young Adult Reflective Listening Sessions).
In the wake of school and community shootings, students and young adults want and need to feel safe, to be seen and heard. We have to name when a crisis is happening; and stop pretending everything is okay if it isn’t. By partnering with students, we can provide students opportunities to lead their own recovery and reclaim a sense of control and connection to others with shared purpose.
Youth Move National defines “youth engagement” as a “strategy in which youth are given a meaningful voice and role and are authentically involved in working towards changing the systems that directly affect their lives” (YMN, 2015 for Healthy Transitions).
Sounds like crisis recovery and renewal to us.
Student engagement voice and activism (e.g., against gun access and violence) is inherently connected to building healing-centered school culture and robust school mental health recovery measures because:
- Self and Collective Determination: trauma can make us feel helpless and powerless because it overwhelms us.
- Voice and Choice: promoting a sense of self-efficacy can help foster resilience and healing.
- Healing through Action: One way to decrease the potentially harmful effects of trauma is to DO something that changes your own situation or the situation of others. This can help with the healing process.
- When we perceive that we have some control over a stressor – this can help reduce the physiological effects of chronic stress and trauma.
- Authentic youth engagement not only helps young people build their self esteem, leadership, advocacy and professional development skills, they also increase young people/s influence and personal state in the community.
- Allying with student action and activism cultivates trust and relational safety.
We know that trauma and violence creates a sense of something happening to us. In order to be trauma informed allies to ensure that we are doing with versus to our students, we offer reflection questions for us adults supporting student action:
- What needs healing and transformation inside me in order to sustain transformation and healing in my classroom, school, organization?
- What does it mean to center the experiences and wisdom of those impacted by crisis in recovery and renewal?
- How might I promote a sense of agency in my students and the young people with whom I work?
- How might we catch ourselves when we are doing something to or for our students instead of with them? Who might hold us accountable?
- What are ways in which the adults in the system or relationship might need to set clear expectations about roles and decision making (power in action)? What are decisions that students can make alone? What might be decisions students and adults might need to construct together? When might there be decisions that only the adults can make, and why?
- How might we train more adults in school systems to be safe spaces and learn how to hold space for youth; allowing space for students to “just feel”?
Unsure or need support for how to have these conversations with students? Check out Nine Ways to Help Students Discuss Guns and Violence (Greater Good, 2018). This article from March 2018 was updated in response to the attack on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas; it includes promising practices that can help educators wondering how best to navigate this inspiring, challenging moment of youth activism.
General resources to learn more about youth-adult (or student-educator) partnerships
- A tipsheet: Petrokubi, J., & Janssen, C. (2017). Creating inclusive and effective environments for young people: Exploring youth voice and youth-adult partnership. Portland, OR: Education Northwest, Institute for Youth Success.
- A framework: Annie E. Foundation: A Framework for Effectively Partnering with Young People (2019)
- An online resource directory: Students at the Center helps educators to understand and make use of current research on student-centered approaches to teaching and learning. Students at the Center Hub
- A guide to fostering student voice in schools: SoundOut
Resources related to student mental health activism:
- Mental Health (Youth Leadership Institute (YLI)’s programming for youth to work to destigmatize mental health, address issues that negatively impact mental health, and advocate for culturally appropriate and accessible mental health resources on school campuses, in communities and online.
- Teenager Therapy Primarily a podcast of five teens who talk about the struggles that come with being a teenager.
- Our Story | YTP | Yellow Tulip Project Founded by a middle school student, The Yelow Tulip Project creates a space for determined youth to eradicate stigma, build community, and inspire productive conversations about how to combat the rising rates of suicide.
Resources related to student action against gun violence:
- Team ENOUGH– a youth-led organization whose mission is to educate young voices about gun violence and mobilize them to take meaningful action against it.
- Youth ALIVE! Youth ALIVE! has worked to help violently wounded people heal themselves and their community by preventing violence and creating young leaders. Specifically, their prevention initiative, Teens on Target, supports Oakland (CA) students most affected by violence learn to honor their own stories, to use their experience to make change. They learn to speak to the media and to city leaders.
- Students Demand Action ( Get Involved | Students Demand Action and Summer Leadership Academy | Students Demand Action) Students Demand Action started in 2016, a national initiative within two weeks of the Parkland shooting led by high school and college students across the country coming together to make their voices heard.
- Program Overview — Sandy Hook Promise Sandy Hook Promise’s Know the Signs programs effectively teach youth and adults how to prevent school violence, shootings, and other harmful acts. Students and educators learn how to identify at-risk behaviors and intervene to get help. These early-prevention measures empower everyone to help keep schools and communities safe. Each program offers 30 to 40 minutes of student training that can be delivered in-person or online.
- 10 Questions for the Present: Parkland Student Activism | Facing History In this lesson, students will analyze how a 2018 high-school mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, spurred a group of student survivors to become passionate activists against gun violence. They will examine the tools used by their peers on the front lines of a burgeoning social movement—including their engagement with social media and journalism, their electoral strategies, and their internal organization. Students will put themselves in their peer activists’ shoes and use the 10 Questions Framework to examine in detail how the Parkland students led the way for the nationwide #NeverAgain protest. In the process, they will explore their own feelings toward their Parkland peers and the lessons they can learn from them.
- Gun Violence in Schools | Learning for Justice Use these resources to help navigate conversations about gun violence, school safety, mental health and how to take action after a school shooting.
- Take Action – March For Our Lives: Start A Chapter Form – March For Our Lives Born out of a tragic school shooting, March For Our Lives is a courageous youth-led movement dedicated to promoting civic engagement, education, and direct action by youth to eliminate the epidemic of gun violence.
Lesson Plan: “We’re the Generation That’s Going to End It” from Junior Scholastic, a step-by-step guide to teaching about the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in classrooms including an examination of school violence.