“Give me a place to stand and I’ll move the earth”

This article was first published in ReConnectEd.

By Roger Holdsworth

Connect has always worked on a ‘theory of change’ of telling positive but critical stories, in sufficient detail that enables others to try what you’ve been doing - but, of course, adapt it to different circumstances. Therefore it’s had goals of encouraging reflection on practice, of documenting and sharing that in enough detail to enable further adoption, and developing and sharing resources to support this. For the last few years it has formalised those ideas on page 2 of each issue.

There are a few ‘importances’ from the Connect experience - that have enabled us to get people to take the issues seriously and to acknowledge the role of the journal in that, both in terms of contributing, and also in terms of ‘listening’ to what it shares.

1. The importance of where one stands

Archimedes is quoted as saying:

‍“Give me a place to stand and I’ll move the earth.”

‍We can reflect on this as an indication of the importance of the positioning of Connect in supporting or bringing about change. (Archimedes was actually talking about the principle of the lever - and the metaphor holds: Connect as a lever. But that also requires acknowledgement of the importance of the length of the lever - and we can see this in terms of longevity: length of time. There may be other ideas of length of vision that are important too.)

This can have several implications. Dana Mitra talked at the Student Voice Conferences in 2019 and 2020 about the importance of deciding whether one was working ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ systems. Being ‘inside’, or working within the system, as part of it, is also to be committed to gradualism, and to largely avoiding confrontation - or doing that wisely and carefully; to be ‘outside’ may free one to be more critical, but it then trades this off against potential influence. I suspect that the reality is more nuanced, and that insider/outsider-ship is relative not absolute; ie one’s position can be ‘inside’ in comparison with some other positions, but at the same time ‘outside’ to others. There are layers.

But largely, Connect has worked from ‘inside’ in another sense, in that I started it as a practising classroom teacher (so there was the sense of‘knowing the way things are’) before then working as an education bureaucrat and University researcher.

Time however took me ‘outside’, as systemic changes occurred that I wasn’t part of or had experienced. And even at the start, being from an ‘alternative school’, to some extent located me ‘outside’; and being visibly active in the union also located me ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, depending on others’ relative positions. A period of time with YACVic also provided broader youth sector perspectives and experiences from ‘inside’ that sector, but also that then located me 'outside' education to others. This also had important implications about being able to bridge the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’.

I don’t think there are absolute implications from this. But it’s something that needs to be kept in mind for what comes next and the legitimacy of ‘having something to say’.

2. The importance of independence

I think that this has been critical to the longevity of Connect and to its maintenance of focus.

Connect has, with the exception of one issue (way back), never had any institutional funding or other support. It maintained print publication based on income from subscriptions, donations and sales of publications. (The latter were initially funded personally, and then sold to recoup costs.) It covered print and postage costs, as well as more latterly, web charges and stationery - but never paid labour costs.

And it is important to recognise that editing and publishing Connect has been a one-person operation for its 42 years - though this has been intensely supported by others, both personally and organisationally: at least wherever I worked (the day job) allowed me to do the work on editing and publishing ... if it didn’t distract from what I was paid to do.

Eventually with formal ‘retirement’, Connect became much more the bi-monthly centre of my ‘work’ that connected strongly with various consultancies - and often the articles reflected these. They were written by people (students, teachers, academics) with whom I worked. Editor and publisher of Connect became top of the pile in terms of how I introduced myself.

While this has obvious limitations (it has had to be a ‘labour of love/passion’), it also most critically meant that support could never be withdrawn. That has freed it to be critical, go out on limbs, take up ideas that weren’t favoured etc. It also insulated it against ideas being the ‘flavour of the time’ and then moving out of favour, as we saw in several examples when reliance on political or organisational structures - being too much ‘inside’ - saw changes in system emphasis and direction that caused the collapse of initiatives.

I suppose this means that Connect has been an example of reliance on ‘market forces’, but with an ideological commitment to avoid pandering simply to what would make money: market forces ‘for purpose, not profit’.

3. The importance, and limitation, of geographical location

Connect has always been specifically located in the Australian context. Where much of the writing and research has occurred (in the anglophone world) in the USA or UK, Connect has focused on what was happening in Australia. There are substantial differences in systems, as well as educational cultures and understandings. Even the terms ‘involvement’ and ‘participation’ have different histories that colour how practices are read.

Connect has carried articles about international practices (eg the ‘pupil voice’ work in the UK; the Foxfire initiatives in the USA, material from SoundOut, Derry Hannam’s and Michael Fielding’s articles etc), and there has recently been increasing interest in reading Connect, and contributing to it, from various parts of the world.

With only one exception that I can think of, publication has been in English. (There was one bilingual story about students and radio production from a Spanish school.)

Within that, there is also no disguising that Connect has been based in Victoria, and that the cultural differences between State education systems are large and important.

One of the biggest ‘failings’ of Connect is that its readership and contributorship remain largely Victorian. This has fluctuated over the years, but we’ve struggled to get consistent input from other states and territories. Even now, we have few subscribers in Tasmania, Western Australia, ACT, NT, and, to a lesser extent, Queensland and South Australia. And Victoria still dominates both in subscribers, but also, more importantly, in the articles about practices - explained by the physical contacts that happen day by day (or did until COVID). Which makes it easier to dismiss in some areas: “oh, that’s just Victoria”.

Similarly, practices have most strongly been represented from state education systems, with the Catholic sector providing some examples more recently, but relatively few stories from independent schools.

And, perhaps because my teaching background was in secondary schools, there was initially a need to specifically work on growing contributions from primary schools. It was Connect 35 in 1985 that was first labelled “The Primary Issue”. This push has been fairly successful, helped by specific work from the late 1980s with networks of primary school JSCs. But a hole remains, as Sophie Cartelli pointed out in #249, in the area of early childhood.

But the particular Australian focus remains important to me (so Connect exists alongside and complement US-based publication eg of theInternational Journal of Student Voice), as does achieving balance across sectors, jurisdictions and age levels.

4. The importance of the focus

This focus has always been on the processes of education: curriculum, pedagogy, governance, relationships. While it has illustrated this focus through practices in a wide range of subject areas, or whole school practices, it has

tried to avoid participation being seen as more naturally relevant only to one or a few areas eg humanities or English.

The focus has also been primarily on participation, with voice and agency as being more recent additions to the terminology, and eventually being conceptualised as ‘preparatory stances’ to the deeper ideas of participation in decision-making...orpartnerships.When Connect started, we used the subtitle of “the newsletter of youth participation in education projects” and this grew from experiences (in Brunswick and elsewhere) with project-based approaches in which students took responsibility for what came to be termed ‘real world’ applications within their learning: teaching others, publishing, carrying out research, community development, social action... ‘real roles of value’.

There was initially little discussion of the terms used. In 1985 (some 5-6 years after Connect started), we were involved in writing a paper for the Commonwealth Schools Commission exploring ideas and practices around ‘Student Participation and the Participation and Equity Program’ - and this explicitly tackled terminology of participation ‘at’, ‘in’ and ‘through’ school (though I think the third of these didn’t quite nail it). But within a program context that primarily saw ‘participation’ as ‘turning up’, I think this significantly shifted the discussion.

It was a few years later (1992-1994) that Roger Hart published the Ladder of Youth Participation (though drawing on ideas about citizen participation by Hannah Arendt in the late 1960s) and further stimulated ideas and distinctions - including about what would be seen as ‘non-participation’ (tokenism, decoration etc).

The terminology of ‘voice’ emerged in the late 1990s (perhaps the UK work of Jean Rudduck etc on ‘pupil voice’ was critical to that); and ‘agency’ (while being used sociologically for quite a while) only came into more common usage in schools and education somewhere in the early 2000s. I think the work that Connect published about a sharper definition of these terms, and their overlap, in about 2017, remains critically important.

These are important ideas to continue to explore and publicise, as there remain dangers that practices slip back into muddied thinking.

And some of the continuing dilemmas about ‘who’ and ‘in what’ remain: the ideas of inclusivity and authenticity. One of the important issues of Connect was #148 (August 2004) that attacked the limited ideas of élitist and irrelevant practices in school governance under the name of ‘representation’. It was clearly the ‘critical’ end of being a ‘critical friend’ to existing practices. It led to the Connect book ‘Student Councils and Beyond’ and provides an example of trying to be supportive, while also critiquing and challenging.

While Connect started with a clear focus on classroom practices - or even ‘projects’ (such as cross-age tutoring, school/community media etc), it quickly included student participation in school governance (including student-run groups or SRCs and JSCs) as a focus, alongside curriculum and pedagogy. At one stage it was explicit about a ‘3- legged stool’ model, pointing to the co- reliance of student organisations, student representation in school governance, and classroom curriculum approaches.

I think it has been important to Connect’s success that it has maintained those balances but also breadths of foci.

5. The importance of reflective documentation

Connect has consistently argued for explicit reflection within the documentation and sharing. It’s sometimes done this through simply inserting sub-headings, or making suggestions to contributors etc. But it’s not always been successful.

Such an orientation towards reflection is contextual. In a context of inter-school (or inter-system) competition, the capacity for honest reflection is diminished. That results in articles that document what happened but do so uncritically. I have tried to assert that just telling the story is not enough; and that just advertising your virtue is dangerous. I’ve tried to discourage articles that are principally intended just to make the school look good - or avoid making it appear ‘bad’ but not including the doubts or the process of struggle.

I’ve also struggled with this as editor. Sometimes I’ve accepted such an article where its production has been important in supporting, applauding and encouraging good practices within the school. And maybe that is all that is possible at that time. Sometimes (and there have only been a few of these) articles have been changed or withdrawn on the direction of school leadership (or departmental leadership) because they have been implicitly critical of what happened - and what was learnt!

I don’t know what can be done on this. Connect has tried to be inclusive about publishing stories - but there have been some examples that I would say, both in retrospect but also at the time, exemplify really limited practice. But how do we then move those practices to the next possibilities? It’s something I grappled with as editor - and I incorporated some approaches around that dilemma in the structure of the audits of student voice, agency and participation as a scaffold to enable growth of better practices.

6. The importance of an inclusive approach to audience

Finally, there is the question of readership. (In absolute terms, the number of paid subscribers increased steadily - to about 700 [I think] - at various times in the 1990s and early 2000s; then decreased to about 400 as subscription prices had to increase to cover printing and postage costs; then again increased to the current level of around 2000 when Connect went on-line and ceased printing copies – and hence needing to charge for subscriptions.

(Some of these subscribers may receive Connect now and delete it unopened. If anything else is to emerge, there is a need to ask subscribers whether they want to continue, and institute an ‘opt-in’ step. This is both a moral step, but also one that tests the reality of interest.)

All through publication I resisted (sometimes explicitly) seeing Connect as a ‘student magazine’ or a ‘teacher magazine’ - or even, as some suggested: ‘a magazine for Students Councils’ - arguing that it was a journal for ‘people who are interested’ in these ideas and practices. I recognise that the mailing list is mainly adults (at least partly because the role of ‘student’ is ephemeral; and that access to student e- mail addresses is more constrained). I also recognise that there are some articles that will be of greater interest to adults than to students (perhaps because teachers are more used to reading slabs of text?); and that some articles will be of more interest to students. But it does influence the language (simple, direct) and layout (graphical where possible).

I think we’ve been fairly successful in getting student contributions (alongside teachers’) about practices, either in their own right (write) or as part of a longer teacher or school authored article.

If we are to maintain a focus on student participation, I think it’s important to take the contributions and interests of all readers seriously. That breadth remains important to me.

At one stage I also defended a rough layout style of Connect (particularly when I was learning how to publish it) as being about accessibility: it conveyed a sense of being ‘unfinished’ in order to encourage reflection, to avoid sending a message to contributors that they had to wait on writing a polished ‘product’. They could share unfinished practice, including errors and uncertainties. I still see some merit in that, though as I’ve become more confident (and hopefully more competent - though still nowhere near being a graphic designer!) and as the tools became more accessible to and used by more people, perhaps that is less of an issue (or excuse).

Hopefully I’ve learnt other things about education, publishing, reflection, working with people and so on. Perhaps these are less visible to me as they’ve become more ingrained.

It’s been an important, entertaining, learning and passionate experience.