Can students help design the systems that teach them? What if schools became spaces not just for learning about justice, but for practicing it every day?

Gretchen Brion-Meisels is a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Faculty Co-Chair of the Identity, Power, and Justice in Education concentration. Her work focuses on youth adult partnerships that nurture both individual and collective well-being. Through youth participatory action research, she collaborates with students to investigate how schools can become more equitable, loving, and democratic spaces. Gretchen’s approach integrates research, practice, and activism, helping educators reimagine what it means to teach with, rather than for, young people.

In this episode, Gretchen and I explore how education can move beyond compliance and control to become a dialogue between students and teachers. She shares how her experiences as a teacher and researcher revealed the ways traditional schooling often alienates young people not because of ability, but because its structure was never built for their voices. We talk about what it means to see students as knowledge producers, not recipients, and how classrooms can transform into spaces of shared inquiry and care.

Our conversation dives into the philosophy of justice, examining how schools reflect capitalist hierarchies and how participatory research can help dismantle them. Gretchen describes projects where middle and high school students lead investigations into real problems in their schools, from lunch inequities to discipline reform, using data and creativity to build more just communities. She reminds us that education is not just about achievement but about belonging and that the future of learning depends on listening to those for whom school was never designed to work.