Fletcher Education Quotes

It is not enough to simply listen to student voice. Educators have an ethical imperative to do something with students, and that is why meaningful student involvement is vital to school improvement.

The single problem plaguing all students in all schools everywhere is the crisis of disconnection. Meaningful Student Involvement happens when the roles of students are actively re-aligned from being the passive recipients of schools to becoming active partners throughout the educational process.

Meaningful student involvement is the process of engaging students as partners in every facet of school change for the purpose strengthening their commitment to education, community & democracy.

Everyday more educators are showing that they value students by involving them in meaningful ways in school. These teachers and administrators say that it is not about ‘making students happy’ or allowing students to run the school. Their experience shows that when educators partner with students to improve learning, teaching and leadership in schools, school change is positive and effective.

In the end I was allowed to be a college student, a little, for a bit. I wish I’d had more time to enjoy it. But what matters is that I left Swarthmore a stronger and happier and saner person than I had been when I’d arrived. I am not certain that the lessons I learned were the ones I was intended to, or that the institution deserves credit for all of them. But I suppose that, really, there isn’t much more you can ask of an education.

It's really seeing student involvement … as a variety of opportunities that are appropriate for each given student and responsive to their individual needs and their desires for their educational experience.

The work of meaningful student involvement is not easy or instantly rewarding. It demands that the system of schooling change, and that the attitudes of students, educators, parents and community members change.

In addition, to fetch cartridges up from the magazine, we had a shrivelled child of uncertain age, by the name of “Nimmo”. He was one of about twenty ship’s boys that lived in dank corners of the vessel down below the water-line. Phiandra’s boys were all street urchins that had been “saved” by the Marine Society, who caught them, cleaned them, fed them a bit, gave them the scrapings of an education and parcelled them off in batches to serve afloat. Captain Bollington approved of this scheme and took his ship’s boys from no other source.

He was an autodidact, and gave himself the education he needed.

Alice James Books is a nonprofit cooperative poetry press, founded in 1973 by five women and two men: Patricia Cumming, Marjorie Fletcher, Jean Pedrick, Lee Rudolph, Ron Schreiber, Betsy Sholl and Cornelia Veenendaal. Their objectives were to give women access to publishing and to involve authors in the publishing process. The press remains true to that mission and to publishing a diversity of poets including both beginning and established poets, and a diversity of poetic styles. The press is named for Alice James—the sister of novelist Henry James and philosopher William James—whose fine journal and gift for writing were unrecognized during her lifetime. Since 1994, the press has been affiliated with the University of Maine at Farmington. The press educates up to 14 interns per year through individual writing apprenticeships. Alice James Books also serves to train and advise the on-campus, bi-annual literary journal, The Sandy River Review. Alice James Books is one of the original and few presses in the country that is run collectively. Our cooperative selects manuscripts for publication through both regional and national annual competitions. The cooperative offers two book competitions a year: the Kinereth Gensler Award and the Beatrice Hawley Award. The winners of the Kinereth Gensler Award competition become active members of Alice James Books and act as the editorial board after their manuscripts are selected for publication. The winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award is exempt from the cooperative work commitment. Alice James Books recently established two new book series: the AJB Translation Series and The Kundiman Poetry Prize. The press partners with Kundiman, a nonprofit organization devoted to the promotion and preservation on Asian American poetry, to present The Kundiman Poetry Prize, a book-length manuscript competition open to all Asian American poets with any number of published books. The inaugural competition took place in 2010.