As a future K-12 educator, I am curious to learn about the potential impacts that my teaching may have on students. While my content area is Spanish, I want students to leave my classroom with a host of valuable skills like critical thinking and problem-solving in addition to knowledge of the Spanish language. While I continue to learn about youth activists’ journeys to becoming activists and the supports they receive in their activist roles, I am interested in discovering how school-related activities— both classes and extracurricular activities — influence students to generate the changes they wish to see.

To answer my research question, I embarked on a qualitative study in which I compiled information from four articles, two interviews with student activists, a podcast, and three online videos of student activists in action. My findings demonstrated that activist skills were bestowed upon students both advertently and inadvertently during their time spent studying in the classroom and participating in extracurricular activities. In this website, you will see a collection of case studies that demonstrate the links between schooling and youth activist development, testimonies from current youth activists, and a reflection about what my findings mean for my future practice.