If my “good thing” monitor is working then “Student Voice” has been re-branded and re-visioned and we are going to hear a lot more “Student Voice” stuff in the next 6 months.
Calls for educators to listen to “Student Voice” have been with us since Dewey .... This recent promotion of “Student Voice” is probably a response to the collective educational ennui over “personalisation” - the last “good thing” to be broadcast, MoE glossy pamphlet-ed, and edu_conference work shopped and keynoted across the conversational corridors of education in New Zealand.
Much like personalisation (see “Personalisation as education’s killer app” ), “Student Voice” is one of those terms we assume is a “good thing” and as such is a term whose meaning is never interrogated and clarified ... we carelessly fling “Student Voice” around in educational conversations along with terms like “learning community” “child centered classrooms”, “inquiry learning”, "engagement, or “relevant and authentic” ..... and we all take different meanings from what is said.
For example, listening to “Student Voice” (all that talking, laughing, crying, yelling, txting and whispering) is one thing .... acting upon “Student Voice” quite another ....
For if we are only charged with listening the first thing you'd want to ask is whose voice are we listening to ...
And if we are only charged with listening with no expectation of action, the next thing we might ask is why those students who can see past the personal glory of being the chosen one ... the “safe one” invited to represent “student opinion” by those with institutional authority .... would continue to bother to share their voice ...
It is a bit like what happens to teachers who are consulted widely by SMT but find none of their suggestions acted upon ...
In truth there is a sad irony in hearing all these educators talk about the importance of “Student Voice” when so many of their colleagues work in schools where they lack “Teacher Voice”.
Michael Fielding’s analysis is useful here, and his Framework for Assessing Student Voice pasted below is a great place to start looking at what is really happening in schools who claim to value “Student Voice”
Framework for Assessing Student Voice
To whom are they allowed to speak?
What are they allowed to speak about?
What language is allowed or encouraged?
Why are they listening?
How are they listening?
Are those skills understood, developed, and practiced in the context of democratic values and dispositions?
Are those skills themselves transformed by those values and dispositions?
To what degree are the principle of equal value and the dispositions of care felt reciprocally and demonstrated through the reality of daily encounter?
Who decides?
How do the systems enshrining the value and necessity of Student Voice mesh with or relate to other organizational arrangements (particularly those involving adults)?
Do the practices, traditions, and routine daily encounters demonstrate values supportive of Student Voice?
Who controls them?
What values shape their being and their use?
Who feels responsible?
What happens if aspirations and good intentions are not realized?
Do we need new ways of relating to others?
In response to Fielding’s questions about new structures and new ways of relating to others ... I’d say yes, yes, yes ...
For calls for “Student Voice” in school, to have any credibility we need to see educational institutions where students are not only participating in the ways identified through the framework, they should also be participating in different contexts ...
“Student Voice” should see institutional structures develop where students are participating and contributing as:
researchers,
planners of curriculum delivery,
appraisers of learning, classroom environments, classes offered and teachers,
decision makers on system-wide school issues around finances, budgets, employment, curriculum, pedagogy, technologies, property, health and safety ...
advocates
etc etc
And when they participate, students need to see their contributions acted upon.
And even then, if the balance of authority means that what is acted upon is determined by teachers then it would seem fair to challenge the whole notion of “Student Voice” ... to ask what exactly are “Student Voices” participating in.
Still this week I am more interested in exploring the other side of “Voice” - in interrogating the many meanings of "Silence' .
and that is making me wonder about how we should understand “Student Silence”....
There is no room for two voices in a binary contex.
Posted by: Janet Hawtin | August 16, 2008 at 03:46 PM
I have have been involved in some interesting discussions recently about the purpose and value of school websites.
It's interesting to sit down with some of the noisier/bigger/more powerful stakeholders in a school community and find out what they really want on their school's website. It's even more interesting to find out who they want on their school website.
Posted by: nix | August 16, 2008 at 05:20 PM
this post feels related =)
http://leadingfromtheheart.org/2008/08/06/whats-my-lesson/
Posted by: Janet Hawtin | August 16, 2008 at 11:02 PM
The corollary to student voice/student silence is that of teacher voice/teacher silence, and I must say I want a deeper understanding of the impact of the corporate culture Victorian schools now operate under.
Had a ‘Houston-we-have-a-problem’ moment when I read this pearler explaining to principals how to interpret their Staff Opinion Survey Data.
Under ‘excessive work demands’ it states: ‘any percentile rank above 50 (that’s right 50!!) is considered too high in that it means the school is too ‘nice’ a work environment to be a high performing school.’
I’ve been digesting this for a few days to make sure my initial bodily reactions weren’t deceiving me and weren’t a symptom of some other mid-life crisis. But they weren’t.
If you’re in the top half of the population enjoying your job and feeling the demands are reasonable, as compared to unreasonable (whatever that means), then you can’t be a high performing school.
And who’s anxiety is that??? When did parents vote on an agenda to have their children to be products of a corporate culture to be outputs on someone elses data under the guise of ‘high performing’?
The implications here are profound. Changing my teacher hat for my parents hat, I ask myself do I want to send my children to an environment everyday where the adults responsible for caring for, and educating, my children are stressed, dissatisfied, feel hurt and institutionally abused?
And guess what: I don’t! In fact my parental instincts tell me I want to protect them from corporate psychopaths. And teach them how to avoid them at all costs for their adult lives.
Sorry Arti, at this stage I need to take a Bex and have a lie down!
Posted by: SC | August 17, 2008 at 03:16 PM
Now that is more than disquieting SC ... whilst I am fretting over the sad irony of teachers not having a "voice" ...
you are living something quite different.
On the dangers of being "too nice" ... would make a good short story ... what is happening to us? .... and why did we ever assume that taking on the rhetoric of business could be limited to rhetoric only
Posted by: Artichoke | August 17, 2008 at 03:51 PM
My own observation of my sons' previous school, in which the concept of student voice is said to be at the heart of their ethos does not leave me feeling very positive. In principle, I am completely in favour of the concept, and the more authoritarian because-the-teacher-says-so approach in their current school has been the cause of some frustrating moments for us as parents. But the practice has been far removed from the theory.
Let's look at it this way. The school has 3000 students. The catchment includes some of the rougher estates in the city. Students are told from the outset that their views are valid; that they are respected members of the community; that they as individuals will be accorded the same respect given to any other member of the community, including the head teacher, etc. etc. So some of the kids decide to use their voice to say things the teachers don't like, using language the teachers find unacceptable. What to do? This child, inexercising his rights is impinging upon the rest of the student body's 'right to learn' and the teachers' 'right to teach' as stated in the school ethos. So the teacher clamps down on that child, thus silencing the voice on this occasion for that most noble of causes: the greater good. When the child objects, the teacher (and the hierarchy) revert to the authoritarian model supposedly absent from this school.
This sends mixed messages to the kids, and those who are from difficult backgrounds begin to act out even more because the shifting boundaries make them feel even more insecure than usual.
I don't pretend to have an answer. All I will say is that the theory is ideal, the practice less so, because people are people: flawed, imperfect, self-interested and inconsiderate. Possibly never more so than when they are teenagers.
Posted by: Karyn Romeis | August 18, 2008 at 11:22 PM
Sylvia Martinez has a related post on her Generation YES blog post ,Believe in ... in relation to 5th grade student Alton Sherman's speech, I Believe in Me, Do You?
But what about the “other ones”. You know the ones, the students who don’t toe the line, the ones who have checked out. The ones who deliver uncomfortable messages in voices at times eloquent and at times spectacularly clumsy or even crude. The ones who challenge the world and the ones who seem not to believe in themselves. Do we listen when the message isn’t so pleasantly packaged, isn’t so clear, isn’t so crafted? Do we believe in them too?
Posted by: Artichoke | September 06, 2008 at 11:00 AM
No, they dont.
Posted by: SC | September 08, 2008 at 09:21 PM