Listening to Students – Program Details
Listening to Students—What They Want from Education
Details from the 125th Anniversary Committee (March 2008)
Rationale: The New England Association of Schools and Colleges, and its respective commissions, acting as the regional accrediting body for New England educational institutions and for a growing number of international institutions, consistently focuses on student engagement as one of its central standards. The NEASC 125th anniversary celebration seeks to model that standard.
By engaging students in this conversation, NEASC also will help them understand and appreciate more clearly the educational mission of the institutions they attend and feel a greater ownership for the education they are receiving. As the students mature and become voting citizens, they will be better prepared and more likely to participate in the complex and nuanced public conversations about the purposes of education and how standards can and should be set and assessed. Listening to Students will help prepare a new generation of citizens that has a far better understanding than the current one of what setting standards and accreditation mean for education in the United States and for democratic societies globally.
Organization: Each institution may choose how it plans to organize the student conversation and different themes it may wish to emphasize within the overall question being discussed. Some may ask a student organization to be responsible for leading the conversation. Others may ask a faculty member to organize the conversation either as part of a formal course or as an independent study activity. Some may give credit for the work and others will treat it as an extra-curricular activity. With respect to content, some schools may want to look at what education traditionally has tried to achieve and consider whether that model serves the community well today. Other students may focus on what they think they will face thirty years from now and how they should be prepared to meet those challenges.
Work on each question may take place over a week, a term or the entire year. Schools may want to organize collaborative sessions with other similar or different kinds of institutions. Participating institutions will have the opportunity to send a student delegation to an annual event held in New England in the early fall where they can share their work with each other. The detailed arrangements for each gathering will depend on the level of participation, but students will come from all levels and types of institutions. Participants will select institutional presentations and/or create a synthesis of presented work to be shared at the NEASC Annual meeting each year. Institutional presentations may be organized by grade level or across grade levels allowing older students to assist younger students and allowing statewide or geographically related groups to form.
The 125th Anniversary Committee’s goal is to encourage the member institutions themselves to use their own circumstances and imagination in determining how best to use this opportunity to engage their students. Institutions will have to pay the costs of transportation and modest registration fees for the symposium and other gatherings that may take place. The 125th Anniversary Committee will seek sponsors for the remaining costs.
The committee assumes that if there is sufficient interest and participation within NEASC, sponsors will be attracted to the enterprise and will want to support student participants both domestically and internationally. Even without sponsorship, the committee presumes that delegations from within New England and from other countries will want to attend and will be able to get their own funding to do so. It predicts that an international symposium of students discussing the purposes of education will generate widespread interest among educators, policy makers, the media and the general public everywhere.
Registration: Institutions wishing to participate in the program are asked to return the attached form to the 125th Anniversary Committee. Further information and possible resources will be forwarded once the extent of interest in this program is determined. Institutional representatives will be contacted and opportunities, based on institution type, will be provided for sharing plans, resources and approaches being developed. Regional or statewide opportunities for sharing program information also will be provided.
Please join us in Listening to the Students.
Committee Members (2008)
- Chair
Gregory S. Prince, Jr. (President Emeritus, Hampshire College)- CAISA
Carl Stasio, Headmaster, Thornton Academy (Saco, Maine)- CIHE
Richard Wylie, President, Endicott College (Beverly, MA)- CIS
William Burke, Headmaster, St. Sebastian’s School (Needham, MA)- CPEMS
Katharine Pence, Principal, Kennebunkport Consolidated Elementary School (Kennebunkport, Maine)- CPSS
Cornelia A. Kelley, Head Master Emerita, Boston Latin School (Boston, MA)- CTCI
Charlie Lyons, Superintendent, Shawsheen Valley Technical School
(Billerica, MA)- NEASC
Eva Kampits, Director, Officer of the Executive Director
> Preliminary Registration Form [PDF]
> Fill out the Preliminary Registration Form online