Because Student Voice is mainly characterized as dialogue, it sometimes does not occur to educators to find ways to make it visible, and to refine and shape what it is students are saying. TEA has developed a rich culture of “making visible” Student Voice. A primary way we capture Student Voice is with video. We have filmed thousands of hours of student interviews--mostly conducted by students--as well as filming students and teachers in action in the classroom. We also have shaped this raw footage into a dizzying number of movies, at last count approaching 50. TEA trains and supports faculty to do this kind of work.  

The TEA team’s focus on Making Visible was first propelled by work begun at Chabot College under a Hewlett-Carnegie grant. TEA team members then created the Faculty Inquiry Network in order to train faculty from around the state. Building upon statewide momentum begun by this work, many  programs across California began uncovering a rich vein of Student Voices.

Student Voices are rarely merely anecdotes; in every student’s ground level lived experience is the likelihood of embedded trends about student learning. Thus, uncovering and evaluating Student Voices—coupled with the effort to Make Visible this abundant data— plays a central role as community colleges across California respond to the Climate Crisis.

Adding to the richness of this work is the fact that at many schools, students are taking control of this technology: conducting interviews, editing video, and creating products. These students also play a central role in shaping emerging work by contributing their expertise about their own education. 

A common way to capture Student Voices is of course to simply interview the student; but taking the “ask-10-canned-questions-with-no-follow-ups” approach preempts an important opportunity to get students engaged and talking. If we think of it not as an interview and more as a conversation, the student may well surprise us with her insights.

One-on-one interviews aren’t the only way to capture Student Voices. We can film: work being done in the classroom setting; student think-alouds and collaborative problem solving exercises; roundtable discussions; focus groups....

• We can give students the camera and watch: students create their own videos;

• students interview students; students interview themselves; students bring back

• footage from their lives outside college; students record the state of their local environment and surrounding nature. 

• And video isn’t the only way of Making Visible. Any time students generate content that we can later analyze as part of our teaching—classroom work, assessments, self-reflections--we are uncovering Student Voices.

One of the most exciting developments about Student Voice over the last decade is the impetus to take Student Voice outside the classroom, out into the larger campus and the surrounding community. This is often posed as being a matter of social justice and of democratizing education, and TEA believes this the natural and crucial evolution of Student Voice. TEA’s trainings and workshops support these efforts and in addition  support faculty in Making Visible the many successes that are engendered.