Ryan O'Malley- Story of Self
Because of this interest, I have found myself joining many education based groups which focus on helping all students access education such as the Harvard Undergraduate Studies in Education, the Student Advisory Council for the Educational Studies Secondary, and PBHA's Deaf Awareness Club, among others.
While being a leader at Harvard, many different aspects of your role and how it impacts others weigh on you. As someone interested in education more broadly, the idea of student voice has been especially important to me over the past few years. At Harvard College, we have seen huge changes to how student voice is solicited and considered. Just in my four years here, students have witnessed the removal of free response feedback in the Q guide, a major source of student input on classes, the removal of shopping week, a feature of class registration widely supported by students, and a plethora of 'town hall' discussions in which deans of the college did not allow for open questions from students and gave vague and unhelpful answers about pressing student issues. As the idea of student voice is in this state of upheaval, I have found myself asking more and more questions like what the best way to collect feedback is, who should hold the power to make change, and how we as leaders should hold ourselves accountable to making decisions that reflect the desires of the members of the spaces we lead.
Coming into this project, I thought a lot about what group it made sense to examine in the context of student voice. This kind of topic is relevant in any organization, as the need for feedback from group members is always present. My decision to examine the Peer Advising Fellows Program more closely was largely due to its structure.
With the PAF program being institutionalized, or operating under the leadership of administrators of the college, there is a much more complex power dynamic between PAFs and those who they would give feedback to. Not only are they being paid in their role, but the administrators in charge of them work for the institution that they attend. I wanted to more closely examine if this kind of relationship between students and leaders led to more or less student voice being volunteered, and if the administrators involved with the program followed the aforementioned trend of stifling that feedback, or if it was uplifted to better the program.
