Inquiring Student Agency in Secondary Education: Key Challenges for an Exploratory Research

Student activism in secondary education has received limited attention in social and political studies, and it is consequently almost absent from the relative academic literature. The distance from learning centres and from organising happening there represents a clear limit to the understanding of political action of the youngest, with implications on analyses related to the education sector and to broader societal issues. This paper would like to expose the challenges that I am experiencing in my studies on student agency in secondary education. Ethical and safety issues related to the under-age of research participants, mixed with the high public exposure of some school student leaders and to the changing tools and rationales of repression in European countries, all have an impact on the methodological challenges of my qualitative study. The importance of a participant observation that is truly immersive, getting the adequate trust of participants, but at the same time not resulting intrusive gets evident in the attempt of studying agency and how school students organise it. Political challenges are just around the corner, given my personal and political story that positions me as a researcher which is at the same time an activist and a former school student leader. It is essential to make boundaries clear, without hiding the opportunities of restitution that such a study gives to the movement, finding a good balance between the acceptance of suggestions to avoid any harm and the need for trustable and accurate analysis. The paper will examine the existing similarities to my previous work on university student unions, getting inspiration from my most recent fieldwork activities in Italy and the Netherlands, with the goal of producing a reflection useful to my next studies on the field and more broadly to future inquiries on school student politics.