From leadership research to district action: Promoting student voice by involving vocational education students and staff in citizenship education development: a participatory action research study

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract Introduction: Despite decades of school improvement efforts, maintaining lasting change in schools remains challenging. So far, traditional interventions have been unsuccessful in recognising schools’ unique and complex contexts, which is why a shift towards a more reciprocal, emergent, and contextualised approach is necessary. Objective: Our aim is to develop citizenship education with students and staff in vocational education and training (VET), which increases student voice and fits the complex school system. Methods: We involved students and staff in citizenship education development and identified relevant factors that influenced this process. This participatory action research (PAR) study used a retrospective design assessing logbook entries, observations, interviews, and focus group discussions collected between September 2020 and September 2023 in four study programmes from one VET institution in the Netherlands. Thematic analysis was used to code the datasources. Results: Collaboration between students and staff flourished while using the curriculum negotiation tool. Relevant factors influencing the process were: alignment between project and participants’ priorities and goals, receptivity to student and teacher voices, leadership engagement, and tensions and intentions about roles and responsibilities between participants. Conclusions: This study emphasises the promise of involving students and staff in educational development. When teachers startedworking collaboratively with students, many of their initial doubts decreased, which led to renewed motivation for becoming student voice advocates. PAR has the potential of starkly disrupting the existing status quo and breaking through ingrained patterns within complex systems to ensure influence for students from all levels of education. Keywords: Curriculum negotiation, Participatory action research, Student participation, Student voice, Vocational education and training

Study methods

This qualitative study used an explorative and retrospective design based on thematic analyses of logbook entries, observations, interviews, and focus group discussions collected between September 2020 and September 2023 in four study programmes from one large VET institution with multiple locations in the south of the Netherlands. Initially, the final product was not predefined and it was up to the stakeholders to design and develop an innovation which would boost the citizenship education curriculum, increase student voice in teaching and learning, and fit the unique context of each study programme. The principal researcher (EG) closely participated in the facilitation and implementation of involving students and staff in citizenship education throughout the project, which consisted of three phases. During phase 1, staff explored and identified the focus during monthly workgroup sessions, while implementing action activities in order to involve students. Phase 2 focused on action planning and design and resulted in a draft of the curriculum negotiation tool, which allowed students to design, develop, and deliver citizenship education lessons for their peers. The tool was piloted, implemented, and evaluated during phase 3 (for more information, see Geurts et al., 2023). This study generally focuses on the first two phases and thus on the process of involving students and staff from various study programmes in citizenship education development. As previously mentioned, Participatory Action Research was the methodological framework for this study.

Limitations

To our knowledge, this is the first study focusing on involving VET students and staff in intervention development concerning teaching and learning. We included complete classes rather than self-selected students with the goal of making student voice opportunities accessible to every student. Accordingly, our notion that student voice activities should not be limited to high-achieving students, but should include students from all levels of education, also VET level 2 students, was confirmed. Conducting PAR via citizenship education proved to be an excellent fit and, especially in the final year, enabled us to spend most of the time in class committed to the implementation, reflection and improvement of the curriculum negotiation tool.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Esther M A Geurts; Rianne P Reijs; Hélène H M Leenders; Maria W J Jansen; Christian J P A Hoebe. Promoting student voice by involving vocational education students and staff in citizenship education development: a participatory action research study. Journal of Educational Change (2025-01-24). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-024-09523-y

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.