SCL Conference

The Student Centered Learning Conference was an interesting, somewhat frustrating event. There were a bunch of highlights and takeaways! Jamila Lyiscott, for example, was incredible. Her talk gave me a different framework for thinking and talking about education, which is really exciting (and endlessly frustrating) as I work on research about in/justice and learning in education. So often, when people talk about injustice in education, they’re really just talking about what access people have to mastering the curriculum. Jamila flipped the script and called out the curriculum itself (and the standards for mastering it) as the problem. One of my workshops also gave me the tool of photovoice, which I’m excited to continue exploring. However, the frustration with the conference came from the framing of the “youth researcher panel.” First of all, they are researchers. (period). As such, it seemed completely inappropriate to me to position them as asking the audience for guidance. They are the experts on their topics, and we should have been asking them the questions, if anything. Also, I noticed that those introducing/moderating the panel both felt the need to explain why youth research is important (which, shouldn’t the rest of the conference have done that?) and to summarize what each researcher said. Personally, I felt as though they did a perfectly fine job explaining their research themselves, and would have liked to see the leaders of this conference trust in youth voice a little more.