The cost of performance? Students' learning about acting as change agents in their schools

Abstract

This paper explores how performance culture could affect students' learning about, and disposition towards, acting as organisational change agents in schools. This is based on findings from an initiative aimed to enable students to experience acting as change agents on an aspect of the school's culture that concerned them. The initiative was informed by contemporary practice and concerns in the field of student voice, and worked with a systemic action research approach focused on organisational dynamics. This research found that students' understanding of, and disposition towards doing, organisational change, seemed to be affected by how their internalisation of performance culture mediated with their concern to maintain their organisational status. Based on the theory of organisational socialisation, it argues that this may lead to a learnt inhibition towards doing organisational change in students who struggle with their organisational status in schools.

Keywords:

• student voice
• students as researchers
• students as change agents
• agency
• performance culture
• student leadership
• organisational change