Keywords

Introduction

The future of our world weighs heavily on the minds of children and young people across the globe. We see their concerns and anxieties fuelling a range of both productive and destructive outcomes. Examples of spaces where young people are finding voice include: climate protests; innovative start-ups; and new ways to connect and create through platforms such as social media sites. However, young people are also often in crisis. Mental ill-health is at epidemic levels in many countries, socially destructive behaviours such as bullying are commonly reported, and there are high levels of school disengagement.

This chapter suggests that educational practices commonly found in schools across the globe today do not support students to be oriented towards a hopeful future. Arrangements of schooling are generally constrained by traditional, conventional, and neoliberal forces that prioritise the reproduction of social and economic structures favouring market efficiency and the inequitable distribution of resources. These arrangements are premised on the conceptualisation of students as future citizens in waiting, who need training through the school system before they are able to act as capable contributors to their communities (Dewey, 1990; Nishiyama, 2017). This conceptualisation positions students as passive receivers of knowledge, subjects them to the control of adults, and reduces their capacity to achieve productive agency in their own lives. An implicit purpose of these prevalent arrangements is to ensure compliance with current dominant social structures and arrangements (Smyth et al., 2014). However, in the current global climate of volatility and uncertainty, the stability and suitability of these arrangements must be questioned, particularly when a future-focused lens is applied.

Appadurai’s (2004, 2013) ‘capacity to aspire’ will be explored as a notion that may support student and educator praxis which aims to form, reform, and transform schooling to work towards positive and innovative possible futures. This approach prioritises student voice, values the contributions students can make as current citizens, and empowers young people to contribute to the transformation of schooling arrangements whilst also developing confidence in their capacities to navigate challenging futures. Critical times are upon us, and significant changes are needed. Schools and school systems need to stop prioritising the reproduction of the past and start prioritising transformation for the future. An important contribution to this should be the voices of students themselves as they seek to shape opportunities to live well in a world worth living in.

The Children Are Our Future

Education has long been a process for shaping societies for future prosperity and this premise underpins an implicit moral purpose for investment in schooling systems (Mandich, 2022). However, as a society, how do we reconcile this belief with the evidence that in our modern times, the future presented to children is ominous and frightening?

Conceptualisations of the future are shaped by culture and economics. An economic view is often framed by principles of investment in a cost-effective future (Sandford, 2013), while an anthropological perspective sees culture “as a matter of one or another kind of pastness” (Appadurai, 2013, p. 180). From both frames, the future is approached “from the stand point of the present through which we seek to predict, transform and control the future for the benefit of the present” (Adam, 2007, p. 200). Such principles are embedded into our social consciousness and shape the ways that we perceive, attend to, and value anything in the future, be it monetary investment or social effort. We are programmed to prioritise our present as it is shaped by our past. The unpredictability of the future exacerbates this. The dual purpose of education, which forms the theme of this book, ‘learning to live well in a world worth living in’, can be questioned to illustrate this challenge. What is a world worth living in? Should we judge ‘worth’ as we understand it now, or as it might be in the future? We can assume, thanks to the current pace of change, that a world worth living in for the children and young people of today, will be very different to that which we are in now. If so, can the adults of today determine what children and young people will require to live well in the world worth living in of their future?

There have been attempts in our communities to prioritise the future more concretely in current times, but these moves have met resistance. An obvious example is calls to action on climate change. Despite evidence of the urgency needed to avoid a climate tipping point (e.g. Barnosky et al., 2012; Reid et al., 2021), governments and policymakers around the globe have been slow to act. They are stuck in the concrete of the present and unable to prioritise an abstract future. Intersections of power and politics are rife in such discourses. Those without a legitimatised voice can scream as loudly as possible yet fail to gain traction for change. Children and young people are prime examples of this. They have limited power in social life and therefore limited power in decisions made about their futures. In Australia, a recent federal court decision exemplified this marginalisation of the future needs of young people. Eight teenagers were unsuccessful in seeking an injunction on the ministerial approval of an expansion to a coal mine. Essentially, their legal argument was that the federal environment minister had a duty of care to protect young people from future harm that the expanded coal mine would cause, but the courts determined that this was not the case (Kerr, 2021).

In broader evidence from Australia of the voices of young people being ineffectual in influencing what would be their future, approximately 500,000 students participated in the School Strike 4 Climate events in 2018–2019 calling for governmental action on climate change (Mayes & Hartup, 2021), yet Australia continues to be ranked last out of 190 nations for positive action against four climate action metrics in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Sachs et al., 2021). Mayes and Hartup (2021) found that the Australian media coverage of students’ activism on this critical issue was plagued with characterisations of the young people as “ignorant zealots, anxious pawns, [and] rebellious truants” (p. 1) with a positive characterisation as “extraordinary heroes” less often found and most often when the articles contained the students’ own voices describing their engagement with the climate strikes.

Children and young people are disempowered and their efforts to raise their concerns are gaslighted by those who control their future, all while they are bombarded by the threat of catastrophic environmental and social changes. They bear the burden of the existential crisis—a potential threat to humanity—that is difficult to comprehend for those of the generations who have lived in relatively stable times of the recent century (Mounk, 2018; Riddle, 2022; Wu et al., 2020), yet we continue to apply the paradigms of our past to their futures.

Is Education Treating Them Well?

Even if we were to accept that it is appropriate for the focus of education to be shaped by the past and geared to goals suited to the present, there is evidence that the arrangements currently do not treat significant numbers of students well. In Australia, which has a total school student population of around 4 million, approximately 70,000 students were conservatively estimated to be completely disengaged from schooling (te Riele, 2014; Watterson & O'Connell, 2019). This can be considered the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of the larger numbers of students whose engagement with schooling is inconsistent, disrupted, or limited (Hancock & Zubrick, 2015). Further, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fragility of arrangements that keep students engaged, particularly for marginalised learners (Brown et al., 2020). A US study estimated that three million students from marginalised backgrounds disengaged from education in 2020 (Korman et al., 2020).

The entanglement of school disengagement and mental ill-health impacting children and young people is well established (Alderman & Taylor, 2013). Mental ill-health diagnoses in younger generations have increased over recent decades and have taken an even steeper growth curve due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Fray et al., 2022; UNICEF, 2020). Although schools cannot be held wholly responsible for the epidemic of youth mental ill-health (Twenge et al., 2019), schools do have the capacity to mitigate or exacerbate feelings of stress or despair (Longmuir, 2021; Riley, 2022). Research has also found that sites where children and young people feel safe and valued are more likely to support the development of socially and emotionally resilient adults (Allen, 2020; O'Connor et al., 2011).

Given the scale of these issues and the influence of schooling arrangements, it is helpful to reframe school ‘disengagement’ as an issue of school disenfranchisement. Disenfranchised young people have not had opportunities to develop connection with schools. They feel that they don’t belong in the often rigid and confining walls of classrooms within schools that are usually physically separated from their communities, often by high, locked fences or even in some communities, metal detectors and security guards. Such increasingly common security measures have been shown to make young people feel less safe in their schools (Perumean-Chaney & Sutton, 2012). In these modern learning environments, children and young people are detaching from education (voluntarily or involuntarily) due to the misalignment of their needs as learners and humans with arrangements imposed on them by schools (Reimer & Longmuir, 2021). Thinking of this as disenfranchisement reframes it from an individualising responsibility that sits with students and families (Alderman & Taylor, 2013) to a recognition that there are schooling arrangements held in place by systemic constraints that impose marginalisation on significant numbers of students (Longmuir, 2020; Mills & McGregor, 2014; Reimer & Longmuir, 2021).

In a case study of the relationships between students and educational leaders in an alternative settingFootnote 1 in Melbourne, Australia, I collected data through observations and interviews with students, teachers, and school leaders to examine how student voice and agency practices supported re-engagement with school. Aspire CollegeFootnote 2 is a ‘second chance’ alternative education setting (Horsford & Powell, 2016; McGregor et al., 2014) catering for students who have been disenfranchised from ‘mainstream’ high schools. At the time of the research, there were 60 students enrolled at Aspire College, all of whom had negotiated and personalised engagement and learning plans. The students were able to make a range of choices about how they attended and the learning activities they engaged in. These were guided by education and career goals as negotiated with and supported by the teachers and school leaders. The staff-to-student ratios were low, at approximately one staff member to six students. Students and staff interacted for learning and social activities (e.g. lunch breaks), and the school’s leaders (principal and assistant principal) were visible and available to students every day. There was a strong climate of equity and connection between students and staff at Aspire College, as the students described: “Everyone gets along” (Tom, student); “It’s easy going and anyone can fit in here. You don’t really get judged, and they help you a lot more” (Amber, student); and “it’s easier to get to know everyone” (Anton, student) (see Longmuir, 2022; Reimer & Longmuir, 2021 for further details of this study).

The students from Aspire College that I spoke with described feeling unwelcome at their previous schools. They felt that it had been difficult for them to act in ways that would positively influence their daily experiences and that most of the adults in their previous schools did not care about them personally. The students explained that they felt less important than the rules in place to manage the large, unwieldy organisation of a mainstream secondary school. They referred to systemic arrangements, such as teacher-student ratios, teacher workloads, and timetable constraints, as some of the reasons that they could not access the learning and/or social support they needed. They regularly identified that teachers were busy and needed to meet curriculum delivery and assessment requirements for large numbers of students and they felt that their specific and diverse individual needs were beyond what could be accommodated. In a demonstration of how these circumstances individualise responsibility, some students in this study expressed that they had felt guilty or uncomfortable if they asked for extra attention or time from their teachers. These participants had internalised the micro-aggressions imposed on them by the systemic arrangements until they felt responsible for their inability to comply and participate (Reimer & Longmuir, 2021). For example, Amber’s family situation had required her to move to several new schools. She described her experience of falling behind over the moves and eventually being unable to access learning, “I missed a lot and they never used to help me. If I asked for help in class, they kind of pointed at the board and explained again… I’d feel like I don’t understand but they’d just move on”. Amber shared that at one point, a student counsellor had even told her that school “wasn’t for her”. Eventually Amber stopped going to school and she explained “I just didn’t want to go. I didn’t really do any work, so I didn’t see the point”. For students like Amber, the social-political, cultural-discursive, and material-economic arrangements of schooling are configured in ways that increase the likelihood of students feeling disempowered and excluded. They felt small and insignificant in an organisation geared to produce students that would fit into narrow conceptions of the citizens required for the social and economic needs of the present. These disenfranchised students were unable to find a place to fit, to feel they belonged, or to learn. Their voices were not heard, and their needs as young people were unmet. The elements that contributed to disenfranchisement reflect similar findings from other studies interested in supporting marginalised young people to access education (see for example: Mills & McGregor, 2014; te Riele et al., 2016) and the importance of students’ voice is highlighted in this literature (see for example: Smyth et al., 2014; Smyth & McInerney, 2012).

Hirschman (1970) proposed a model for understanding the way that individuals engage with organisations using the concepts of ‘exit’, ‘voice’, and ‘loyalty’. These classifications capture the range of ways that one can respond to the arrangements of an organisation, particularly when there is misalignment between the organisation and an individual’s own values, priorities, or interests.

Hirschman first proposed the model to explain consumer or employee behaviour when the quality of goods, or the rewards for employment, deteriorates. In these situations, Hirschman (1970) concluded that individuals might choose an ‘exit’ option—that is to detach from an organisation by quitting their employment or no longer purchasing goods. Another option available, according to Hirschman (1970), is ‘voice’—where dissatisfaction is expressed to an authority, or through a more general protest to interested parties. With exit and voice being somewhat binary options, Hirschman (1970) conceptualises ‘loyalty’ as a moderating factor in individuals’ behaviour, describing it as a “key concept in the battle between exit and voice” (p. 82). Feelings of loyalty determine the viability and availability of an ‘exit’ option as well as the likelihood of an enactment of ‘voice’ and even in adverse situations can hold individuals in patterns of behaviour that support the status quo.

Hirschman’s (1970) model has commonly been used to theorise areas such as public policy, public management, and public service (James & John, 2021). In his work to examine the cultural connections of communities living in poverty in India, Appadurai (2013) applied the model to contend that the default cultural affiliation is usually loyalty. Voice and exit options, Appadurai (2013) suggests, require higher levels of knowledge and empowerment to enable individuals to act on a dissatisfaction with the cultural status quo. Therefore, loyalty and the associated status quo prevail for two reasons. Firstly, the dominant cultural group is most aligned with the social arrangements, benefiting from its reproduction, and therefore is most often loyal. Secondly, marginalised members of an organisation or society often have an ambivalent relationship with the dominant norms (due to disempowerment resulting from minimal access to recognition and resources), which manifests as loyalty tainted by cynicism or uncritical compliance (Appadurai, 2013). Opportunities for transformation become more visible when all those who are dissatisfied for diverse reasons can access agentic dissenting responses, such as exiting or raising their voice to communicate their dissatisfaction and to suggest alternatives.

Diversifying the voices that have influence is crucial when the reproduction of present conditions is likely to result in an untenable future. Given the current circumstances, a positive future will require currently unimagined alternatives, unprecedented collaborations, and innovation on a scale unseen before. Kemmis (2022) considered how a change to practices (rather than just changing minds) is needed to address the climate change emergency in Australia. Kemmis (2022) explored the work of French political sociologist Alain Touraine (1981) to note that,

changes of practices and the conditions that make them possible are frequently accomplished through social movements… social movements confronted the established social orders, bringing about transformation (not always complete and final) in the process Touraine described as “the self-production of society”. (Kemmis, 2022, p. 45, original emphasis)

The transformation required to produce a society that can thrive through the challenges ahead needs new conditions for different practices. Education needs to find ways to provoke, contribute to, and support social movements inspired by dissenting voices that highlight dysfunction and are courageous enough to seek alternatives.

Letting Them Lead the Way: Student Voice and Agency

The concept of student voice has gained attention since the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) by most countries in the late 1980s which called for children to “say what they think should happen when adults are making decisions for them and to have their opinions taken into account” (United Nations, 1989). Despite widespread usage, the term student voice, which is most commonly used, is ambiguous (Graham et al., 2018; Longmuir, 2020) and has become a ‘catch all’ for various understandings (Charteris & Smardon, 2019). Research suggests that in practice student voice initiatives are commonly tokenistic. Arrangements in place for attending to students’ voices are such that only those who align with current practices and expectations are heard (Finneran et al., 2021). These types of arrangements are biased to the reproduction of conditions and favour a ‘loyalty’ response both by those actively involved and by those who are marginalised as their voices are silenced.

If student voice is to be leveraged for education focused on transformation, adults need to relinquish the traditional power they have held in schools to allow higher levels of student agency to emerge. In current settings, educators need to consider how student voice is facilitated so that students may break the bounds of complicit loyalty, without resorting to exit (Longmuir, 2020; Mitra, 2018).

Current opportunities for student voice see young people as “subject to ‘adult’ discourses and regulations while at the same time carrying certain adult responsibilities and entitlements over which they have little power” (Walsh et al., 2018, p. 221). For students to influence schooling arrangements they need to follow entrenched and traditional paths and their influence is constrained by present norms and expectations. These paths of influence are usually accessible only to students who are exceptional in their capacity to navigate the current arrangements leaving many excluded and disempowered (Finneran et al., 2021). As a result, “the emotional effects of these entrenched dynamics are typically discouraging: this leads young people in turn to reject conventional institutions, processes and politic[s]” (Walsh et al., 2018, p. 229). This rejection manifests as either ambivalent loyalty or disenfranchised exit from education and reduces the likelihood of positive and productive engagement with social and political institutions beyond schooling. Yet a key responsibility that we present to students is a requirement that they be socially, politically, and economically prepared for a precarious future—a future which is regularly portrayed to them as likely to be catastrophic. By dampening the current participatory agency of young people, we reduce the range of ideas, innovations, and resources they have available to envision and manifest positive alternative futures.

Agency in social theory is often defined in terms of individual emancipation and social context. Biesta and Tedder (2007, p. 135) considered theoretical developments of agency and concluded that it should be defined “as the ability to exert control over and give direction to one’s life”. They build on work of Emirbayer and Mische (1998), who conceptualised a three-dimensional configuration of agency as an interaction of “influences from the past, orientations towards the future and engagement with the present” (Biesta & Tedder, 2007, p. 135). They argue that agency is achieved rather than possessed by actors and that this achievement of agency is an interplay that “varies within different contexts-for-action, and which locates agency in the ability to shape our responsiveness to such contexts” (Biesta & Tedder, 2007, p. 133). They expand their attention to context, explaining that “the extent to which people have control over and give direction to their lives crucially depends upon contextual and structural factors and on the available resources within a particular ‘ecology’” (Biesta & Tedder, 2007, p. 145). In considering the potential of students to achieve agency in present times, they acknowledge the work of social researchers such as Bauman (2000) and Giddens (1990) who have suggested that the volatility and uncertainty of modernity make agency—particularly projective (or future focused) agency—both more necessary and more challenging to achieve. While acknowledging these constraints of modern social ecologies, it is important for this discussion to highlight that a key motivator of agency is its “intention to bring about a future that is different from the present and the past” (Biesta & Tedder, 2007, p. 136).

In my research with students in the alternative setting in Melbourne, Australia, agentic student voice was crucial to re-engagement with learning (Longmuir, 2022; Reimer & Longmuir, 2021). The principal at the school, Gail, described the importance of listening to the students and allowing them to have some control over their engagement with their education: “It’s the choice thing. It’s not a big force and a big stick. It’s just trying to get them to be curious and to want to learn so that it is fun and enjoyable” (Gail). The students acknowledged the importance of feeling listened to and having agency: “They respect you and what you want to do…and you feel you can say what is on your mind without being shot down. They listen to what you have to say” (Zali, student) and “they always ask us because they don’t know; we do… Whatever doesn’t work, we just tell her (the teacher) so she can fix it for next time” (Anton, student).

In this alternative education setting, central tenets of relationships before rules (Reimer & Longmuir, 2021), student voice (even when dissenting), and agentic choice making were foundational to repairing the damage students had experienced in prior schooling settings. In a reflection of the broader issues of engagement and well-being that were described earlier, these young people were productively connected to learning despite experiences of mental ill-health (such as depression and anxiety), as well as other diagnosed social and behavioural issues, all of which had previously contributed to their exclusion from schools. Students overcame issues that had been insurmountable in other settings due to the relational and agentic approaches that were enabled by the alternative practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014) of the school. The theory of practice architectures holds that practices are enabled and constrained by particular cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements in each site (Kemmis et al., 2014). In the case of this study, these included a social-political dimension that did not focus on narrow academic achievement requiring students to compete for ranked results but rather supported students’ diverse interests with a focus on positive and productive post-school pathways. As well, the symbolic authority of adults was reduced to ensure more equitable ways of relating. The material-economic arrangements were such that students could receive the support that they needed through resourcing and scheduling that prioritised connection, engagement, and well-being. The cultural-discursive dimension featured sayings that were founded on a premise of unconditional positive regard within negotiated expectations for interactions. With these types of arrangements in place, students found new opportunities for their education and new hopes for their futures. Further, the adults found that by trusting students’ expertise as informed, creative, and caring young people, broader avenues for voice and authentic collaboration emerged.

These students were empowered to inform and support the arrangements of the school and the classrooms in ways that worked better for all involved. This case demonstrates the potential in ‘letting them lead the way’ combined with the necessary support, belief, and care from the adults around them.

From this example and the broader student voice and agency literature, the question must be asked, are educational systems and the prevalent schooling arrangements ‘doing to’ students, which constrains empowerment, or ‘doing with’ students, which scaffolds their agency and encourages their empowerment? Trends of performativity and standardisation that characterise the neoliberal educational landscape (such as standardised curricula, common assessment programmes and schoolwide instructional models) limit student and teacher agency in learning relationships (Lingard & Sellar, 2013; Reid, 2019; Schostak, 2020). Limited agency is detrimental to present educational experiences as well as the development of future-ready capabilities.

A Capacity to Aspire

Having discussed the challenges and opportunities of education systems—particularly regarding the ways that schooling is arranged and the disempowerment of students through practices that minimise opportunity for voice and agency—I now turn to consider how more hopeful orientations to the future can be advanced through schooling. A ‘capacity to aspire’ has the potential to combat despondency and despair currently experienced by many young people and to open broader opportunities and resources for building a positive future.

To reiterate, the zeitgeist surrounding young people regularly suggests catastrophe and devastation. Kaukko et al. (2021, p. 1559) describe the current circumstances as a “nested crisis” where social, environmental, and health crises are entwined together. They suggest that for the post-COVID-19 world “what is needed is new practice architectures—new conditions of possibility—under which human beings can learn to live sustainably within the community of life on Earth” (p. 1559).

Riddle (2022) further describes the complexity of the challenges,

Young people face a future of great uncertainty amid multiple, intersecting global crises, including increasing social and economic inequality, predatory globalised capitalism and neoliberal policymaking, the rise of post-truth discourses and the decay of trust, the global COVID-19 pandemic and a climate catastrophe, driving ecological collapse, mass extinction, food and water shortages and displacement. (p. 108)

With the combination of these negative prospects and minimised opportunity for voice and agency, it is no wonder that children and young people are often despondent. A critical question then is ‘How can those who currently hold all the power in schooling provide environments where children and young people can thrive and face the future with hope?’ Appadurai (2004, 2013) proposes this notion of a ‘capacity to aspire’ which explores the place of agency and voice in supporting disenfranchised groups. The ‘loyal’ marginalised, he contends, are disempowered, so that they often have a complicit and ambivalent relationship with the cultural norms and arrangements that reproduce their disadvantaged conditions. To understand how this cultural disempowerment might be countered, Appadurai (2004) frames voice as, “a cultural capacity, not just as a generalised and universal democratic virtue because for voice to take effect, it must engage social, political, and economic issues in terms of ideologies, doctrines, and norms which are widely shared and credible” (p. 67). This cultural capacity needs to be enacted in ways that have “local cultural force…and when they do work, as we have seen with various movements in the past, they change the terms of recognition, indeed the cultural framework itself” (Appadurai, 2004, p. 67).

Appadurai (2013) found that aspiration is an important driver of voice and, ultimately, transformation. He suggests that aspirations about “the good life, about health and happiness, exist in all societies” (Appadurai, 2004, p. 67) and understanding the cultural and social structures that support individuals to achieve agency in working towards these aspirations is important. His studies found that the more privileged members of society have access to greater recognition and resourcing, which enables them to more readily apply aspiration as a “navigational capacity” in their lives.

The more privileged in any society have used the map of its norms to explore the future more frequently and more realistically... The poorer members, precisely because of their lack of opportunities to practice the use of this navigational capacity (in turn because their situations permit fewer experiments and less easy archiving of alternative futures), have a more brittle horizon of aspirations (Appadurai, 2004, p. 69).

Appadurai links this capacity to aspire to Hirschman’s faculty of voice, suggesting that “each accelerates the nurture of the other” (2004, p. 70). Without the capacity to aspire—and the associated opportunity for voice—apathetic loyalty or exit can result, increasing the likelihood of reproduction of the status quo and decreasing the likelihood of transformational change. This notion of a capacity to aspire holds potential for education that seeks to transform for hopeful futures. With explicit consideration of how the future is framed, and how students are supported to develop the navigational capacities needed for robust and hopeful horizons of aspiration, the needed transformation may be more possible.

Bringing Student Voice to Praxis and Practice for the Future

The theory of practice architectures (TPA) contends that practices are shaped by interactions between individuals and the circumstances beyond each person (see Kaukko et al., 2020). Although practice architectures (composed of overlapping social-political, cultural-discursive, and material-economic arrangements) hang together within a site to prefigure particular practices, they do not predetermine them and TPA “recognises the agency of individuals and groups to make changes to pre-existing arrangements” (Kaukko et al., 2020, p. 5). As has been discussed above, “many of the arrangements in established, institutionalised spaces [such as schools] have a long history, and they effectively constrain practices that challenge them” (Kaukko et al., 2020, p. 5), yet transformation is possible and becomes more possible where social movements challenge the prevailing social order (Kemmis, 2022; Touraine, 1981). The imperative for social change is clear, and the potential of students to challenge the social order is evident; however, student-led transformations are usually found outside of schools. At Aspire College, students were able to reconnect with aspiration after having been disenfranchised from mainstream schools where their capacities to access hopeful futures had been diminished.

Students had choices about their learning and were listened to by the adults in ways that valued their input. The case offers a glimpse into the potential of student voice to support positive school engagement while enhancing dispositions, capacities, and resources that can be mobilised for more positive futures. The metaphorical ‘map’ that provides a capacity to navigate the future (Appadurai, 2004) was shared by students and educators making a hopeful future more visible to the students.

By examining the potential of student voice and the development of an associated capacity to aspire, this chapter has argued that transformation is possible by authentically and regularly involving students in educational praxis which is “a kind of educational practice that is informed, reflective, self-consciously moral and political, and oriented towards making positive educational and societal change” (Mahon et al., 2020, p. 15). With an understanding of the potential benefits of students’ voices to contribute to challenging the habitual and constrained practices that focus on reproduction for present imperatives, transformative social change that provides hope for a more positive future is more possible. Not only are children and young people insightful and informed experts on their own experiences (Beattie, 2012), but they are also inherently less constrained by the present and are highly invested in manifesting positive futures (Walsh & Gleeson, 2021). Strengthening students’ capacities to aspire with purposeful, collaborative praxis will help them to counter the dominance of tradition and systemic interests so that their future world will be one worth living in.