Student Leadership to Build Community through Dialogue

What is a school if it is not a community? Yet, it is hardly a given. In fact, for a school to be a living community requires a mind shift by school administrators, faculty and students alike. An active community is self-regulating and its members share common values and concerns. It also displays shared modes of life to make these values come alive - in the areas of how challenges are defined, how they are solved and what meanings are ascribed to them. For this vision to be a reality, leadership is critical.

Student leaders have a key function in the building of community and I'm not just referring to the enforcement of rules or codes of conduct. Rather, they play an important role as living symbols of the community's values, as examples for the rest in the community to follow. For example, they may personify excellence through their achievements or other virtues through their behaviour.

More important is the role of student leaders in building community in 3 key areas. First, student leaders are vital focal points for dialogue about what's important in the community. Raising awareness about issues facing the school population is a key aspect of student leadership if seen from this point of view. These issues could range from the maintenance of the school environment to changes in school rules to how the student population should manage itself to more global or societal issues. From a constructivist perspective, how student leaders understand and response to issues will reflect the extent to which the community's position to these issues take shape.

Student leaders are also vital in the creation of structures that help articulate the community's internal dialogue. As the community dialogues, structures help to create and understand the emerging common realities. Such structures could comprise town hall meetings with the student population, regular meetings with faculty representatives as well as the bodies that student leaders sit in. While these could be established by the dictates of school administrators, the ownership in these structures by the larger student population may sometimes be lacking. Should these structures even be viewed as lacking in legitimacy for whatever reason, then should it be a surprise that the notion of 'community' be lacking in a school?

Finally, for dialogue to be effective in building community, student leaders need to learn from adult modelling not just the techniques of communication and conflict resolution. In fact, they need to live the very ethos of the building process itself - viewing the opposite individual as worthy of communicating with even if we disagree with what he says. While student leaders need to be familiar with negotiation skills, assertiveness and all the entire skill-set labelled as 'effective communications', these only make sense if understood through a healthy open-mindedness that sees others as co-creators of the same community.

Noel Tan

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