Student voice as a contested practice: Power and participation in two student voice projects

The primary school case: SaR project: How children learn best

The school caters for pupils in the 4–11 age range; it has approximately 230 pupils on roll and is situated in an urban area. According to the school’s Ofsted Report (2007) the school is in an area of high social deprivation; well above average number of pupils are eligible for free school meals; nearly half of all pupils have been identified as having learning difficulties or disabilities; and a high number of pupils have statements of special educational need.

The secondary school case: SaR project: How to raise students’ aspirations

This school is a mixed urban comprehensive catering for pupils in the 11–16 age range with approximately 960 pupils on roll. According to a recent Ofsted Report (2008) the overall socio-economic circumstances of the students are comparatively disadvantaged; there are a greater proportion of students with behavioural, emotional or social difficulties than found nationally; and the number of learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities is above the national average.

Power as overt domination: Power by virtue of hierarchical authority, status and institutional role

The presence of power relations was evident in the initial setting up of the SaR projects. Taking power to refer to authority, where power is gained by virtue of position or by expertise (Allen, 2000), power is clearly enmeshed within the relations which enabled the projects to commence. Power here is understood as overt authoritative power, where those in an authoritative position use their authority to empower or enable others in a less authoritative position to become legitimately involved in, and take forward, an aspect of practice. In our cases, the power of the local authority (LA) is evident in terms of the hierarchical position it holds vis-à-vis schools: the LA was a significant fund holder and was prepared to fund those institutions which had agreed to take on board an aspect of practice which the LA favoured. Thus, financial control enabled the LA to empower only those particular schools which agreed to operate within the boundaries it set on student voice work, and which complied with the advice and prescriptions given on how this aspect of practice should be taken forward in their schools. Allied to this, the LA approved of school-based SaR projects which in turn empowered those head teachers who wanted to be involved. The head teachers’ approval then served to empower members of staff and students within the school to be involved in the work. However, at the same time and alongside such empowerment, those members of staff who did not share the head teachers’ views or who were opposed to SaR projects, may have found themselves decisively disempowered. Staff involved in the running of the SaR projects commented that some staff within their schools were sceptical about increasing the level of student voice work in their schools as they were concerned that this may undermine the voice of teachers within the school. The authoritative position of the head teacher and their decision to introduce SaR work in the school, however, meant that the work would go ahead in schools, regardless of the opinion of those who were sceptical or disapproving of it. The deployment of power here may be understood as the ‘systematic and unreciprocated transfer of power’ between social groupings, and is a use of power that Young (1990) views as one of the five forms of ‘oppression’. Young’s argument is useful in cautioning against any understandings of oppression as structural or essential, and emphasizes instead (as we do in this SaR case) the contextual and local production of oppressive power relations.

At the level of the school, power held by members of staff in hierarchical authoritative positions manifested itself in their freedom to choose specific students to be involved in the respective SaR projects. During reflections on the selection of students for the SaR projects, staff and students from the secondary school commented:

It just came naturally to chose who to be involved, it’s what we do, we use our judgment to chose who we think is the most suited. (Secondary school teacher)

I suppose we didn’t really question the fact that staff chose us to be involved, that’s just what we’re used to in school. (Member of secondary school SaR group)

The fact that neither the staff nor the students questioned this act demonstrates the acceptability, indeed the ‘taken-for-granted’ nature of cultural norms relating to modes of authority (and domination) which infuse existing teacher–pupil power relationship. As Lynch and Lodge (2002) acknowledged, power relations between students and teachers tend not to be problematized, but are taken as a hierarchical given. In addition, the fact that schools are organized in hierarchical terms, means that the ability to exercise degrees of power is associated both with formal roles and with particular status identities (Lynch & Lodge, 2002). Similarly, Harber and Mncube (2011) acknowledges that schooling can actively perpetuate authoritarianism, and the struggle to ensure that schools provide genuine opportunities as a safe, peaceful and democratic environment for learners continues. This also resonates with work by Haugaard (2012) who argues that social norms create realms of legitimate authority that empower and disempower the social actors relative to each other.

Power as ‘hidden’ domination: Power by virtue of perceived hierarchical positions

As described above, in each case study the process of identifying an area to research was conducted through discussions between members of the SaR groups in the presence of two adults – a member of staff and one of the authors. In each case, the discussions involved minimum adult intervention or steering, with the adults endeavouring to give students opportunities to discuss their opinions openly. While this is clearly good student voice practice, there are nevertheless still aspects of ‘hidden’ dominant power present. For example, there is the unstated assumption that certain aspects of school practice, such as the general structures of school organization, could not be challenged. As Thomson and Gunter (2006, p. 854) noted in their study of pupils-as-researchers, students’ lives and selves are deeply embedded in discourses which position them as individualized ‘consuming children’. In our cases, such discourses could be seen as underpinning ‘hidden’ dominant power which constrained the focus of SaR projects, given that students have an awareness that their choice of subject had to be approved by the member of staff leading the project, as well as by the broader dominant network within the school. The detailed practices evident within our cases lend support to Lemke’s (1990) acknowledgement that unequal student–teacher power relations mean that teachers get to decide what counts as knowledge, and that this in turn influences the approach to research and restricts the feedback and opinions students give. Our cases draw attention to the micro, but nonetheless significant constraints which covertly attend the staff/pupil dialogues which took place within SaR group meetings and which influenced the SaR group’s choice of focus. While Noyles (2005) rightly points out that power differentials between staff and pupils require careful negotiation and critique in order to allow pupils to shape such dialogues, this sort of critique was not evident in our examples.

The presence of members of staff, routinely seen by students as being authority figures within the school, is likely to have compounded students’ desires to focus on ‘safe’ areas they knew would meet the teachers’ approval. The reasons for this will be historical and various. Most obviously, there is the influence on students’ perceptions of the teacher as the one ‘in control’ of what is taught, how it is taught, when it is taught and the academic and behavioural expectations placed on them. When reflecting on their focus research areas, students commented that they found it difficult to finalize their focus area because ‘we had to chose something that we could make a change to make our lives in school better’. Further discussion revealed that students within the secondary school considered that areas relating to pedagogy or to certain aspects of the school organization could not be within their remit in terms of developing a research project, as these are ‘bigger things. . . that the head teacher and the governors sort out’ (member of the secondary school SaR group). Similarly, in the primary school one student commented, ‘It’s the teachers who decide about the lessons and Miss [head teacher] decides about what the teachers do, we don’t really make decisions in school.’ This evidence indicates the subtle ways students automatically positioned themselves in relation to what they saw as the more powerful adults in the school. In doing so, they are embodying ways of being-in-the-world in which, as Haugaard (2012) explains, require actors to reproduce specific meanings associated with authority positions. This example also demonstrates the power of Bernstein’s (1971, pp. 49–50) concept of ‘frame’ which refers to ‘the specific pedagogical relationship of teacher and taught’; his conception of framing as the ‘degree of control staff and pupils possess over the selection, organization and pacing of the knowledge transmitted and received in the pedagogical relationship’, has clear resonance with our cases. Framing, as an everyday pedagogic practice imbued with hidden dominant power relations, raises questions about the extent to which the topics suitable for discussion were in fact open to negotiation.

It seems likely, then, on evidence from these cases that students within the SaR groups were positioned as less powerful by the very SaR processes that the teachers were aiming to use to empower them, with the result that they only felt able to voice opinions which conformed to the limited remit which they knew in advance would be met with approval. In addition, the physical presence of a member of staff is likely to have summoned up notions of past relationships and the subtle modes of dominance which come with them which position the member of staff as the ‘knower’ and the students as ‘unknowing’. Following on from this, we argue that such knowledge processes involve much more than the transmission, acquisition or even negotiation of facts or ‘content’; they involve processes whereby students are disciplined to the norms expected by the staff and the school. By ‘disciplined’ we do not mean any form of overt or covert punishment but the everyday normalization processes which invoke established institutional and hierarchical norms and standards. As Foucault (1979, 1980) argues these normalization processes are a routine mode of governmentality and, as our example shows, they work to condition students’ identities, behaviours and expectations in a context of unequal teacher–student power relations.

Another significant factor is the presence of one of the authors as an ‘outside advisor’ who, as such, also occupied a position of power. All students and staff present were aware of the author’s belief in, and commitment to, the importance of ‘giving students a voice’. While this may have served to empower pupils to feel ‘safe’ in voicing their opinions in the knowledge that the ‘outsider’ present would approve of them voicing their perceptions of aspects of their school life, an alternative reading is that the author’s presence served to disempower both staff and students. As an ‘expert’ from a university, she brings with her the perceived legitimacy of elite modes of knowledge production as well as the status traditionally accorded to universities. For these reasons, her role may have created an imbalance in power relations from the start. One small but significant indicator of this is that the staff had relative difficulty in introducing the author to the students by her forename and without using her title of ‘Doctor’. Although the young people themselves appeared far more at ease with such informality, previous encounters in which a respected outsider is brought in to school, would doubtless have conditioned them to be ‘on their best behaviour’ and ‘to make a good impression’ in the presence of such a visitor. These factors could well have influenced the choice of topics pupils felt at ease to discuss, giving them even more reason to want to please the teachers leading the project and to identify research projects which they considered would be seen as ‘commendable’. Such caution concerning the extent to which student voice work can elicit the authentic voice of the student, especially in the presence of more powerful adults, is shared by Chadderton (2011), who considers it naive to assume that where students offer a perspective it will give access to an essential unmediated self. Bhavnani (1990) also draws attention to the need to consider the power of researchers and their impact on contexts. While the forms of domination and control we discuss here are extremely subtle, almost ‘off the radar’, they do consistently work to regulate students’ (and teachers’) attitudes, expectations and behaviours.

The discussion so far has focused on institutional and pedagogic power relations, however, power is also implicated in all social relations, including between the students themselves. As Alcoff (1992) points out, rituals of speaking are constituted by power relations of domination, exploitation and subordination. In our cases, power relations between students in the SaR group impacted on who spoke and who listened. For example, within the primary school SaR group, one of the boys demonstrated confidence in relation to the wording of the questions on the questionnaire with the outcome that the quieter pupils did not articulate their opinions. Similarly, in the secondary school SaR group some girls displayed a greater confidence in articulating their opinions, often silencing the views of others in the group.

The enduring problem of including/excluding certain voices has been raised consistently by feminist researchers on voice. The complexity of the problem is indicated by Jackson (2003) who argues against any easy presumption that to include silenced voices is unproblematically emancipatory. Indeed, practices which aim for greater polyvocality and which are often presumed to represent more diverse practices of inclusion and participation are cautioned against by Bhavnani (1990), who points out that the inclusion of hitherto silenced voices may itself be manipulative. This was certainly the case in our examples particularly in that it was the staff who chose SaR group members. Other powerful and broader forms of exclusion permeated the project in both schools: choosing some students meant excluding a significant proportion of the student body; while the process of administering questionnaires to only some of the student body served to exclude many others.

Having discussed some of the micro-practices of how power operated within the two chosen SaR case studies, we now broaden the discussion to review some theoretical understandings of power and what they may offer in understanding the transformative potential of student voice work.

Understandings of power and the transformative nature of student voice work in the context of SaR projects

The SaR projects discussed above explicitly aimed to empower pupils to voice their opinions on aspects of their school experience which were important to them, with a view to making changes to aspects of school practices, depending on the findings from their SaR projects. These aims resonate with Apple and Beane’s (1995) notions of democratic schooling. For Beane and Apple (1999) in a democratic school, all of those directly involved in the school, including young people, have the right to participate in the process of decision making. However, they acknowledge that many schools silence the voices of those outside the dominant culture, ‘particularly. . . the young’ (1999, p. 15) and we see this working through in our examples. The positioning of students, both collectively as a student group and individually, in relation to the school’s dominant culture is of relevance here. Our understanding of the term ‘culture’ relates to the school’s organizational culture and broadly refers to a definition given by Schein (2011) in which he defines ‘organizational culture’ as the ‘shared philosophies, ideologies, beliefs, feelings, assumptions, expectations, attitudes, norms and values’. Such beliefs, values and norms influence the way members think, feel and behave (Lunemburg, 2011). Certainly, in our case study schools, particularly in relation to the choice of SaR topic, the dominant culture expressed itself through the ideologies and values of the head teacher and other senior staff, and it was evident that where students (or staff) do not strive towards enacting these ideologies, or where they display attitudes and behaviour which do not favour them, the dominant culture of the school works to actively or subtly work to silence these voices.

Giroux’s (1981) consideration of how power operates in the classroom in both visible and not so visible ways resonates with the way power has been categorized in the above discussion of overt and hidden domination. According to Giroux visible power is manifest in hierarchical relations, top-to-bottom methods of communication, rigid time-schedules, rigid prescriptions about classroom behaviour, and inflexible modes of evaluation, all of which position the student as a spectator rather than a choice-making participant in educational interactions. Giroux’s concepts are useful to our SaR examples in that, although the students were consciously positioned as participants rather than spectators, the ‘choice making’ element of their role was heavily constrained by the over-riding visible (and in some cases, not so visible) power dimensions of the teacher–pupil relationship which, as we have shown, impacted on the students’ behaviour, and on the choice of topics discussed. Freire’s (1972) view that an outcome of many of the processes present in schools result in some of the student body being left feeling oppressed, has some relevance here.

While these views from the field of critical pedagogy offer some important insights, Giddens (1979) offers an alternative view. He suggests that the unequal nature of power relationships derives from differences in access which individuals have to economic and authoritative resources, and he acknowledges that authoritative resources have the capacity to control the time, space and social interactions of others. Our examples have demonstrated how teachers have relatively greater access than pupils to such resources, and pupils accept that teachers control pupils in time and space through the curricular and pedagogical evaluative practices. Our study shows how the authoritative resources possessed by the adults in the school were apparent in many aspects of the SaR work for example, when staff ‘invited’ students to be part of the SaR groups, and when they requested that students attend a meeting at a time, for a set duration, and at a location decided on by the member of staff.

Foucault’s theories offer yet another useful perspective which illuminates other aspects of the working of power within the SaR projects. In his theorization, power is not something possessed by individuals, rather it is something which ‘circulates’ and individuals are ‘always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 98). In his discussions of institutions as agents of social control he acknowledges that children in school are ranked according to age, gender and perceived ability and subjected to a range of practices which demarcate them as ‘other’ in their relations with adults in school. He sees discourse as a crucial practice in promoting and legitimizing such norms. Foucault’s understanding of power helps illuminate how not only overt but also how hidden forms of domination operate by, for example, working their way into our imagination and constraining the way we act (Foucault, 1980). In terms of the SaR projects, we can see that power has worked its way into students’ imaginations, not only constraining how the student researchers act in the presence of teachers, but also conditioning the verbal and questionnaire responses of other students. For example, when responding to questions posed by the SaR group, other students gave responses which they knew would garner approval of the student researchers, who were now themselves positioned as institutionally, and thus legitimately, authoritative. The subtle presence of hidden domination within the circulation of power amongst pupil groups, as well as between teachers and students, has significant implications in terms of the transformative potential of SaR projects more broadly, not just in these particular cases.

Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1977) notion of institutionalized forms of cultural capital adds an interesting dimension to understandings of school culture and helps explains the part played by schools in reproducing unequal economic and social structures and relationships. Bourdieu and Passeron see cultural capital as consisting of those informal academic standards which are also class attributes of the dominant class. In relation to the SaR projects, we can clearly see that the students’ ‘safe’ choice of research topic quite unquestioningly reproduces the school’s dominant cultural capital. In addition, we see Bourdieu’s (in Giroux, 1981) contention that teachers relate to students differently as a result of the cultural capital students bring with them, at work in teachers’ processes of student selection. For example, the students in the SaR group were those who were known to adhere to school expectations concerning school uniform, completing homework, participating in lessons, arriving on time for lessons, and talking politely to teachers. In addition, the focus and shaping of both SaR projects supported the institutional cultural norms of the school in that both were easily allied to their school’s agenda for improving student achievement, enhancing performance and skills, and school improvement. We are not claiming that students were either consciously or overtly manipulated, as they clearly were not. However, the evidence from the cases indicates the subtle ways in which students’ ostensible empowerment through SaR is aligned with school institutional agendas, which help the school to enhance its normative, dominant institutional and cultural capital. As Fairclough (1989) acknowledges, those usual institutional practices people draw upon without thinking, often embody assumptions which directly or indirectly legitimize existing power relations.

It is the case that both schools embarked on the SaR projects with a view to making changes as a result of the findings. However, as our analysis of these two cases shows, the processes involved in implementing the research projects, the topics researched and the changes made as a result of the findings were unlikely to take staff or pupils outside of their comfort zone or to challenge what Giroux (1981) refers to as the structural restraints in schools, that is, those ideas, values, norms and processes which serve to create and maintain pupils in their positions of relative powerlessness in most schools. From this, we would argue that the measures taken by the schools to give pupils a voice did not serve to challenge or re-define, in any significant way, the nature of existing forms of domination or the notions of power historically present within these particular school settings.

Concerns that student voice work may serve to reproduce the role of student as the less powerful in the student–teacher relationship have been documented over many years. Hart’s Ladder of Participation was used to consider ways in which children were listened to, and Hart (1992) acknowledged that some forms of listening to young people was manipulative and tokenistic, while other methods were more child-initiated and involved shared decisions being made with adults. Similarly, Lodge (2005) has explored student voice across a range from that which assumes a role of quality control to that which is based on open dynamic dialogue in which students ‘are viewed as active participants’ with listening and speaking being the twin responsibilities of all parties. Lodge’s (2008) asserts that such dialogic interactions require openness to differences as a foundation for a consideration of alternatives, and that this will enable changes to understandings, and actions to take place. Only partial elements of this practice were in evidence in the projects considered here, which perhaps accounts for the limited nature of the changes they entail.

It has also been acknowledged, however, that for the teacher–student power balance to shift in order that students become active participants in the teacher–student dialogue, this requires a major shift on the part of both teachers and students in ways of thinking about issues of knowledge, language, power and self (Oldfather, 1995). More recently, Cook-Sather (2006) asserted that student voice work requires a cultural shift that opens up spaces and minds not only to the sound but also to the presence and power of students.

The above discussion has considered some of the ways in which power impacts in negative ways on participation in SaR practice. From this we argue for a need to recognize the power dynamics between adults and young people in their roles as students, and to take steps to shift these power imbalances. This may involve a recognition that power is productive, that it is a key factor in the formation of social identities, and opens the possibility for change (Foucault, 1979). Part of the legacy of critical pedagogy that we may want to hang onto is that education is part of a struggle for a better world, and no doubt our case study schools engaged in student voice work as part of that struggle. While our analysis of the cases indicate that the micro-practices of SaR implementation radically condition its potentially transformative power, this does not mean we should give up on the potential for student voice to include more diverse voices and greater participation by students in the life of their schools.