Taking the Lead: Understanding Student Leadership in Atlantic Canadian Secondary Schools

Abstract

Participation and student voice are important components of childhood and adolescence. Leadership, when described as individuals with specific motives and values mobilizing others towards a common goal, is one form of participation and student voice (Kort, 2008; MacNeil, 2006; Thomson, 2012). Often, students’ first platforms for leadership opportunities and active participation are through extracurricular activities like student councils; however, there is limited research on youth leadership (Karagianni & Montgomery, 2017). Using the Social Change Model of Leadership, as well as Transformational and Transactional Leadership theories, this research project examines and questions the role that secondary school student councils play in the development of leadership in Atlantic Canada: nineteen secondary school students from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador contributed their leadership perceptions in a thirty-six question, online, qualitative survey. The survey poses questions about social identifiers, experiences in student government, and understandings of leadership and student leadership. What emerges is a spectrum of lived experiences within leadership, the prevalence of binaries in participants’ thinking about quality leadership and identified inequalities within the practice of leadership. Overall, leadership is understood by the participants as being positionally-based and centered within discovering, establishing, and maintaining relations with followers. Participants’’ definitions of what a leader is are incredibly situational. This topic warrants further research and deeper opportunities for young people to directly share their experiences.