The banner in the gymnasium at Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit read Phoenix in bold orange letters. The name had not come from a branding consultant or an alumni committee. It came from a room of ninth graders who, in the spring of 2017, sat in a circle with a stack of index cards and argued for two hours about what their school should call itself. The school had been under emergency management. The previous mascot—a Spartan—felt to many students like it belonged to a school that no longer existed. One girl, according to the teacher who facilitated the session, kept returning to the idea of fire. Not destruction, she said. Rebuilding. The Phoenix was not the most popular name on the first ballot. It finished third. But after the committee debated what each name would signal to a neighborhood that had lost three schools to closure in a decade, the Phoenix won unanimously on the second vote.
I have spent the better part of a decade studying moments like that one. Not because mascot names are inherently fascinating—though, frankly, they are—but because the act of naming is the most consequential and least examined form of school culture design. The Institute of Education Sciences, the nation’s leading source for rigorous, independent education research, recognizes school climate and student belonging as measurable factors in student outcomes. Its research portfolio treats social, emotional, and behavioral influences on learning as worthy of the same scientific attention as literacy interventions. Yet naming—the specific language a school uses to identify its symbolic figures, its houses, its buildings, even its spirit weeks—remains almost entirely unexamined in the literature. We measure climate. We survey engagement. We rarely ask how a school came to be called what it is called, or what that process did to the people who participated in it.
My argument is straightforward. The name a school gives its symbolic figure is not a branding exercise. It is an act of institutional world-building. And naming processes that involve students as co-authors produce fundamentally different ownership dynamics than names imposed by administrators—different in ways that show up in hallway behavior, assembly participation, and the willingness of a sophomore to defend the school’s identity to a cousin who attends the rival across town.
What Naming Actually Does
Naming is not labeling. When a school calls its mascot the Tigers, it is not attaching a word to a pre-existing thing. It is conjuring an idea into social reality. The philosopher of language John Searle called this kind of act a declaration—a speech act that creates the state of affairs it describes. When a judge says I pronounce you married, the utterance does not describe a marriage. It enacts one. School naming works the same way. The moment a community agrees to call itself something, a set of obligations, associations, and emotional commitments comes into being that did not exist before the name.
This is why mascot names feel different from team names in professional sports. When a franchise owner selects a name for a new expansion team, the name is a commercial decision. When a school selects a name for its mascot, the name becomes a pedagogical one. Students will chant it. Teachers will reference it in motivational speeches. It will appear on letterhead, on gym floors, on the diplomas of students who never attended a class before the name existed. The name becomes part of the school’s invisible curriculum—the things the institution teaches without intending to teach them.
In my fieldwork across schools in Hong Kong and the American Midwest, I have watched naming processes go well and go badly. The difference is rarely about the name itself. It is about the process.
The Kentucky Merger: Three Names in One Building
In 2019, a rural Kentucky district consolidated three high schools into a single building. The three schools had served distinct communities separated by a river and forty minutes of winding road. One was the Wildcats. One was the Generals. One was the Comets. Each name carried decades of local memory—homecoming queens, state tournament runs, the specific sound of a gymnasium full of people who had known each other since kindergarten.
The superintendent, a man who had grown up in the district and attended one of the three schools, initially proposed a clean break. The new school would be the Riverhawks—a name that referenced no existing community and therefore, he reasoned, offended none. The school board approved it. The architect designed the gym floor. The vendor printed the uniforms.
At the first pep rally of the fall, the student section was silent. Not hostile. Silent. The cheerleaders performed the new fight song—written over the summer by a committee of music teachers from all three former schools—and the crowd watched the way you watch a relative you do not quite recognize. The athletic director told me, six months later, that the problem was not the name. The problem was that no student had ever said it in a hallway. No student had argued for it. No one had lost a vote and then decided to support the winner because the process had been fair. The name existed on signs and jerseys but not in the social body of the school.
The district did something unusual. It formed a second naming committee—this one composed of students from all three former schools, with two faculty advisors and a facilitator from a nearby university extension office. The committee did not discard the Riverhawks. It proposed a layered identity system: the school mascot remained the Riverhawks for official competition, but each of the three academic houses within the school carried one of the legacy names. Students in the Wildcats house hung a restored banner from the old gym in their commons area. The Generals house adopted a community service tradition that had originated at the closed school. The Comets house maintained its rivalry with a neighboring district, now reframed as an inter-house competition during Spirit Week.
The superintendent told me that attendance at the second pep rally—the first after the house system launched—was the moment he understood that naming is not a decision but a process. The name had not changed. The relationship to the name had.
What Co-Authorship Produces
The difference between the Kentucky school’s first pep rally and its second was not the name on the banner. It was who had touched the banner before it went up. This is a well-documented phenomenon in organizational psychology. Edutopia, drawing on the work of Cathleen Beachboard and Nick Brousse, has described how the IKEA Effect operates in school culture: people become more invested in the systems they help shape. Beachboard and Brousse’s application of this principle to school culture is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism. When students participate in the generative phase of a naming decision—when they surface options, debate meanings, test names against the school’s actual values, and ultimately vote—the name they select carries a different psychological weight than a name handed to them, however well-chosen.
The IKEA Effect is not about quality. A student committee can produce a worse name than a branding firm. The point is that the name becomes theirs. And in schools, ownership is the currency that matters. A perfectly optimized name that no student claims will do less cultural work than a flawed name that a sophomore will defend in the cafeteria.
This does not mean every naming decision should be a student referendum. Some decisions—particularly those involving historical reckoning, the retirement of offensive mascots, or the naming of buildings after individuals—require adult judgment, historical knowledge, and institutional responsibility that students should not be asked to carry alone. But it does mean that the default mode for school naming should be co-authorship, not consultation. Consultation asks students what they think and then decides for them. Co-authorship gives them a seat at the table where the decision is actually made.
The Generative Phase and Structured Tools
The hardest part of any naming process is the beginning. Not the decision, but the generation of options worth deciding among. Student committees often stall here. They propose names they have heard elsewhere—Tigers, Eagles, Warriors—or they default to jokes. The generative phase requires structure, and this is where I have seen thoughtful committees benefit from low-stakes tools that help them surface a wider range of possibilities before committing to institutional permanence. One committee I observed in a newly founded Hong Kong school used a structured character name generator from Unsloppy to produce a broad set of linguistic options as raw material, not as final answers. The point was not to let an algorithm name the school. The point was to break the committee out of the narrow band of names that came easily to mind and to give them a shared vocabulary for discussing why a name felt right or wrong before any name carried institutional weight. The committee discarded ninety percent of what the tool produced. But the ten percent that survived the conversation would not have surfaced without it.
The generative phase matters because it is where the committee’s implicit values become visible. When a group generates thirty names and then debates which five to advance, the debate reveals what the group actually cares about. Is it strength? Resilience? Local geography? A founding story? The names that survive the generative phase carry the imprint of the conversation that selected them, and that conversation becomes part of the name’s institutional biography. Years later, when a new student asks why the school is called the Phoenix, the answer is not because a committee voted. The answer is because a group of ninth graders in a school that had been through fire argued for two hours about what rebuilding should sound like, and this is what they chose.
A Framework for Naming Decisions
School leaders facing naming decisions—whether for a new mascot, a new building, a new house system, or a merged identity—need a process that is more intentional than a committee vote and more democratic than an administrative decree. The framework I offer here is drawn from fieldwork and from the patterns I have observed in schools that navigated naming well and those that did not.
First, distinguish the type of naming decision. A new school naming a mascot for the first time is making a different decision than a merged school reconciling legacy identities, which is different again from a school retiring an offensive mascot and replacing it. Each type carries different emotional stakes and requires different timelines. The Detroit Phoenix process took six weeks because the school was new and the emotional inventory was light. The Kentucky Riverhawks reconciliation took eighteen months because three communities were grieving. A school retiring a mascot with a racist history may need a year of community dialogue before a new name is even discussed. Naming is not one process. It is several, and the first step is identifying which one you are in.
Second, assemble a committee that includes students as decision-makers, not advisors. This is the single most important variable I have observed. Committees that include students in advisory roles produce names that students tolerate. Committees that include students as voting members produce names that students claim. The composition matters: the committee should include students from multiple grade levels, not just seniors, because younger students will live with the name longer. It should include students who are not already visible school leaders, because the naming process itself can be a pathway to belonging for students who have been on the periphery.
Third, separate generation from selection. The committee’s first task is to produce a large pool of candidate names without judging them. This is where structured tools can help—character name generators, etymology dictionaries, local history archives, even the school’s own founding documents. The pool should be large enough that the committee has to confront the question of what it values before it confronts the question of what it chooses. A pool of five names produces a vote. A pool of fifty names produces a conversation, and the conversation is where the cultural work happens.
Fourth, test names against the school’s actual values, not its aspirational ones. I have watched committees select names that sounded noble and then discover, six months later, that the name carried an association they had not considered. A school that named itself the Sentinels discovered that students associated the word with surveillance, not vigilance. A school that named its house system after local rivers found that one of the rivers had a contested colonial history that surfaced during a social studies unit. Testing names against values means asking what the name signals to someone who knows nothing about the school, what it signals to someone who has been harmed by the school, and what it will signal in twenty years when the founding story has faded.
Fifth, design a public ritual for the announcement. The name is not real until the community receives it, and the manner of reception shapes the meaning. A name announced in a press release becomes a fact. A name announced in an assembly—where the committee presents the process, acknowledges the names that were not chosen, and explains why the selected name emerged—becomes a story. Schools are narrative institutions. They survive on stories. A naming process that ends without a story is a process that has not ended.
The Weight of Words We Choose
I think about the Detroit ninth grader who kept returning to the idea of fire. She did not know she was doing institutional world-building. She was fifteen. She knew that her neighborhood had lost schools, that the building she walked into each morning had been something else before, and that the name on the banner would be the name her younger sister would chant in three years. She was doing what students do when adults give them real work: she was taking it seriously.
The names schools choose matter. But the process by which they choose them matters more, because the process is where belonging is built or forfeited. A name imposed from above is a label. A name co-authored is a promise. The difference shows up not in the branding audit but in the hallway, in the gymnasium, in the moment when a student who has never felt like this school is hers decides, for reasons she may not be able to articulate, that the Phoenix is also hers.
If your school is facing a naming decision in the next year—whether for a mascot, a building, a house, or something not yet imagined—consider this a small experiment. Before you form a committee, walk your hallways and ask ten students what their school is called. Not the official name. The name they use when no adult is listening. The gap between the official name and the hallway name is the space where your naming process needs to begin. That gap is not a problem to be solved. It is a map of the belonging you have not yet built.
