Student Leaders Speak 2021

This year, GlobalMindED and Every Learner Everywhere embarked on a learning journey to listen and understand the voice of the most vulnerable students during the health pandemic, multiple measures of racial/social injustices and COVID-caused learning slide.

We began with 102 student leaders and selected twenty-five Student Ambassadors to represent the larger group and all students in the wider audience of those across the country. In this report you will read insights from the GlobalMindED/Every Learner Everywhere Student Ambassadors as they reflect on their lives, their learning, their digital experiences, their challenges, their setbacks and their triumphs.

What has ravaged our country and much of the world in the last year showed these students what they are truly made of—their inner strength, their ability to draw on resources, their ability to be vulnerable, the courage to be real and the bold, raw capacity to show up, speak up and stand up for what they rightly deserve through their voice, their advocacy and their inclusive leadership.

In the pages that follow you will read our students anonymized comments, a summary of five students from an in-person interview with Dr. Dwinita Mosby Tyler, and their personal stories which they crafted with the assistance of their business mentors. You will learn first-hand why these students will beat the odds as First Gen to graduate from college and why they are the best-bet hires any company can make. We hope that our work this year will normalize student voice and presence at the college leadership table so that students can influence and direct what they most need from those who run their college environment.

Student Leaders Speak 2021:  Student Voices Informing Educational Strategies, conducted via surveys, interviews and informal feedback from mentors, illustrates a lack of national and collegiate preparedness to address the near-immediate shift from in-classroom to remote learning.  Students reported a lack of access to an engaged faculty and essential technology while underscoring that their greatest support and strength has come from interaction and collaboration within their dedicated student community.

December 2020 Update: The GlobalMindED team convened 25 students to serve as Peer-to-Peer Ambassadors. These extraordinary student leaders, representing colleges and universities from around the country were invited to engage their own peers in answering key questions about their experiences in today’s virtual/remote learning environments. Each Ambassador was challenged to get at least 10 of their peers to complete a survey that explored the lived experiences of students during this complex time in history. This report reflects the sentiments of over 270 student responses.

This engagement was designed to augment the Student Speak 2020 report published in October, 2020. The goal was to leverage a similar line of questioning as was used in the original report while leveraging an opportunity to expand to an even larger number of student voices.

Download the full Student Speak 2020 report here and access the Peer-to-Peer update here.

Learn more by visiting GlobalMindED and The Equity Project.