Since you’ve boldly thrown down the what’s-next gauntlet, I’ll take a crack at your first proposition. I agree: similar spaces, similar means. When we first started talking about student voices, there was no blueprint. You took the skeleton and hung some serious musculature on it, and the s2oh “staff writer” model sprang to life. Now, how about a complementary “digest” model, something along the lines of the Utne Reader? Regularly find and feature insightful/relevant/challenging/just plain good posts by student bloggers from all over. Could be a good way to expand the pool of s2oh writers.

Another idea has been rattling around in my head since we started this conversation. I haven’t fleshed it out enough to know it has legs, but here’s the rough thumbnail: a blogging project pairing professional mentors with motivated students with a passionate, live-and-breathe-it interest and well-down-that-road knowledge in whatever field it may be. We’ve recognized the need for student voices to season and enrich edublogosphere conversation. So if it’s powerful learning across the board to have student voices in the mix, imagine extending the idea to other professional/creative -blogospheres. Civil engineers mentoring and blogging with bright lights of the next generation of bridge builders, for instance. Ditto with medicine, theoretical mathematics, social work, you name it. Really, it’s about getting. . . beyond school. How’s that for a novel idea? I envision a mentor/student relationship playing out as equal parts job shadow, shop talk, Socratic method, and modeling a kind of discourse for the rest of us that takes place on an equal footing, where knowledge is age-blind and ideas are weighed by their merit. Certainly the students would learn from the relationship; even more certainly, the mentor would learn something about his/her work, whether reinforcing, challenging, or pointing to the need for radical change. And less certain but almost more intriguing from my seat are the untold overlaps, juxtapositions, and synchronicities that could emerge from such an interdisciplinary stew. And I suspect most fields are even more deaf to student voices than education. Frank conversation between confident, mature professionals and bright students could be like smelling-salts to take back to those respective fields and spheres. I guess this idea really springs fully (well, maybe not FULLY) formed from the teeth you’ve sown many times about creating authentic, unschooly spaces. Connecting students with. . . well. . . colleagues, right?. . . in whatever field their rockets are pointing them toward seems like a good step. And that’s an exciting, egalitarian, unschooly idea. But even more exciting is that the unschooliness could spread to other arenas, and that those other arenas could in turn teach us a lesson or two about going beyond school. Because isn’t “beyond school” really a signifier for getting beyond anything institutional and bureaucratic? Where the walls outnumber the windows, where gray is the color du jour, and where conformity trumps imagination?

Geez. Whew. Time to take a chill pill, as they say in 90’s (or was that 80s?) vernacular.