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This Special Issue looks at new developments within an area of
practice that FORUM, with its rich history of advocacy for
genuinely comprehensive public education, has always been supportive
of, namely ‘Student Voice’.
In the past, we have tended to approach student voice from either
the standpoint of young people being given greater responsibility
for their own learning through a more imaginative and flexible pedagogy,
or we have concentrated on ways in which institutional forms of
student engagement, such as school councils, could develop a more
authentic collective voice that would lead, if not to a more democratic,
then at least to more engaged forms of institutional and personal
learning. Those concerns and aspirations remain. What is particularly
interesting here is the fact that some of the new developments presented
by a range of contributors seem to provide a bridge between the
individual/pedagogic and the collective/school council practices
that have so often provided the two poles of past student voice
work.
Now, at least within many of the examples explored and celebrated
within this Special Issue, there is a sense in which not only the
previously forbidden area of teaching and learning is becoming a
legitimate focus of enquiry from the standpoint of students as well
as teachers, but also that the roles of teachers and students are
beginning to become less exclusive and excluding of each other.
Similarly, there is an emerging interconnectedness between and expansion
of the arenas of classroom life, the wider contexts of the school
as a whole, and community spaces and practices that exist outside
the school. The reciprocity between student and teacher, school
and community that have always been at the heart of a widely and
richly conceived notion of education seems to be expressing itself
in new ways and new forms that may hold out much hope for the future
We open our Student Voice Special Issue with three articles by
young people who have been involved in some of the creative and
vibrant developments alluded to above. Pupils at Wheatcroft Primary
School in Hertford give a hugely uplifting and inspiring account
of Working as a Team; Beth Crane’s advocacy of the ‘Students
as Researchers’ initiative as means of Revolutionising School-based
Research and her fellow ex-Sharnbrook Upper School student,
Chris Harding’s, insistence that ‘Students as Researchers’ is
as important as the National Curriculum lay appropriately challenging
and exciting foundations for the rest of the Special Issue.
Louise Raymond’s overview of the groundbreaking ‘Students as Researchers’
initiative in her Student Involvement in School Improvement:
From Data Source to Significant Voice, provides a fascinating
case study of how a small but radical student-led initiative can
grow into something that has the potential to transform the nature
of curriculum renewal and organisational learning. Leora Cruddas’s
account of working with young women with emotional and behavioural
difficulties reminds us of the capacity of young people to work
in ways which exceed inappropriately narrow expectations of teachers
and fellow students. Her Rehearsing for Reality: Young Women’s
Voices & Agendas for Change also reminds us of the culpability
of schools as-they-too-often-are in denying the creativity and responsibility
that young people have within them to develop together with each
other and their teachers.
Kate Bullock and Felicity Wikelely’s Personal Learning Planning:
Strategies for Pupil Learning again points to the possibility
of pupil agency, but reminds us how far we have yet to go to listen
and learn together in ways which are mutually fulfilling for those
involved. Sara Bragg’s Taking a Joke: Learning from Voices We
Don’t Want to Hear is at once disturbing and inspiring. It provides
a challenge, later taken up by Elena Sylva in this Special Issue,
that centres round the difficult problem of what our most appropriate
response is to voices we find initially offensive or in other ways
unacceptable to our current way of doing things. Other challenges
to a too easy advocacy of student voice are taken up in Perpetua
Kirby’s Participatory Research in Schools. Her comprehensive
overview of both the issues and the opportunities of working with
young people in research is an important corrective to the quick
recourse to questionnaires and other surface means of engagement
that are so often predominantly adult and accountability driven.
In their Supporting Teachers in Consulting Pupils about Aspects
of Teaching and Learning and Evaluating Impact John MacBeath,
Kate Myers and Helen Demetriou offer us a number of very interesting
examples of emerging practices that move steadily and thoughtfully
beyond our traditional ways of working. However, as Isobel Urquhart’s
‘Walking on Air’? Pupil Voice & School Choice reminds
us, we also have to face up the very uneven realities of very uneven
progress. The disappointments and duplicity of an always unreal
‘choice’ for working class students in a market-driven system of
education is an absolute outrage: and yet many seem to remain resilient,
despite the manifest betrayal they suffer.
How interesting that we can look to Chile for leadership in citizenship
education. Marcia Prieto’s Students as Agents of Democratic Renewal
in Chile is an inspiring account of innovative practice between
the university sector and schools that holds many lessons for us
all, not least of which is the increasing capacity of mutual learning
between adults and students, thus blurring traditional role boundaries
and pointing us towards the possibility of a more ‘radical collegiality’
for the 21st century. The two contributions from North America also
have much to teach us, largely through their patient and fearless
engagement with issues that have too often been glossed over in
the understandable desire to promote student voice. Dana Mitra’s
Opening the Floodgates: giving students a voice in school reform
is, perhaps, the more reassuring of the two, alluding in a number
of places to very positive developments that hold out the possibility
of mutual learning. Elena Sylva’s ‘Squeaky Wheels and Flat Tires’:
a case study of students as reform participants makes distinctly
uncomfortable reading. And yet in that discomfort there lie the
seeds of student voice as a driving force for change. What she urges
us to face is the multiplicity of student voices that speak to us
and the undeniable fact that so often only some of those voices
get heard, usually those of articulate, middle class, white girls.
If we can grapple honestly with issues bearing on the multiplicity
of student (and, indeed, teacher) voices then the student voice
movement will really have come of age. My own Beyond the Rhetoric
of Student Voice: new departures or new constraints in the transformation
of 21st century schooling? draws on all the contributors to
this Special Issue and on a wide range of published research and
work-in-progress. It develops a framework for evaluating the conditions
of student voice and through that framework attempts an appraisal
of student voice as a force for genuine, positive change in our
currently over-determined, largely anachronistic forms of schooling.
The messages, it seems to me, are ambivalent: I do make my own
assessment of the way things are likely to go, but with trepidation
and a real sense that even tentative forecasts are of little use
in themselves: those we agree with we tend to forget about; those
we dispute we tend to dismiss. Two things are important: firstly,
that we listen to, hear and learn from each other, since it is through
dialogue that meaning is made; secondly, we must act together and
alone in ways which demonstrate courage, humility and an undeviating
sense of hope. Contact the authors of the articles, contact each
other. Come to Sussex University in the summer of 2002 and carry
on the dialogue: I feel an international student voice conference
for students, teachers and researchers coming on.
Michael Fielding
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