Urban High School Students’ Experiences of Participation as a Counterstory Constellation to Institutional and Policy Guidelines in Chile

Abstract

The present study uses a story constellation to explore the experiences of a group of students participating in their high school in an urban city in Central Chile. Because these experiences were motivated by the students’ participation in the student movement outside of their high school, they were not considered in any school or policy guidelines. Consequently, we argue for the value of this constellation as a counterstory that invites to acknowledge how students participate beyond institutional and citizenship policy guidelines and to recognize the contribution of their experiences in the pursuit of democratic thick forms of education and citizenship.

Keywords

high school programs activism social adolescent subjects

Introduction

Citizenship education policies have gained prominence in different countries around the world, including Chile (Keating, 2014; Ministerio de Educación, 2006). As a whole, these policies have contributed to the renewed emphasis on the importance of promoting, through the school curriculum, participatory conceptions of citizenship that include critical thinking around issues of public interest (Pykett, 2010). Nevertheless, these policies also have tended to focus on state political institutions without giving due consideration to the students’ own citizenship experiences, restricting rather than expanding students’ spaces for citizenship participation (Peterson & Davies, 2016). Thus, the present research argues that these experiences should also be taken into account. To sustain this claim, the notion of counterstories (Ciuffetelli Parker & Craig, 2017) is used because it makes visible the experiences lived out by students and teachers beyond the framework of current policies and institutional guidelines. The literature on the democratization of schools that recognizes the difference between a participatory “thick” and a procedural “thin” understanding of democratic participation provides further support to this argument (Gandin & Apple, 2012).

Consequently, we use a narrative inquiry approach to look into the student participation stories from an urban high school in central Chile during a period of time between 2011 and 2016 in which a national student social movement was also taking place. This movement emerged as a critique toward the state and the implementation of market-based policies throughout the past three decades. Such policies have led to the privatization of schools, which in turn has reinforced the segregation and inequality in the country (Kubal & Fisher, 2016; Somma, 2012). As part of this movement, the students carried out a series of demonstrations through street marches and were also actively engaged in protest activities within their own schools (Mayorga, 2018).

Specifically, the study uses a story constellation (Craig, 2007b) in which different stories are intertwined together, providing a panoramic view of the educational landscape in which they are located, to explore the experiences of a group of students participating in their high school. Because these experiences were motivated by the students’ participation in the student movement outside of their high school, they were not considered in any school or policy guidelines. Accordingly, the students faced a series of difficulties and conflicts without receiving support from any formal institutional or policy guideline. Consequently, we argue for the value of this constellation as a counterstory to those institutional and policy guidelines that do not fully acknowledge the students’ own experiences of participation. Alongside, we contribute with suggestions to the research on student participation and on citizenship education in Chile and in other countries with similar policies and propose connections to the field of urban education.

Theoretical Framework

The present study applies a narrative inquiry approach to uncover the stories that students experience in their particular school settings (Ciuffetelli Parker & Craig, 2017). Often, these stories stand in contrast to those guidelines and discourses that emerge from institutional and educational policies, built around managerial notions of standardization and measurement, and used to control the teaching and learning experiences of teachers and students (Olson & Craig, 2009). By doing so, stories lived by students and teachers may act as counterstories, showing that such guidelines and discourses cannot cover the entire scope of their experiences, and that it is possible to confront and even transform them (Milner, 2008). Consequently, counterstories serve as an epistemological tool that provide researchers with a “life space” in which they can understand how teachers and students give meaning to schools and, through their actions, seek to bring changes to their educational institutions and the broader context in which they are located (Xu & Connelly, 2010). In this sense, these stories/counterstories move beyond subjectivity to provide a holistic view in which the personal is intertwined with the political, cultural, and social contexts that conform to the life of students and teachers in schools (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007).

In addition, the perspective advanced by Craig (2007b), according to which people’s stories can be placed together in the form of story constellations, is central to this study. Building upon Clandinin and Connelly’s (1996) notion of schools as landscapes—within temporal, relational, and spatial dimensions—in which teachers’/students’ experiences/stories unravel with their separate plotlines while remaining interconnected, Craig underlines that once these experiences/stories are intertwined as a story constellation, they provide a panoramic/comprehensive view of these landscapes that is, nonetheless, fragmented and nonlinear just like in any experience. By doing so, these constellations suggest nuances and open space to navigate through the complexities of living in schools, raising questions and insights that move away from the normative frameworks advanced by institutional guidelines and other research, and evidence-based paradigms exclusively focused on variables and causal relations that can often be dismissive of the experiential knowledge of students and teachers (Craig, 2007a).

Specifically, in the field of citizenship education, narratives are essential for understanding how students can develop the experience of participating as citizens despite the difficulties present in their communities and society (Osler, 2015). Cavieres-Fernández (2014), for instance, used the stories of two teachers to explore how they applied their personal and professional experiences to help students engage civically beyond their self-centered interests. De Groot, Goodson, and Veugelers (2014) used the narratives of Dutch adolescents to analyze their citizenship engagement within contexts in which conceptions of democracy and democratic participation are not discussed. Similar studies, although not subscribing explicitly to a narrative methodology, share the experiences of teachers and students working together to discuss issues of public concern, all of which allows for the emergence of counternarratives that question the accountability context in place, which, with its focus on testing and measurement, displaces the need for students to develop empowering critical practices (Horn, 2017). Authors such as Rubin, Ayala, and Zaal (2017) similarly highlight the conflicting experiences of students as they try to engage with these forms of participation in schools.

Studies on the democratization of schools, with an important focus on democratic participation, provide important theoretical tools in the present work. Some studies have criticized a “thin” notion of democracy that informs school civic education programs that are merely focused on preparing students to vote in electoral processes (Carr, 2012). A thin notion of democracy promotes an individualistic form of participation in which citizens take an interest in their governments merely to advance their self-interests (Stitzlein, 2013). In contrast, a “thick” democracy is at the core of programs oriented to prepare students for collective forms of participation, coupled with the critical awareness to analyze and discuss the limits of the democratic system in place (Gandin & Apple, 2012). Carr and Thésee (2017) add an important element to this perspective by underlying that this form of “thick” participation within the formal curriculum needs to be built upon the students’ lived experiences within their own cultural backgrounds, which, in many cases, stand outside of the formal structures of schools. In this sense, citizenship participation is not only confined to the realm of state political institutions as promoted in schools, but also considers other public spaces in communities and social movements to promote the collective good (Carr, 2012). Therefore, developing a thick understanding of democracy in schools requires engaging students in discussions and actions that confront the economic inequality and cultural exclusion resulting from power structures and state policies and how these affect the students’ environments in which they develop as citizens (O’Sullivan, 2012).

Although many of the works on the democratization of schools focus on descriptive case studies, the descriptions are heavily based on narrative accounts (Apple & Beane, 2007; Shiller, 2013), some of which refer to experiences carried out by social movements in Latin America (Gandin & Apple, 2002; McCowan, 2010). In these narratives/stories, students and teachers engage and participate in knowledge construction by discussing issues of social justice and public interest, establishing connections to their communities, and visualizing their role as democratic citizens in relation not only to the state political institutions but also to civil society and the public sphere. In this work, the story constellation that will be presented adds to the perspectives provided by these narrative accounts that also act as counterstories to the institutional and policy context in place.

The Broader Political and Educational Context

Consistent with a narrative approach, a general context is required to understand the stories shared by student and teachers in schools. Pertinent to this study, first, we present an overview of some of the policies and guidelines on citizenship education that have been implemented internationally, including in Chile. Then, we focus on the student mobilizations that have influenced the way students experience their citizenship participation in Chile.

Citizenship Education Policies

Citizenship education policies in countries such as England and the United States have promoted students’ active citizenship in the face of what policy makers consider to be high levels of civic apathy and disengagement among the youth (Fischman & Haas, 2012). Accordingly, new guidelines have suggested that teachers use interactive pedagogies so that students can acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they need to participate in the political institutions of a democratic society (Pykett, 2010). In Chile, these guidelines are built on similar principles to promote the values and duties necessary for citizens to embrace the ideal of living together in the country within the legal and political order (Ministerio de Educación, 2006). The Ministry of Education has also suggested the use of interactive pedagogies in the classroom and the strengthening of those spaces outside the classroom that promote student participation, such as the student councils and the school councils in which the school community participates to deliberate on issues concerning the curriculum, the school environment, and the relationship between the school and the outside community (Ministerio de Educación, 2006).

However, there is a persistent criticism against these policies. Overall, in Australia, England, and Canada, citizenship education guidelines, despite including elements of a thick conception of democracy, such as the promotion of critical and active participation, tend to reinforce a thin conception by merely reinforcing a state orientation in which students are expected to participate mainly in partisan and voting activities (Zyngier, 2012). Consequently, significant democracy-related issues are excluded from the curriculum, for instance, the increasing levels of social inequality that impede participation in decision making in society, or the informal spaces in which the youth participate, including demonstrations or protests, which are considered irrelevant to the stability of the institutional political system (Bickmore, 2014). Furthermore, under a rhetoric of “crisis,” civic engagement is promoted as the remedy to the supposed apathy that youngsters have toward a civic commitment, without considering that their low levels of political participation are rather the result of the narrowing down of spaces in which they can contribute and challenge the obstacles that keep them excluded from the political system (Weinberg & Flinders, 2018).

Similar criticism, although less developed, can be found in some of the works carried out in Chile. In general, based on their analyses of the national curriculum guidelines handed out by the Ministry of Education, these studies criticize the emphasis placed on the political system over the students’ interests in participating in groups and associations from civil society (Muñoz & Torres, 2014). Vallejos (2016) also criticized the prominence of individual over collective forms of citizenship participation. Cavieres-Fernández (2017), through a narrative inquiry, not only reaffirms that citizenship education acts as a meganarrative that stresses a state-centered perspective but also claims that it could serve as an obstacle for teachers trying to accommodate their students’ citizenship experiences, many of which were developed in the midst of mobilizations that actually hold the state responsible for the social inequalities present in the country.

Specifically, there are also several critiques in relation to student councils, through which students learn, in particular, about democratic and citizenship participation. For example, McFarland and Starmanns (2009) showed that although student councils in the United States engage in a wide range of purposes and activities, these are not explicitly related to developing citizenship skills. There is evidence as well that in countries such as Sweden, England, and Wales, many student councils are directed by the adult staff merely to conform students to the official curriculum guidelines established according to institutional guidelines and performative indicators and standards (Andersson, 2018; Garratt & Piper, 2008). In this sense, the existing policy support to these councils has not gone hand in hand with implementations that effectively provide students the democratic space to organize and represent their points of views and interests and to foster the students’ interest toward active citizenship (Jerome, 2012). In Chile, this criticism is also noticeable among the school councils, which generally lack the institutional support for students to implement their own forms of governance and contribute to the democratization of their schools (Valenzuela, 2007).

Student Social Movement and Political and Citizenship Education

During the past decade in Chile, secondary and higher education students have led a social movement supported by other social and political groups. It emerged as a response to decades of promarket educational policies (Somma, 2012), which supported the significant rise of a private school sector subsidized by state funding that has competed for enrollment, attracting a large amount of students from underfunded public schools. For such competition to happen, a measurement system based on national testing was put in place under the rhetoric that it would provide quality education for all students (Alarcón, Frites, & Gajardo, 2015). However, the result has been the deepening of economic and social segregation between students from higher income backgrounds and those from lower income backgrounds, who mostly attend public schools (Garcés, 2013). Therefore, through their movement, the students pressure the governments to implement policies that will secure more funding for schools in poverty areas, eliminate for-profit educational institutions that result in the increased privatization of schools, and remove any form of discrimination in an educational system strongly based on the selection of students to promote competition among schools (Kubal & Fisher, 2016).

In terms of the citizenship participation of secondary students, this movement also had important effects. First, they provided students with a space in which to learn more about the representative democratic system in place, recognize its limits, and demand transformations to regulate the relationship between the political and the economic sphere (Figueroa & Cavieres-Fernández, 2017). Second, students were able to experience alternative forms of organization through open assemblies based on horizontal relations and direct participation, along with different political actions to support their demands, including street marches and takeovers of their schools (O’Malley & Sarah, 2013). Finally, as part of their movement, some groups of students also tried to influence the curriculum by pushing for the inclusion of topics and teaching methods that were more aligned to their interests, as well as to contribute to the governance in their schools toward creating a more democratic environment (Bergerson, 2016). Nevertheless, studies on the effect of the student movement in Chile have remained scarce.

Method

This study uses narrative inquiry to look into the student participation stories from a high school in an urban city in Chile. Using a story constellation, we intertwine these stories to provide a panoramic view to explore the experiences of a group of students participating in their high school. Consistent with this narrative approach, the stories we present are located within a three-dimensional inquiry space (Clandinin, 2013) constituted by (a) place, with a range of spaces that include classrooms, the student council, and the sites of student mobilizations within and outside the high school; (b) temporality, from a period of time from 2011 to 2016 and connected by a shared sense of the past, present, and future; and (c) relationality, formed by the relations between students, between students and teachers, and the relationships established by students with the broader political and educational context.

The Field Texts Recollection Process

The setting for this study is an urban public high school in central Chile. Similar to most of the public urban schools in the country, the majority of the student body comes from families of a low to lower middle income backgrounds (Cavieres-Fernández, 2011). This high school is recognized in the city for being historically politically active, as declared in its mission statement. In particular, its students stood out for their protests during the dictatorship imposed on the country from 1973 to 1989. In 2011, they were also heavily engaged in the student movement that emerged in the country. Teachers also have a political reputation and a group of them participated actively in street marches and in demonstrations against the recent implementation of a set of policies on the teacher profession (Cavieres-Fernández & Apple, 2016). Nevertheless, the political activity of its members has also created tensions in the high school, further amplified by the accountability educational policies in place. All these aspects taken together made this high school an interesting site in which not only to learn more about the student movement but also to learn about the students’ participation. To carry out this research in the high school, all the related institutional protocols were followed.

During 2011, Victor was a teacher in this high school and had both witnessed the conflicts that emerged between students and teachers, and gained the students’ trust by supporting their demands in favor of having more participation in the high school. Based on this, in September 2012, he carried out a preliminary research to explore the student movement and how it had affected the high school. Because teachers were not allowed entry to the student’s political organization, Victor only organized a focus group as a data gathering tool with five male and three female 11th- and 12th-grade students who had high levels of participation in the student movement and the high school, and were willing to share their experiences on these issues. In addition, because he also wanted to hear the teachers’ perspective on the students’ participation, Victor interviewed two teachers, a male philosophy teacher and a male music teacher, because they were vocal about their concerns regarding the negative effects that this participation was having on the high school. Each interview lasted 1 hr.

In 2014, after a new student movement cycle, Eduardo joined the research as an external researcher. The authors agreed on the importance of a series of student stories that emerged in the 2012 interviews and that shed light over the students’ difficulties to participate, relating not only to the lack of institutional support but also to the policy context. Accordingly, with the objective of recollecting more stories, individual 1-hr-long interviews were carried out with three female students and one male student from year levels 10 to 12 who, as their counterparts in 2012 who had already graduated, had an outstanding participation in the student movement. Therefore, they could provide accounts of instances of student participation to which teachers were not given access. These participants were asked to recall their experiences with the 2014 student movement, the effects it generated in the high school, and its contributions to the students’ organization. Alongside, 1-hr-long individual interviews were also carried out with a male and a female biology teacher, a female music teacher, and a male social studies teacher. In contrast with the teachers from 2012, they were supportive of the students’ demands and had experience participating in demonstrations. These teachers were asked similar open-ended questions as the ones used with the students, with a focus on their support to the students’ participation in the student movement and the high school.

By 2016, with stories from 2012 and 2014, and a new round of student protests, the authors had the cultural intuition (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002)—sustained on their personal and professional experience with the high school and with teachers in the country that supported their students’ participation in the student movement (Cavieres-Fernández, 2015)—that although these stories were part of a same “text,” nevertheless, it was not “complete.” The students’ forms of participation and their relationship with the high school was changing, all of which begged for more analysis. Consequently, in October 2016, there was a new recollection of stories that replicated the design from 2014 to maintain a certain symmetry between these two data gatherings. As before, another four male students from year level 12 who were now, as their predecessors who had graduated, among the visible leaders of the students, were invited to participate in this study. They were asked to share their experiences related to the recent student demonstrations, and the relationship between these experiences and the high school, specifically the teachers. Finally, two female social studies teachers, one female philosophy teacher, and one male music teacher were asked to participate. Because they had not participated in 2014, the expectation was that they could bring new insights on how the teaching staff were becoming more supportive of the students.

Analysis Tools

To analyze the stories that emerged from the data gathering, the tools of narrative inquiry were used, namely, broadening, burrowing, and restorying (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). First, broadening was applied to situate the stories we select in light of the theoretical framework, which provides the analytical context of the study (Goodson, 1995). The intention was to treat the participants’ contribution not as opinions, but as narratives and, therefore, to connect theory and field texts not merely from an abstract theoretical level, but also in reference to the concrete experiential elements included in the stories.

Second, burrowing was used to explore the experiences that compose these stories. Because of the differences in the participant samples, and the variations in the stories along the years, the stories from 2012, 2014, and 2016 were analyzed separately as well as the student and teacher stories within those years. Traditional qualitative coding strategies were used (Saldaña, 2013). Accordingly, inductive and deductive codes relevant to this study were used to reorganize the stories around main themes, such as democratic student participation in the high school, student movement, conflicts and difficulties for participating, student and teacher collaboration, and national policies. For the analysis of the teacher stories, the analysis remained focused on the same topics centered on the participation of students in the high school. In this sense, we also considered the teacher stories as student participation stories.

Considering this reorganization, restorying was applied to construct a plotline (Goodson & Gill, 2011). Thus, the researchers’ interpretation was used to integrate the series of stories into a distinct constellation. In this constellation, while their differences remain, the stories are interconnected by the common themes, allowing a panoramic view that is not entirely coherent, but which is sufficiently comprehensive to capture the educational landscape in which they are located. Accordingly, the authors retell the student stories, suggesting a three-part narrative structure that integrates the stories and show their progression within a three-dimensional narrative space. The first part constitutes the introduction that situates as a starting point the High school’s crisis and the related conflicts and difficulties for students’ participation, the second part presents a transition in which the students experience new forms of participation in their high school, and the third part is proposed as an open-ended conclusion with the progress made by the students. The constellation also includes the student participation stories told by their teachers to enrich the students’ perspectives.

Although the authors construct a narrative structure based on their interpretative comments, these are followed by the stories as told by the students and teachers. For this reason, each participant in this study was quoted and great care was exercised to ensure the accurate translation of quotes from Spanish to English. This intermingling of the authors’ comment with the participant quotes supports the plausibility of the authors’ interpretation of these stories (Polkinghorne, 2007), while this interpretation respects the genuineness of the stories just as the participants recalled living them (Clandinin, 2013). In addition, the inclusion of teacher stories alongside the student stories, all stories coming from different timelines, also reinforces the trustworthiness (Craig, 2009) of this story constellation built upon the integration of a diversity of stories that, nevertheless, sustain each other to form the three-dimensional inquiry landscape in which they are located.

The Student Participation Story Constellation

2012: The “Crisis” as the Students’ Participation Starting Point

In 2012, the students in our constellation saw their high school as a part of an unjust educational market-based system in which the school was “constantly induced into crisis, because it does not have appropriate funding and receives no privileges” (Silvia). Silvia further complained that the system should understand that the “high school and the students are not a product. The high school has not been designed as a shop.” Furthermore, for students, the crisis had deepened because the high school did not have “pedagogical autonomy” (Carla), which led to an authoritarian structure with a strong emphasis on discipline. As a matter of fact, one of the students (Simón) said students felt like they were “in jail because the teachers only tell us what we have to do and how to do it. That’s why I think this is an educational crisis.” This feeling was supported by another student, Ricardo, who further remarked that “every teacher who works here should really know what we think and respect us.” Much of this critique reflected the demands that the national student movement was putting forward.

As a result of this atmosphere of crisis, in 2011, the students started mobilizing for the democratization of spaces, such as the classroom. This new mind-set, resulting from the students’ participation in demonstrations outside of the high school, was evident in Lucia’s comment: “We have learned that there are options. Before, the teachers gave their opinions and that was it. Now, we have a space in which to stand up and say, ‘I don’t agree.’” It followed that students also put “pressure on the administration because there are things that need to happen within the high school, and they need to give us the space” (Ramon). This led to an 8-month high school takeover that had serious consequences. However, the students did not consider fair that the administration blamed their demonstrations for the high school crisis: “The teachers know the reasons why this happened, but they stick to the simplest criticism about the damage to the building or the material that was stolen. But they know that there is an unfair system behind it” (Jose). In 2012, this led to an overt conflict, with students standing outside of the principal’s office for months during recess to demand his resignation, which finally happened. Rene explained, “The principal was always absent and didn’t like the students. He would just block the students’ activities. He just wanted to keep us quiet.”

From the teachers’ perspective, the crisis started when the standardized testing scores dropped because of the lack of efficiency on the part of the school administration: “The administration did not have the cohesiveness of past administrations (. . .) during the last years; it looked weakened, divided, with a lot of contradicting guidelines” (Mr. Lopez). Mr. Pinto also blamed some of the teachers because they were not showing commitment and needed to “remember that they are in a privileged place. No other public school in [the city] has reached the scores we have, despite the crisis. Therefore, teachers need to make a bigger effort” (Mr. Pinto). Finally, according to Mr. Lopez and Mr. Pinto, the students had also been uncooperative. Although the high school needed some democratization, the students did not have the knowledge to implement changes, as was obvious in the recent takeover. The assemblies, through which the students wanted to influence the high school, created a larger distance because the student leaders were not willing to reach agreements with the teachers unless all the students agreed.

2014: Experiencing New Form of Student Participation in the High School

By 2014, according to a new generation of student leaders, the difficulties to participate had continued because the teachers’ authoritarian relationships with students had still remained: “The teacher is always up there transmitting the knowledge, always in the front; giving orders and we must follow the line” (Maria). From Juan’s perspective, the main purpose of the educational system and the high school was to improve the indicators for the educational market: “They are not designed to create democratic classrooms. Nowadays, everybody knows that education is conceived as a way to prepare people for standardized tests.” Nevertheless, although they maintained their criticism of the new administration, students appreciated its willingness to negotiate with them and the support of some teachers toward their efforts to democratize the high school, especially in the classroom. For example, Sonia commented, “Even in Biology, so distant from our discussions on current events, we discuss about the news, and the teachers give us those 15 minutes to talk about these things that we need to talk about.”

In such context, the student participation in the national movement was continuing to have an impact: “The students achieved an organization that no one thought possible” (Sonia). The students also valued their own participation in street marches:

I don’t think that when the high school goes on a march, the students are missing classes. It is part of the education that the high school should give us because it introduces you to debates that we generally don’t have. (Juan)

In this respect, participating in the student movement provided them with a significant space:

Participating in a movement is important for the personal development of each person, that students get to know their rights and the programs implemented in the schools, so if there are things you don’t like, you can change them, not just remain silent. (María)

Maria further said, “In the student movement, the students from this high school are the most informed and participative ones, with the biggest autonomy from the school administration to make our own decisions and go out on the streets if we want.”

In terms of the high school, the students still remembered positive and negative aspects of the conflictive 2011 takeover. Juan recalled,

I had friends that worked in the kitchen and had their own rooms. They even had small gardens inside the classroom, as if they were going about their everyday life within the takeover, which lasted so long that the high school was becoming their home.

He added, “Sometimes people would come and paint murals, and the people that were here most of the time were worried about survival stuff, like trying to get food and cook.” However, for María, “the takeover was really good and well organized at the beginning,” but “it got distorted later on. There were a lot of people that weren’t even from the high school or weren’t interested in the movement. So, you end up losing sight of what you were fighting for.” This criticism was shared by Sandra: “We lost a year. Not much can be achieved with a year-long takeover. A lot of students decided to leave the high school (because there were no classes due to the takeover).”

Despite the criticism, participating in the student movement was motivating students to expand their organization in the high school: “Participation [was] always limited to one group. It is the same logic you see at the national level: a group of enlightened students that lead in the high school” (Juan). In contrast, the organization of assemblies provided a more participatory experience: “We had several small assemblies on our list of demands. We had questions, and these were answered by the majority” (Sandra). As a result, the students decided to create a new organizational structure called CODERE (the “representatives’ council” in Spanish), alongside the student council formed by a smaller group of students: “Each class in the high school [equivalent to a homeroom] has its council, and the student that best represents it is chosen to attend the CODERE to make decisions with the rest of the representatives” (Maria). Certainly, some difficulties still remained in the CODERE: “Sometimes if someone didn’t think like the others, for example, about going to a protest, the others would blame him or insult him. If we can’t be united among ourselves, we can’t expect unity at the macro level” (Sonia).

As for the teachers, they thought that, at a national level, the participation of students in demonstrations made significant contributions: “Their demands for changes are now included in the government policies. There is a before and an after; the kids were able to put issues that were not considered before on the table” (Ms. Muñoz). Mr. Frias emphasized that “this student movement presented pedagogy as an issue, something not present in other historical movements. The students have tried to respond to what they consider to be inadequate in terms of pedagogical practices.” Nevertheless, some criticism still remained, especially related to the presence of violence:

I can agree with a takeover for making a space so people can get together to discuss, to reflect about what is happening, and to have an intervention in a space, but I can’t agree with the destruction of the school property. (Mr. Varas)

Applying such analysis to the high school, Ms. Castro reflected,

It is hard to accept that our own students didn’t want to take care of what is ours. I also feel responsible that as teachers we weren’t able to instill in them a sense of respect. Because a lot of things have been lost and destroyed.

Despite this criticism, the teachers agreed that the students were increasing their participation in the high school: “The students now have more freedom for their meetings, the CODERE. They are given the space to organize themselves and express their needs and expectations” (Ms. Castro). Mr. Frias added, “There isn’t one class in which there isn’t a group of students that are not participating actively.” Nevertheless, this teacher also shared his doubts about whether students were just being reactive in their participation. In his opinion, the students have “started experimenting in terms of organization” just to criticize the political parties and their form of organization. From Mr. Varas’ perspective, the students’ participation was not necessarily helping to solve the problems in the high school, and the administration was merely giving the students more freedom “to avoid a bigger conflict.” This view was further developed by Ms. Muñoz: “I see a huge divide between students and teachers. The students reject the teachers; they don’t have that sense that we are all in this together. We are almost the enemy.”

Consequently, the teachers were in favor of democratizing the high school but in a way that brought students and teachers together: “We need open forums with the students because they allow an interchange, so the kids can realize that we aren’t against them; we are on their side, with some nuances, [and] as partners in this process” (Mr. Varas). For this to happen, Mr. Frias considered it crucial that students “should be part of the decisions made in this institution; the concrete way to do it is debatable. I do not know the concrete format for this form of democratization, but everybody should participate, the students and the teachers.” For some teachers, this democratization also had to affect the classroom. In the words of Ms. Castro, “we follow a behaviorist model with strict rules, [although] we try to combine models. But if we want a real participative democracy, we need to be decisively more student-centered.”

2016: Consolidating the Student Participation in the High School

Throughout 2016, a series of new difficulties were appearing, some of which came from the students themselves. Marcos summarized, “With more organization, there are new groups, but they have the same logic of previous years of not wanting to overcome their differences. With this individualism, everything remains the same.” Another important obstacle was a lack of interest: “In the school, the students wanted to be informed or go to marches. But with this capitalism and consumerism, we are losing that. Many students just want to stay home and play online games” (Carlos). Nevertheless, the student leadership was trying out new strategies to include more students in the decision making and in their activities and to discuss issues such as sexuality and gender, environmental issues, or current events. According to Raul, “Our best strategies were to have debates and to open the biggest amounts of spaces, for instance, the CODERE, in which we could listen to the voices of the students.” In addition, the student council was strengthened: “When there were discussions, we would refer to our new statute, which also resulted from our own debates, so it was validated” (Pedro).

Although, the students recognized as a difficulty their limited organizational skills—“I don’t think we achieved much this year. Perhaps we should do more radical things.” (Carlos)—their discussions on the effect of policies on the educational system and their high school were helping them improve their reasons to participate: “Before, there was such a need to mobilize that anything became a movement. Once, the student council organized a pen strike just because the students didn’t want any classes” (Pedro). According to Marcos, “a movement is justified if it promoted by the student grass roots. But it isn’t if it just a political plot by some organizations for their own interests. We have to participate only if we have clear reasons.” He further said,

If we are fond of our high school, we can’t destroy our bathrooms or paint all over the building. With our love for public education and our high school, we need to fight so they can flourish. Love and identification should be the first steps in our future mobilizations.

As a result, the students were achieving new goals and insights with their participation, as it happened during a 2-week takeover in which, although they were not able to commit the entire community, the students had important personal experiences. Leo recalled,

On the first night, we had to cook for ourselves, and I felt that my schoolmates were my brothers in arms. It was the takeover’s biggest achievement: to make us feel like brothers of this high school and public education.

Pedro shared a similar experience:

When you have to clean the high school toilets with someone else [during a take-over], you start understanding how he thinks and acts. On many occasions, among the political forces, one simply thinks that the other just wants to do harm.

All of this was helping them become more creative as well. For example, they started adding a “cultural” component to their street marches: “something that is super Latin-American—the batucadas, the carnival, the music. People really like it; it looks great. We exit the high school marching, and when we get tired, the guys from the batucada start playing” (Marcos). Carlos recalls that during a national 1-day demonstration, “some schoolmates got on the city buses to explain to the people our demands. It was one of the new ways, and it worked. People were talking about it.”

Along with these gains, the students increasingly started welcoming their teachers’ support and even invited them to the auditorium for a discussion on the high school takeover. According to Carlos, “It was helpful to listen to the teachers’ view that we were being manipulated by other secondary student associations. Of course, others thought that the teachers were the ones manipulating us so we wouldn’t miss classes.” Although many students remained cautious, they continued inviting their teachers: “In previous years, the teachers were not part of the movement. Now the student organization wanted to bring everyone together. So our takeover was open and the teachers could participate” (Leo). The students’ participation in the movement affected the classroom as well: “The students had faced so many scenarios that they weren’t afraid to participate in math class, for example, and there was a lot of respect toward the teachers that backed the mobilizations” (Pedro). Marcos described, “The student movement produced changes in the curriculum. In history class, we started focusing on Latin America and not on things that nobody cared about. This would have been impossible before.”

Overall, the teachers supported the students’ participation in the student movement, although they were against the takeovers because the students missed classes, which affected their academic performance, and their motivations were not always clear. Ms. Perez remarked, “A lot of the kids were saying, ‘I have never been in a takeover, and it is our right to be in one.’ So they voted in favor of it.” Nevertheless, a group of teachers remained in dialogue with the students: “We went to the assembly in which they decided the takeover. Many students recognized that it was not only about this, that there was an educational problem in the country. We gave our opinions and contributed to their understanding” (Mr. Aros). Afterward, they liked the nature of the takeover: “Actually, the students didn’t call it a takeover but an open occupation, not with a lock on the door as before but as a space for everyone to participate in different activities” (Ms. Tapia). As a result, many students who had not been engaged before got involved and started participating in other political activities, such as “street marches and public forums” organized in the high school (Ms. Correa).

In such a context, the teachers complimented the implementation of workshops as a collaborative and learning experience based on their students’ interest: “This generation is sending a message that the occupied spaces help to go beyond the curriculum” (Ms. Tapia). Still, some criticism remained, “The students asked for a workshop about rock music, but their enthusiasm changed, and less and less participated on the following days” (Mr. Aros). Nevertheless, the workshops also affected the classroom, allowing for discussions on issues such as the student movement, which helped make the teachers “understand the education of our students not only in academic terms but in relation to their participation in the democratization of our high school. This relates to our daily practices, how we teach” (Ms. Correa). It also included discussing about the way the students participated in the high school. Ms. Perez described, “In class some students criticized the takeovers: ‘We didn’t get anything out of them.’ Others said that they would do it again. So we went over the concepts of democracy, and we talked about different forms of participation.”

As a result, the group of students that participated in the high school was becoming more robust: “They are not many, but they make a lot of noise. The others that are not interested do not have the arguments to oppose those who are committed” (Ms. Correa). Their experiences were expanding their perspectives on several issues for the future as well. For instance, in the words of Ms. Perez, “Some students participate in their neighborhoods. In class, one student asked how he could help in his neighborhood where gun fire is often heard. They felt that the high school had to be an open space for the community.” According to Mr. Aros, learning about the political context was also making students be more sympathetic toward the high school in their critiques: “The students have become aware of the educational laws. They have a strong criticism against the standardized tests, [but] realize that there are a lot of things that are beyond the high school[’s decisions].”

Altogether, the students’ participation was pointing to an emerging educational landscape in which students and teachers were coming together to collaborate and learn; as Ms. Tapia describes, “With the students I learned that there are other forms of participation [beyond voting]. When we went out marching together, we all felt more like citizens” (Ms. Tapia). Although in these years policy implementations had remained under the same logic and the institutional guidelines on participation had not significantly changed, the expansion of the students’ participation was helping the initial conflict and the corresponding crisis in the high school to finally recede.

Discussion

For our discussion, we argue for the value of this story constellation as a counterstory to institutional and policy guidelines. We also offer suggestions for future research on citizenship education as well as propose connections to the field of urban education.

The Value of the Student Participation Constellation as a Counterstory

In this work, we explored the experiences of a group of students participating in their high school. By putting them together as a story constellation, they provided us with a panoramic view within temporal, relational, and spatial dimensions that cut across the students’ experiences and give us a glance into the students’ institutional settings and their larger social and educational context. This glance references a series of difficulties and conflicts present in the students’ stories that reaffirm our assumption that taking into account how students participate as citizens from their standpoint shows a complexity that contrasts with some of the narrow perspectives advanced by institutional and policy guidelines, as described in the theoretical framework. In this sense, we consider this constellation as a counterstory.

Accordingly, this story constellation questions some of these narrow perspectives advanced by official policies in Chile that, during a period of student mobilizations, which have heavily criticized the negative effects produced by these policies, have kept the emerging forms of student participation marginalized (Cavieres-Fernández, 2015). For instance, the reference to a crisis placed at the outset of the constellation provides a background for this tension between the students’ lived experiences and official guidelines. This notion of crisis has played a pivotal discursive role in justifying the need for current educational policies, including those on citizenship education. This is consistent with the experiences initially shared by the teachers in the story constellation in which testing and student participation within preestablished parameters seem to be the solution to such crisis. By contrast, the student stories, later supported by stories told by teachers, locate the cause of the crisis in the policies themselves and situate the solution in the students’ own participation.

The Constellation as a Counterstory to Envision New Institutional Contexts

In addition, the constellation describes some of the experiences that students can develop to increase their participation in their high schools despite the lack of support from institutional guidelines and policies. In this counterstory, these experiences were in line with the analyses on how thick forms of democratic participation can confront those other “thin” forms present in official guidelines (Carr, 2012). In this respect, the story constellation references how the overall market-driven context displaced the importance of forming students for democratic participation in the high school. Such a context was related to forms of individualism also present in the student body, which was reinforced by an elitist “thin” model of student council. As a response, and following the experiences that they were having in the student movement outside of their high school, students committed to the “thick” democratization of their high school. Consequently, they supported collective forms of organization through assemblies and other spaces with ample representation, and they opened their classroom to discussions on issues of their interest such as the inequalities emerging in current economic and educational policies. From this perspective, the story constellation confirms the importance of participatory practices, such as those discussed in studies on the democratization of schools (Gandin & Apple, 2012).

Nevertheless, the panoramic view (Craig, 2007b) provided by the constellation does not allow for the in-depth analyses of these “thick” forms of participation promoted by the students. Rather, it highlights the dimensions of place, relationality, and time present that made these experiences possible. This is particularly important considering the difficulties and conflicts that were present, which could not be resolved with simple prescriptions. Consequently, the creation of new places in which the students had autonomy was relevant in order for them to experience and to assess alternative forms of participation. These new places, as the takeovers, were also crucial to cultivate a sense of responsibility toward their high school. As for relations, it was essential to move from antagonistic relationships toward the development of collaborative and friendly bonds among students and to the nurturing of dialogue between teachers and students, which required sustained relationships of trust. In terms of time, persevering over an extensive period of time was crucial to maintain a process that was not linear but constructed under contingencies, tensions, and setbacks that required that students became aware of their gains as well of their limits and excesses. Therefore, this progression had to cut across different generations of students who built upon their memories to continue building it.

However, although all these experiential dimensions can be described separately, their greatest significance resides in reflecting a particular educational landscape (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996) in which the counterstory constellation is located. As such, it ultimately helps to envision institutional contexts that can better help the students to participate, especially in times of educational policies that, under a regime of testing, do not fully recognize the centrality of students’ experience. In this sense, each story considered on itself does not contribute as much as if put together within this three-part constellation that starts from an initial conflict, moves through the experiencing of new solutions, and ends with a sense of progress that is, nevertheless, open to new challenges. Therefore, just as in the emerging educational landscape in this constellation, any envisioned institutional context, instead of merely advancing abstract state-centered models of citizenship, should accommodate the wide-ranging participation experiences of students, including those coming from outside of schools that can be complex and conflictive. By doing so, it will further support students to expand them, allowing them, through the retelling and reliving of their stories, to refine their reasons to participate, improve their forms of participation and, in the words of one student, to commit in helping their school to “flourish.”

Narratives and Research on Citizenship Participation

Although several studies in the field of citizenship education use different forms of narratives, few of them explicitly draw on narrative inquiry to explore the conflicting versions held by students and teachers and those advanced by official policies on the ways in which students develop as citizens in schools. From this perspective, the story constellation presented in this work contributes to the research that is not positioned from the perspective of overarching policy guidelines or abstract models of citizenship education but from the experiences of those who engage with citizenship in schools (Aspa, McGregor, & Mills, 2016). Furthermore, this study can provide important insights to those quantitative studies that seek to better understand the connection that should exist between students’ identities and knowledge, and citizenship education across different geographical contexts (Knowles, Torney-Purta, & Barber, 2018).

Accordingly, the story constellation also gives support to the research that values various elements in citizenship education policies but still questions a form of participation that, by not considering the students’ lived experiences, ends up as, in the words of Fischman and Haas (2014), a “narrow idealistically discourse.” Nevertheless, because of the open-endedness of the story constellation, which touches on a wide range of issues rather than advancing clearly bounded suggestions, the current study poses further questions that do require more focused approaches. For instance, which of the steps taken to make the student council more representative were more inclusive and participatory, especially considering the level of individualism that was also present among students? In addition, the relationship between students and teachers in the narrative invites further analysis on how the ongoing tensions that exist between teacher authority and student autonomy can be mediated, and how discussion can be promoted at all school levels, including the classroom. All of the above are crucial elements in analyzing changes in the curriculum and policy toward providing relevant spaces for students to develop as citizens across different contexts and settings (Cremin & Faul, 2012).

The story constellation complements as well the studies on the democratization of schools and their aim of building descriptive works to show that such democratization is possible (Apple & Beane, 2007). Similar to those studies, the story constellation shows how students can commit to forms of citizenship participation, including dissent, to create inclusive public spaces, such as in their high schools, which move beyond the limits placed by state-centered political institutions (Banaji, 2008). Nevertheless, in many of those studies on the democratization of schools, there is a focus on the institutional guidelines and resources in place that prove crucial so students can develop these forms of experiences. Although in the story constellation in this study some of those resources do exist (e.g., in the support given by teachers), they are not widespread. In this sense, by shifting the attention from the institutional to the personal, this study suggests the value of students’ and teachers’ experiences as a crucial resource that requires further exploration for their potential contributions to confront those policy contexts that downplay rather than support thick forms of democratic citizenship in schools.

Finally, even though this work does not explicitly focus on the recent student social movement in Chile, it is an important reference to further grasp the nature of the experiences that students were trying to bring into their high school. For this reason, it invites, as well, to learn more about the significance of students participating in social movements (Edwards, 2012). Alongside, because this student movement occurred mainly in the urban cities of the country, in a context in which political and economic trends are realigning schools to the emerging interests of markets, its demands and critiques speak to the changes affecting urban schools and the effect these have over students’ learning, something that is not only happening in Chile, but also globally (Pink & Noblit, 2017). Specifically in this story constellation, these changes occur in an urban city that resembles other urban contexts in other parts of the world that are going through similar processes of educational and social/urban segregation (Lipman, 2011). Therefore, helping to understand how students can participate in these urban cities’ high schools may open space for a new intersection between citizenship and urban education studies that foregrounds the importance of “thick” forms of democratization to counter some of the problematic influences resulting from educational policies worldwide.

Conclusion

Using a story constellation that provides a panoramic view of the educational landscape in which it is located, the study explored the experiences of a group of students participating in their high school in an urban city in central Chile. Because these experiences were motivated by the students’ participation in a student movement outside of their high school, they faced difficulties and conflicts without receiving support from any formal institutional or policy guideline. For this reason, we argue for the value of this constellation as a counterstory to those institutional and policy guidelines that do not fully acknowledge the students’ own experiences of participation. Accordingly, the constellation questions some of the policies on citizenship education in Chile and in countries with similar policies. In addition, the educational landscape that the constellation reflects, within temporal, spatial, and relational dimensions, helps to envision alternative institutional contexts that are better suited to help students increase their participation than those emerging under current policy implementations. From this perspective, this counterconstellation connects to a broader tradition of counterstorytelling that puts a “face” to what happens in “educational theory and practice,” challenges the “wisdom” of those standing at the center of society—in this case, of policies—and opens new “windows” to foresee how reality/schools can be transformed (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 36).

Consequently, the story constellation in this study contributes to the field of citizenship education because it offers perspectives from the students’ standpoint to better understand their participation in their schools along with their difficulties and possibilities. Although this constellation reflects just one educational landscape among the countless others that exist worldwide, including in the high school that is mentioned in this work, its connection to notions of thick democratic participation in schools, which are based on similar experiences happening in multiple countries, points to a common ground that can make this study relevant within a wider international scope. Such a common ground is also affected by predominant accountability reforms that are standardizing educational systems around the globe to align schools to markets, contributing to social unrest due to the persistent inequalities that global capitalism brings into the urban cities (Kauko, Takala, & Rinne, 2018; Pink & Noblit, 2017). From this perspective, this study is an invitation to acknowledge the numerous ways in which students participate beyond current institutional and citizenship policy guidelines, and to recognize the contribution of their experiences and activism to overcome the conflicts in their schools and broader urban settings in the pursuit of democratic thick forms of education and citizenship.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Eduardo Cavieres-Fernández

Author Biographies

Eduardo Cavieres-Fernández, PhD in Education (University of Wisconsin-Madison), holds a position as a researcher at Center for Advanced Research (CEA), Universidad de Playa Ancha, Valparaíso, Chile.

Víctor Figueroa-Farfán is a doctoral student in the Education program at the Universidad Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. He is an instructor at Universidad Andrés Bello, Viña del Mar-Chile.

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