Students’ ‘voice’ within the educational system : complexities, challenges, and possibilities

Abstract

This dissertation research takes a re-conceptualist approach to the study of voice in education to examine children’s daily encounters at school and in residential care that dissociate from socially constructed accounts of children’s lives, especially those which seek to compartmentalize the child, children, and children’s decision making. As an Educational Psychologist (EP), my interest in this research was to understand the ways in which children make themselves visible and legible as social actors—even in ways which disagree with adults’ expectations. I wanted to see how they negotiate the circumstances that surround their life, and, perhaps most importantly, I was interested in the role (if any) their voice has in the political process. The theoretical orientation of this study is grounded in the work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière namely, the distribution of the sensible, ignorance, political, and aesthetics: among others, to explore what kinds of knowledge and values related to children’s voice get to be visible or invisible, sayable, or unsayable, audible, or inaudible, legible, or illegible, to the extent that such existing frameworks police children’s everyday practices. These partitions are, in fact, perceivable through children’s demonstration of what they assume adults expect of their works and behaviour. In this regard, two of the main questions my dissertation raises are: What is children’s voice, and how is it accessed? What is the impact of children’s voice on EP practice? Based on the mosaic approach case study, with children aged between 8 and 15 who attend nurture centres, I bring in my observations of how children display their capability to voice out their views and disagree with and overturn the existing rules and roles imposed on them by constituting political scenes, despite the struggle/s that might follow. The methodological approach, too, draws from a Rancièrian concept of aesthetics that demands the researcher to disrupt her preconceived notions about the subject and thus constitute effects of equality with the informants by the presumption and practice of equality. This method required the adult researcher to consider her positionality and membership at the site, as well as to take seriously relational ethics toward researching with children. However, rather than having answers set forth, my dissertation aims to invoke (re)considerations toward new and different approaches to the works and theories of education: to reconceptualize habitual theories and practices, hierarchical adult-child relationships, and assumptions of rules and roles in education; to think and do activities with children through different perspectives and pedagogical practices, seeing children as political and social agents, embrace relational ethics in research with children, and review implications about EP practices in relation to children’s voice.