Student voice has been heralded as a practice that provides all children with the opportunity to ... more Student voice has been heralded as a practice that provides all children with the opportunity to exercise their right to participate in matters affecting them. However, a common research concern is that not all student voices are consistently or comprehensively attended to. What is often under scrutinised is how this uneven distribution of opportunities that students have to voice may be felt by students, in particular by those who have the opportunity to voice. This paper examines a point of perplexity in data generated with members of student representative councils who participated in focus groups. These focus groups were conducted as part of a study that evaluated a primary school student voice programme facilitated by an external provider. We found that participants’ feelings about the ‘privilege’ of being involved in student voice practice belied their assertions about student voice as a ‘right’ that all students have. Claire Hemmings’ concept of affective dissonance is used to guide our thinking about this disparity between what students think and feel about voicing. We argue for the importance of attending to how students feel about voicing as how they feel may impact on their potential to act as agents of change.
The VicSRC Executive, working with funding from the Victorian Department of Education, commission... more The VicSRC Executive, working with funding from the Victorian Department of Education, commissioned this evaluation study of the VicSRC’s Primary School Engagement (PSE) project. This evaluation study investigates the situated accounts of students, teachers and school leaders of their student voice initiatives, and their participation in the VicSRC’s PSE project. This report summarises the findings of this evaluation study
This article brings together high school students, teachers, and researchers to think about the i... more This article brings together high school students, teachers, and researchers to think about the issue of power in student voice work. • Each author uses a metaphor or a theory to explain how they think about power in schools and in student voice work. • The authors, at times, have different ideas about power relations in student voice work. • We argue that the way we think about power has effects on what we see, feel, and do in student voice work.
“Students as co-researchers” is a mode of engagement between students and teachers in school syst... more “Students as co-researchers” is a mode of engagement between students and teachers in school systems that has been likened to a bridge. This article explores the bridge metaphor with reference to one school’s experience of a students as co-researchers project involving students and teachers in the school and a university partner. We use the bridge metaphor, inspired by the imagist poet Ezra Pound, to explore particular challenges faced in this project, and to envision new modes of teacher/student relationships in education. We argue that the purpose of building such a bridge between students and teachers is not an instrumental one (to reach the other side), but rather that the bridge offers up zones of affective relational encounters between students and teachers.
This article presents an account of a collaborative inquiry engaging with sympogogy a pedagogic p... more This article presents an account of a collaborative inquiry engaging with sympogogy a pedagogic processes of learning-with, specifically in relation to practices of play. It is presented by a collaboration of researchers known as the PlayTank Collective ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3001-6316
A marked feature of the political tactics of the transnational School Strike 4 Climate movement (... more A marked feature of the political tactics of the transnational School Strike 4 Climate movement (also known as Fridays for Futures and Youth Strike for Climate) has been the use of humour on cardboard signs, digital memes and social media posts. Young people's cardboard signs, memes and social media posts have frequently mobilised humour as public pedagogy and political intervention-to emotionally stir and to politically engage others. In this article, we argue that the school strikers' creation and mobilisation of humour demonstrate a critical affective climate justice literacy that educators committed to pursuing climate justice have much to learn from. In analysing examples of humour in contemporary student climate justice activism, this article brings previous analyses of the potential of humour in social movement studies and climate change communication into conversation with calls from environmental education scholars to pay greater attention to the potency of emotion for climate justice education, beyond a rationalistic focus on climate science literacy. We outline four pedagogical propositions for working with humour, accompanied by their own perplexities, in moving towards critical affective climate justice literacies.
Cautious about the dangers of ‘authentic experience’ and confessional narrative, this chapter unc... more Cautious about the dangers of ‘authentic experience’ and confessional narrative, this chapter uncreatively assembles accounts of the complexities of women’s lives in academia. Online sources of information about navigating academia as a woman become elements for artistic experimentation. Purposely juxtaposing official university web accounts of valuing equity, diversity and flexible working arrangements with online newspaper, blog and social media accounts of the lives of women in universities, the tensions, contradictions, perplexities (and potential liberties) of women’s lives in academia are foregrounded. These words, images and screenshots are re-arranged into a form akin to a poem with footnoted weblinks. Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) has described this form of writing as “uncreative”, “patchwriting”: “a way of weaving together various shards of other people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole” (p. 3). This chapter appropriates Goldsmith’s methodology of writing into feminist methodologies of “collective memory” (Haug et al., 1999) and “collective biography” (Davies & Gannon, 2006). Working with digitised fragmentation (and/ or proliferations) of subjectivities, uncreative writing forms a “postidentitarian literature” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 85). To deliberately sort, manipulate, move and manage words, images and screenshots from webtexts performs and parodies the sorting, manipulations, movements and management strategies of the corporate university, even as there are concurrent, latent modes of agency at work. Creative combinations of information become “moving information” – language is “push[ed]” around while, simultaneously, the author/ reader is “emotionally moved by that process” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 1). These new assemblages may not always “make recognisable sense”, but “express intensities” “capture forces” and “act” (Lecercle, 2002, p. 195), to make a “different sense” (St. Pierre, 2008, p. 330). In these re-arrangements, the reader (and writer) become disoriented, amused, and impelled to re-think habitual modes of reading, writing and living our shared lives.
for a peer reviewed journal article (in Childhood) that includes discussion of this puppet produc... more for a peer reviewed journal article (in Childhood) that includes discussion of this puppet production.
Alongside the role of the teacher-as-researcher specifically in low SES communities, we are inter... more Alongside the role of the teacher-as-researcher specifically in low SES communities, we are interested in the alternative discourses and identities that become possible in “figured worlds” where teachers are positioned, and position themselves, as researchers. We consider the questions: What discourses, artefacts and identities are typically associated with low SES schools? What is/could be distinctive about teacher research in low SES settings? How might teacher research in low SES settings contribute to the production of alternative discourses and learner/teacher relationships and identities?
Abstract This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective explores the ethical, po... more Abstract This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective explores the ethical, political and pedagogical challenges in addressing climate change, activism and justice. The provocation Earth Unbound: the struggle to breathe and the creative thoughts that follow are inspired by the contagious energy of what Donna Haraway (2016) calls response-ability or the ability to respond. This energy ripples through monthly reading groups and workshops organised by this interdisciplinary collective that emerged organically in January 2020.
Student voice has the potential to prompt creative and transformative teacher professional learni... more Student voice has the potential to prompt creative and transformative teacher professional learning and practice. However, contemporary conditions of education-including policy priorities and institutional constraints-shape how student voice is taken up. This article draws on data from an evaluation study of a student voice programme ('Teach the Teacher') as enacted in two Australian schools. Notwithstanding the possibilities of student voice, reductive interpretations of teacher's work risk translating student voice into thin practices; the teacher becomes envisioned as technician who needs to fill their 'toolbox' and find 'what works' by listening to students. Analysing what is said and unsaid about student voice for teacher professional learning in interviews with school leaders and teachers, as well as focus groups with students, this article explores the problematics of mobilising student voice for teacher professional learning. Questions are raised for those seeking to promote reciprocal intergenerational learning in democratic schools.
Abstract This article reviews and reconceptualises – remembers and imagines – previous and possib... more Abstract This article reviews and reconceptualises – remembers and imagines – previous and possible methodological approaches to the study of the concept of school climate. Mapping three methodological approaches to school climate, we consider how each approach brings the concept of school climate into being, and the in/exclusions at work in each approach. Questions are raised about the politics of forming and naming a climate, the effects of such measurement and inscription of a school's climate, and the affects that escape and exceed the measurement of a climate. We consider the value of the concept of climate – particularly its ecological connotations, and the possibility of this concept for moving beyond individualised, responsibilitised notions of reform in schools. Working with the conceptual resources of affect and feminist new materialist theories, school climate is re/imagined as indeterminate, exceeding the spatial boundaries of a school, and inescapably political. Such an approach to school climate affirms and creates possibility and alternative modes of being in schooling relations – beyond critique of present approaches to measure and intervene into a school's ‘climate’ alone. We reconceptualise school climate as processual, continually made and remade in and through the everyday practices of schooling, including the research event.
In recent years, student voice has become a popular school reform strategy, with the promise of g... more In recent years, student voice has become a popular school reform strategy, with the promise of generating relations of trust, respect, belonging and student empowerment. However, when student voice practices are taken up by schools, student voice may also be associated with less affirmative feelings: it is often accounted for in terms of teacher 'fear', 'resistance' or 'uncertainty' about altered power relations. Such explanations risk individualising and pathologising teachers' responses, rather than recognising the complexities of the institutional conditions of student voice. This article considers the affective politics of student voice: that is, the contestations that attend who gets to name how student voice feels in schools. Working with data from an evaluation study of three Australian primary schools who engage in 'exemplary' student voice practices, we listen to school leaders and facilitating teachers' accounts about the responses of other teachers at their schools to student voice. Parallels are drawn between the construction of some teachers as reluctant, and previous analyses of 'silenced' student voices in schools. We argue that, in order to analyse the enactment of student voice in more nuanced tones, it is necessary to consider the profoundly emotional experience of teaching and learning, the ambivalences of teachers' experiences of student voice, and contemporary reconstitutions of teacher subjectivities.
The challenges of student voice in primary schools: Students 'having a voice' and 'speaking for' ... more The challenges of student voice in primary schools: Students 'having a voice' and 'speaking for' others The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), ratified by Australia in 1990, has provided a framework for students' participation in school decision-making and reform processes (Groundwater-Smith, Dockett, & Bottrell, 2015). Article 12 focuses on children and young people's expression of views: 'the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child' (United Nations, 1989). The UNCRC responded to the paternalism of adults 'speaking for' children and young people. The new sociology of childhood, emerging at a similar time to the UNCRC, critiqued developmental psychological constructions of children and young people, where children and young people are understood to be in the process of becoming adults. Proponents of a new sociology of childhood argued for a conceptualisation of the status of children as beings (exemplified in James & Prout, 1990), and reconceptualised children and young people as active subjects making sense of and creating their worlds (Alanen & Mayall, 2001). Student participation in school decision-making and reform processes has taken inspiration from the UNCRC and reconceptualisations of childhood, with advocates arguing for the repositioning of children and young people in relation to adults in schools (Fielding, 2011). This move has been termed 'student voice'-the inclusion, influence and active participation of young people in decisions about matters affecting them at school. Advocates for student voice have argued that young people are increasingly responsible, competent and involved in complex relationships outside of school, but schools' structures and patterns of relationships have remained locked in hierarchical modes of relating that justify the exclusion of students from classroom and school decision-making (Bron & Veugelers, 2014). Student voice, in school improvement efforts, has sought to reposition students as agents and actors (Cook-Sather, 2002), with situated knowledge that can contribute important insights to change processes. De-stabilising student and teacher 'roles' in student voice encounters is argued to engender 'restless encounters' (Fielding & Moss, 2011, p. 79) that enable students and teachers to 're-see' each other as 'persons, not just as role occupants' (Fielding, 2011, p. 13). Fielding and Moss (2011) construct a typology for the reconfiguring of students' roles in schools, describing how the 'radical democratic school' encourages 'fluidity and exploration, not only amongst staff but also between staff and students' (p. 75). Students may be positioned as: 'data sources', 'active respondents', 'co-inquirers', 'knowledge creators' and 'joint authors'-and finally, adults and children may collaboratively engage in 'intergenerational learning as participatory democracy' (Fielding & Moss, 2011, pp. 75-79). A range of positive impacts of student voice have been explored in previous research. Participation in school decision-making and reform processes is argued to have personal benefits for students, strengthening their: Engagement and motivation, self-esteem, confidence and communication skills (e.g. Mitra, 2004) Peer relationships and relationships across year groupings (e.g. Quinn & Owen, 2016) Skills in working with others and 'accept[ing] other people's ideas' (student's self-report, in Thomson, 2012, p. 99) Leadership and citizenship skills (e.g. Walsh, Black, Zygnier, & Fernandes, 2018). Other reported benefits of student voice include the strengthening of student/ teacher relationships through facilitating dialogue between students and teachers (e.g. Ferguson, Hanreddy, & Draxton, 2011), with the potential for significant professional learning for teachers (e.g. Demetriou & Wilson, 2010). Student voice activities may lead to material and political shifts in schools including '[c]hanges to or improvements in facilities and influence on rules, policies and procedures' (that is, the physical environment, toilet facilities, playground equipment, food, and school uniforms) (Mager & Nowak, 2012, p. 47). Previous research on student voice has also explored entrenched deficit conceptions of age and relations of power between adults and young people. Drawing on Alcoff's (1991) The Problem of Speaking for Others, Fielding (2004) makes connections between the paternalistic stance of 'speaking about' and 'speaking for' marginalized others, and relations between adults and students in schools (p. 302). We summarise four of the concerns that he raises for 'teachers, teacher-researchers, or researchers' relating to the dangers of 'speaking about' and 'speaking for' students, as these will become pertinent to our later discussion of the enactment of student voice in primary schools. Fielding (2004) raises concerns about the 'presumed homogeneity' of the 'student voice' as sidelining the diversity of intersecting raced, gendered and classed subjectivities amongst students (p. 302). This presumed homogeneity serves the interests of students who are already privileged, rather than those who are 'least well-served' by schooling (Silva, 2001, p. 98). Secondly, Fielding (2004) questions the potential for 'appropriation' of students' voices to better control them, asking, 'Is our current interest in student voice rooted in our fear that they may be rocking the boat?' (p. 303). Thirdly, he encourages teachers, teacher-researchers and researchers to question their interest in 'student voice': 'Are we sure that our positions of relative power and our own personal and professional interests are not blurring our judgements or shaping our advocacy?' leadership activities: Student research in Woodlea Primary. Management in
This paper brings Barad's agential realism into relation with educational ethnographic work, and ... more This paper brings Barad's agential realism into relation with educational ethnographic work, and longstanding concerns with matters of inequality. We extend previous work that foregrounds time and space in particular places, and that resists approaches to inequality that generalise about 'best practices' for schools in communities facing challenging circumstances. An Axminster Jacquard carpet loomlocated in a particular place, the City of Geelong-becomes a specific point of entry to a discussion of agential realism, ethnography and inequality. This carpet loom was once a key machine in a thriving Geelong carpet factory employing families intergenerationally; it is now a demonstration machine in the Geelong National Wool Museum, operated by skilled carpet weavers (now employed as demonstrators) formerly employed at the (now closed) factory. We read questions of deindustrialisation and schooling through the carpet loom as apparatus, working with the questions that it materialises about educational research, ethnography and inequalities.
This article conceptualizes the materialities of school governance council meetings. A concern fo... more This article conceptualizes the materialities of school governance council meetings. A concern for the material a/effects of spatial positioning emerged during a participatory action research project concerned with secondary school students’ sense of the benefits and challenges of student representation on school councils. Attending to affective, spatial and material dimensions of power with the conceptual resources of new materialisms, I question representational logics in policy, research and practice related to school councils. In particular, I interrogate whether the presence of human bodies representing interest groups necessarily promotes more democratic relations, and whether questions of power are best explored through discursive analysis alone. School council meetings are understood to be events where the political philosoph(ies) of a school materialize in concrete relations between bodies, and where subjects form, re-form (and de-form) in and through material-discursive pr...
Student voice has been heralded as a practice that provides all children with the opportunity to ... more Student voice has been heralded as a practice that provides all children with the opportunity to exercise their right to participate in matters affecting them. However, a common research concern is that not all student voices are consistently or comprehensively attended to. What is often under scrutinised is how this uneven distribution of opportunities that students have to voice may be felt by students, in particular by those who have the opportunity to voice. This paper examines a point of perplexity in data generated with members of student representative councils who participated in focus groups. These focus groups were conducted as part of a study that evaluated a primary school student voice programme facilitated by an external provider. We found that participants’ feelings about the ‘privilege’ of being involved in student voice practice belied their assertions about student voice as a ‘right’ that all students have. Claire Hemmings’ concept of affective dissonance is used to guide our thinking about this disparity between what students think and feel about voicing. We argue for the importance of attending to how students feel about voicing as how they feel may impact on their potential to act as agents of change.
The VicSRC Executive, working with funding from the Victorian Department of Education, commission... more The VicSRC Executive, working with funding from the Victorian Department of Education, commissioned this evaluation study of the VicSRC’s Primary School Engagement (PSE) project. This evaluation study investigates the situated accounts of students, teachers and school leaders of their student voice initiatives, and their participation in the VicSRC’s PSE project. This report summarises the findings of this evaluation study
This article brings together high school students, teachers, and researchers to think about the i... more This article brings together high school students, teachers, and researchers to think about the issue of power in student voice work. • Each author uses a metaphor or a theory to explain how they think about power in schools and in student voice work. • The authors, at times, have different ideas about power relations in student voice work. • We argue that the way we think about power has effects on what we see, feel, and do in student voice work.
“Students as co-researchers” is a mode of engagement between students and teachers in school syst... more “Students as co-researchers” is a mode of engagement between students and teachers in school systems that has been likened to a bridge. This article explores the bridge metaphor with reference to one school’s experience of a students as co-researchers project involving students and teachers in the school and a university partner. We use the bridge metaphor, inspired by the imagist poet Ezra Pound, to explore particular challenges faced in this project, and to envision new modes of teacher/student relationships in education. We argue that the purpose of building such a bridge between students and teachers is not an instrumental one (to reach the other side), but rather that the bridge offers up zones of affective relational encounters between students and teachers.
This article presents an account of a collaborative inquiry engaging with sympogogy a pedagogic p... more This article presents an account of a collaborative inquiry engaging with sympogogy a pedagogic processes of learning-with, specifically in relation to practices of play. It is presented by a collaboration of researchers known as the PlayTank Collective ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3001-6316
A marked feature of the political tactics of the transnational School Strike 4 Climate movement (... more A marked feature of the political tactics of the transnational School Strike 4 Climate movement (also known as Fridays for Futures and Youth Strike for Climate) has been the use of humour on cardboard signs, digital memes and social media posts. Young people's cardboard signs, memes and social media posts have frequently mobilised humour as public pedagogy and political intervention-to emotionally stir and to politically engage others. In this article, we argue that the school strikers' creation and mobilisation of humour demonstrate a critical affective climate justice literacy that educators committed to pursuing climate justice have much to learn from. In analysing examples of humour in contemporary student climate justice activism, this article brings previous analyses of the potential of humour in social movement studies and climate change communication into conversation with calls from environmental education scholars to pay greater attention to the potency of emotion for climate justice education, beyond a rationalistic focus on climate science literacy. We outline four pedagogical propositions for working with humour, accompanied by their own perplexities, in moving towards critical affective climate justice literacies.
Cautious about the dangers of ‘authentic experience’ and confessional narrative, this chapter unc... more Cautious about the dangers of ‘authentic experience’ and confessional narrative, this chapter uncreatively assembles accounts of the complexities of women’s lives in academia. Online sources of information about navigating academia as a woman become elements for artistic experimentation. Purposely juxtaposing official university web accounts of valuing equity, diversity and flexible working arrangements with online newspaper, blog and social media accounts of the lives of women in universities, the tensions, contradictions, perplexities (and potential liberties) of women’s lives in academia are foregrounded. These words, images and screenshots are re-arranged into a form akin to a poem with footnoted weblinks. Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) has described this form of writing as “uncreative”, “patchwriting”: “a way of weaving together various shards of other people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole” (p. 3). This chapter appropriates Goldsmith’s methodology of writing into feminist methodologies of “collective memory” (Haug et al., 1999) and “collective biography” (Davies & Gannon, 2006). Working with digitised fragmentation (and/ or proliferations) of subjectivities, uncreative writing forms a “postidentitarian literature” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 85). To deliberately sort, manipulate, move and manage words, images and screenshots from webtexts performs and parodies the sorting, manipulations, movements and management strategies of the corporate university, even as there are concurrent, latent modes of agency at work. Creative combinations of information become “moving information” – language is “push[ed]” around while, simultaneously, the author/ reader is “emotionally moved by that process” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 1). These new assemblages may not always “make recognisable sense”, but “express intensities” “capture forces” and “act” (Lecercle, 2002, p. 195), to make a “different sense” (St. Pierre, 2008, p. 330). In these re-arrangements, the reader (and writer) become disoriented, amused, and impelled to re-think habitual modes of reading, writing and living our shared lives.
for a peer reviewed journal article (in Childhood) that includes discussion of this puppet produc... more for a peer reviewed journal article (in Childhood) that includes discussion of this puppet production.
Alongside the role of the teacher-as-researcher specifically in low SES communities, we are inter... more Alongside the role of the teacher-as-researcher specifically in low SES communities, we are interested in the alternative discourses and identities that become possible in “figured worlds” where teachers are positioned, and position themselves, as researchers. We consider the questions: What discourses, artefacts and identities are typically associated with low SES schools? What is/could be distinctive about teacher research in low SES settings? How might teacher research in low SES settings contribute to the production of alternative discourses and learner/teacher relationships and identities?
Abstract This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective explores the ethical, po... more Abstract This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective explores the ethical, political and pedagogical challenges in addressing climate change, activism and justice. The provocation Earth Unbound: the struggle to breathe and the creative thoughts that follow are inspired by the contagious energy of what Donna Haraway (2016) calls response-ability or the ability to respond. This energy ripples through monthly reading groups and workshops organised by this interdisciplinary collective that emerged organically in January 2020.
Student voice has the potential to prompt creative and transformative teacher professional learni... more Student voice has the potential to prompt creative and transformative teacher professional learning and practice. However, contemporary conditions of education-including policy priorities and institutional constraints-shape how student voice is taken up. This article draws on data from an evaluation study of a student voice programme ('Teach the Teacher') as enacted in two Australian schools. Notwithstanding the possibilities of student voice, reductive interpretations of teacher's work risk translating student voice into thin practices; the teacher becomes envisioned as technician who needs to fill their 'toolbox' and find 'what works' by listening to students. Analysing what is said and unsaid about student voice for teacher professional learning in interviews with school leaders and teachers, as well as focus groups with students, this article explores the problematics of mobilising student voice for teacher professional learning. Questions are raised for those seeking to promote reciprocal intergenerational learning in democratic schools.
Abstract This article reviews and reconceptualises – remembers and imagines – previous and possib... more Abstract This article reviews and reconceptualises – remembers and imagines – previous and possible methodological approaches to the study of the concept of school climate. Mapping three methodological approaches to school climate, we consider how each approach brings the concept of school climate into being, and the in/exclusions at work in each approach. Questions are raised about the politics of forming and naming a climate, the effects of such measurement and inscription of a school's climate, and the affects that escape and exceed the measurement of a climate. We consider the value of the concept of climate – particularly its ecological connotations, and the possibility of this concept for moving beyond individualised, responsibilitised notions of reform in schools. Working with the conceptual resources of affect and feminist new materialist theories, school climate is re/imagined as indeterminate, exceeding the spatial boundaries of a school, and inescapably political. Such an approach to school climate affirms and creates possibility and alternative modes of being in schooling relations – beyond critique of present approaches to measure and intervene into a school's ‘climate’ alone. We reconceptualise school climate as processual, continually made and remade in and through the everyday practices of schooling, including the research event.
In recent years, student voice has become a popular school reform strategy, with the promise of g... more In recent years, student voice has become a popular school reform strategy, with the promise of generating relations of trust, respect, belonging and student empowerment. However, when student voice practices are taken up by schools, student voice may also be associated with less affirmative feelings: it is often accounted for in terms of teacher 'fear', 'resistance' or 'uncertainty' about altered power relations. Such explanations risk individualising and pathologising teachers' responses, rather than recognising the complexities of the institutional conditions of student voice. This article considers the affective politics of student voice: that is, the contestations that attend who gets to name how student voice feels in schools. Working with data from an evaluation study of three Australian primary schools who engage in 'exemplary' student voice practices, we listen to school leaders and facilitating teachers' accounts about the responses of other teachers at their schools to student voice. Parallels are drawn between the construction of some teachers as reluctant, and previous analyses of 'silenced' student voices in schools. We argue that, in order to analyse the enactment of student voice in more nuanced tones, it is necessary to consider the profoundly emotional experience of teaching and learning, the ambivalences of teachers' experiences of student voice, and contemporary reconstitutions of teacher subjectivities.
The challenges of student voice in primary schools: Students 'having a voice' and 'speaking for' ... more The challenges of student voice in primary schools: Students 'having a voice' and 'speaking for' others The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), ratified by Australia in 1990, has provided a framework for students' participation in school decision-making and reform processes (Groundwater-Smith, Dockett, & Bottrell, 2015). Article 12 focuses on children and young people's expression of views: 'the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child' (United Nations, 1989). The UNCRC responded to the paternalism of adults 'speaking for' children and young people. The new sociology of childhood, emerging at a similar time to the UNCRC, critiqued developmental psychological constructions of children and young people, where children and young people are understood to be in the process of becoming adults. Proponents of a new sociology of childhood argued for a conceptualisation of the status of children as beings (exemplified in James & Prout, 1990), and reconceptualised children and young people as active subjects making sense of and creating their worlds (Alanen & Mayall, 2001). Student participation in school decision-making and reform processes has taken inspiration from the UNCRC and reconceptualisations of childhood, with advocates arguing for the repositioning of children and young people in relation to adults in schools (Fielding, 2011). This move has been termed 'student voice'-the inclusion, influence and active participation of young people in decisions about matters affecting them at school. Advocates for student voice have argued that young people are increasingly responsible, competent and involved in complex relationships outside of school, but schools' structures and patterns of relationships have remained locked in hierarchical modes of relating that justify the exclusion of students from classroom and school decision-making (Bron & Veugelers, 2014). Student voice, in school improvement efforts, has sought to reposition students as agents and actors (Cook-Sather, 2002), with situated knowledge that can contribute important insights to change processes. De-stabilising student and teacher 'roles' in student voice encounters is argued to engender 'restless encounters' (Fielding & Moss, 2011, p. 79) that enable students and teachers to 're-see' each other as 'persons, not just as role occupants' (Fielding, 2011, p. 13). Fielding and Moss (2011) construct a typology for the reconfiguring of students' roles in schools, describing how the 'radical democratic school' encourages 'fluidity and exploration, not only amongst staff but also between staff and students' (p. 75). Students may be positioned as: 'data sources', 'active respondents', 'co-inquirers', 'knowledge creators' and 'joint authors'-and finally, adults and children may collaboratively engage in 'intergenerational learning as participatory democracy' (Fielding & Moss, 2011, pp. 75-79). A range of positive impacts of student voice have been explored in previous research. Participation in school decision-making and reform processes is argued to have personal benefits for students, strengthening their: Engagement and motivation, self-esteem, confidence and communication skills (e.g. Mitra, 2004) Peer relationships and relationships across year groupings (e.g. Quinn & Owen, 2016) Skills in working with others and 'accept[ing] other people's ideas' (student's self-report, in Thomson, 2012, p. 99) Leadership and citizenship skills (e.g. Walsh, Black, Zygnier, & Fernandes, 2018). Other reported benefits of student voice include the strengthening of student/ teacher relationships through facilitating dialogue between students and teachers (e.g. Ferguson, Hanreddy, & Draxton, 2011), with the potential for significant professional learning for teachers (e.g. Demetriou & Wilson, 2010). Student voice activities may lead to material and political shifts in schools including '[c]hanges to or improvements in facilities and influence on rules, policies and procedures' (that is, the physical environment, toilet facilities, playground equipment, food, and school uniforms) (Mager & Nowak, 2012, p. 47). Previous research on student voice has also explored entrenched deficit conceptions of age and relations of power between adults and young people. Drawing on Alcoff's (1991) The Problem of Speaking for Others, Fielding (2004) makes connections between the paternalistic stance of 'speaking about' and 'speaking for' marginalized others, and relations between adults and students in schools (p. 302). We summarise four of the concerns that he raises for 'teachers, teacher-researchers, or researchers' relating to the dangers of 'speaking about' and 'speaking for' students, as these will become pertinent to our later discussion of the enactment of student voice in primary schools. Fielding (2004) raises concerns about the 'presumed homogeneity' of the 'student voice' as sidelining the diversity of intersecting raced, gendered and classed subjectivities amongst students (p. 302). This presumed homogeneity serves the interests of students who are already privileged, rather than those who are 'least well-served' by schooling (Silva, 2001, p. 98). Secondly, Fielding (2004) questions the potential for 'appropriation' of students' voices to better control them, asking, 'Is our current interest in student voice rooted in our fear that they may be rocking the boat?' (p. 303). Thirdly, he encourages teachers, teacher-researchers and researchers to question their interest in 'student voice': 'Are we sure that our positions of relative power and our own personal and professional interests are not blurring our judgements or shaping our advocacy?' leadership activities: Student research in Woodlea Primary. Management in
This paper brings Barad's agential realism into relation with educational ethnographic work, and ... more This paper brings Barad's agential realism into relation with educational ethnographic work, and longstanding concerns with matters of inequality. We extend previous work that foregrounds time and space in particular places, and that resists approaches to inequality that generalise about 'best practices' for schools in communities facing challenging circumstances. An Axminster Jacquard carpet loomlocated in a particular place, the City of Geelong-becomes a specific point of entry to a discussion of agential realism, ethnography and inequality. This carpet loom was once a key machine in a thriving Geelong carpet factory employing families intergenerationally; it is now a demonstration machine in the Geelong National Wool Museum, operated by skilled carpet weavers (now employed as demonstrators) formerly employed at the (now closed) factory. We read questions of deindustrialisation and schooling through the carpet loom as apparatus, working with the questions that it materialises about educational research, ethnography and inequalities.
This article conceptualizes the materialities of school governance council meetings. A concern fo... more This article conceptualizes the materialities of school governance council meetings. A concern for the material a/effects of spatial positioning emerged during a participatory action research project concerned with secondary school students’ sense of the benefits and challenges of student representation on school councils. Attending to affective, spatial and material dimensions of power with the conceptual resources of new materialisms, I question representational logics in policy, research and practice related to school councils. In particular, I interrogate whether the presence of human bodies representing interest groups necessarily promotes more democratic relations, and whether questions of power are best explored through discursive analysis alone. School council meetings are understood to be events where the political philosoph(ies) of a school materialize in concrete relations between bodies, and where subjects form, re-form (and de-form) in and through material-discursive pr...
Uploads
Papers by Eve Mayes