23 October 2008
Warwick University Conference Park

This one-day conference offered the opportunity to challenge existing notions and interpretations of what learner voice should actually mean in practice. It considered the role of learner voice in personalised learning, looked at some of the barriers, challenges and opportunities faced when giving learners a say in their education, and examined the potential offered by digital technologies to overcome them.

Below, Carlo Perrotta and Alison Oldfield (Futurelab learning researchers) report back on some of the sessions from the conference.

Michael Fielding, Professor of Education, Institute of Education, University of London

Michael Fielding started his keynote by questioning the rationale for learner voice: why are we doing it? What are the values guiding us? In whose interest is learner voice? Is this about controlling students?

Drawing on his well established work on voice and students as researchers, Prof Fielding argued that when talking about 'learner voice' the emphasis is often placed on structures and control, albeit implicitly. On the other hand, he suggested that the true motivation for engaging with this notion lies in the need for inclusiveness and respect, "it’s about not giving up on people", he said.

Prof Fielding described learner voice as the main democratic quality of "person-centred educational communities".

Drawing on the work of the 19th century Scottish philosopher John MacMurray, Prof Fielding made an important distinction between personal relations and functional relations. Functional relations are those that help us to 'get things done', and are defined by purely instrumental purposes. On the other hand, 'personal' relations are those defined by existential and humanistic aims, through which individual and social meanings are dialogically discovered.

In a person-centred learning community, functional relations are at service of personal relations and communal aspirations. In this type of social configuration, the development of organisational forms, such as informal spaces in which voice can be nurtured, contributes to the establishment of a sense of place, purpose and identity.

As an example of person-centred community, he told the inspiring story of a 1950s school: St George-in-the-East Secondary, still a good example of democratic education, which happened in an age when the notion of voice was yet to be conceived.

Amongst the constituting elements that lead to the emergence of person-centred communities, Prof Fielding stressed the importance of the radical and leadership-questioning collegiality of a person-centred context, based on the development of a wider set of activities inclusive of young people and respectful of their 'voice', that is, their capacity to engage with democracy and society at large.

Nick Lee, Associate Professor, Warwick Institute of Education

Professor Lee conducted research at a secondary school over a two-month period to look at a structure he calls the "pedagogic sequence". A pedagogic sequence refers to a way of structuring classroom communication in time and is a well established version of 'earning' in schools. It normally takes the form of questions and answers. For example, a teacher asks a question, a learner tentatively agrees and the teacher confirms and agrees. The sequence also helps create established roles and identities of adult as 'teacher' and child or young person as 'learner'.

The school where the research took place was an English secondary school that had been in special measures, had a new head, and was undergoing building work. Not surprisingly, the teachers were stressed under these conditions. Teachers at the secondary school had identified a problem – students were reluctant to speak in class and were, in effect, not taking part in these recognised sequences of 'learning'.

While teachers at the school hypothesised that the learners may have lacked the necessary communication skills to engage with them, Professor Lee's research through interviews with the learners showed that learners were fully aware of the pedagogic sequence but their participation was not voluntary. In fact, they felt it was very difficult – if not impossible – to refuse or get out of the sequence and thus often easier just to say 'I don’t know'. Rather than lacking the communication skills, the learners seemed to be making strategic acts of communication through non-responses.

This research points to the pedagogic sequence as an outdated model that may promise stability and clarity in terms of 'teacher' and 'learner' in the classroom but does not seem to be working for either. Instead, he recommended we think about new ways of learning that may shift the well-established identities and roles in the classroom and require adulthood to change alongside childhood and learners. He also identified the possible role of technology in supporting this transition – but only as a way of shifting communication rather than as a requirement for change to happen.

Audrey Osler, Director, Centre for Citizenship and Human Rights Education, University of Leeds

Audrey Osler's critical examination was firmly rooted in a human rights perspective. She argued that human rights are a basic tenet of social life, underpinned by clear moral and legal commitments made by the international community after the Second World War.
Such commitments are enshrined in the various UN conventions subscribed by nations, including the Convention on the Right of the Child. This document provides a moral and legal framework to guarantee the right to education, the right in education and, particularly important in the context of the conference, specific rights through education.

In this regard, article 12 of the convention explicitly states that governments should:
"Take the views of children into account when devising policy that affects them. All adults should be encouraged to listen to and act on the views of children and young people".

The main point of Osler’s critical examination was that the way 'pupil voice' has been supported in many schools fails to meet the moral and legal requirements outlined by the UNCRC. She suggested that the current curricular offer in terms of citizenship is mostly based on promoting loyalty and patriotism, instead of those critical skills that might lead to question institutional authority. The alternative, she argued, is a more 'critical' patriotism, unafraid of critical analysis. This alternative is based on a view of human rights as based on two strands: a horizontal strand, which emphasises social cohesion and equal relationships amongst citizens, and a vertical one, which is based on a more questioning approach and which challenges the status quo.

Lynn Davies, Professor of International Education, Centre for International Education and Research (CIER), University of Birmingham

In her talk Prof Davies discussed some of the findings emerged from her research on learner voice and extremism and radicalisation. She described a research programme involving school councils and class councils, aimed at setting up 'committees' in which teachers and pupils worked together defining agendas and priorities.

Prof Davies described the teachers' "surprise" at realising that pupils have a voice and can engage in decision making. However, she also mentioned the numerous insecurities that still exist amongst teachers; insecurities which sometimes mask a plain resistance to letting pupils be engaged in school matters. She quoted a teacher saying: "I won’t have a kid judging the way I teach".

Despite the resistance, the positive outcomes of the programme outweighed the negative ones. Prof Davies stressed how thanks to the programme children are becoming more aware of the complexities of teaching and, conversely, more aware of their own learning. She showed examples of pupils expressing views and opinions to teachers in colourful and original ways, actively and meaningfully joining the decision making process. However, she reiterated that there is a challenge in making sure that pupil voice is truly inclusive of all students and not just the elite.

From her studies, Davies found that for student voice to be meaningful and effective, it must include three key elements:

• must be all students
• must look at serious issues
• students need to be treated as professionals.

Her second research focus was on "educating against extremism". This type of research is obviously very much in keeping with current political and social issues, and has serious implications for learner voice. Prof Davies described the challenges faced by schools committed to free speech and pupil voice. These schools constantly need to monitor how views are expressed in order to avoid offence and recriminations. Prof Davies' main argument was based on a critical analysis of the notion of 'offence', usually motivated by a resurgence of fear of blasphemy and sacrilege. She stressed the importance of humour as tool against such resurgence, an effective way to diminish its extremist potential.

Keri Facer, Research Director, Futurelab

In her keynote Prof Facer suggested that our current understanding of children's right to have a voice is based on a changing relationship between adults and young people.
She warned against the risks of an isolated view of rights and agency, a view which does not account for the role of identities and social constructions. Discourses of learner voice are intertwined with changing discourses of learner identity, and these discourses call into question the nature of contemporary adulthood as well. The notion of childhood itself, argued Prof Facer, is a social construction, based on the inherent distinction between adulthood, seen as rational and independent, and childhood, seen as irrational and dependent.

However, in the use of digital technologies such relationship is inverted, with novel constructions of childhood becoming pervasive and dominant. The emphasis on education and technological knowledge has produced a new type of young person, with a characteristic social identity: the digital native, skilled in the use of technology, independent and inquiring.

This notion, Facer suggests, is a discursive construction that is not only providing a way to categorise young people but it is also challenging our ideas of conventional adulthood. Adults, in other words, are becoming more 'dependant', often incapable to engage with technology and learning without the guidance of a young person; adults become invisible, while children are endowed with the skills and the rights to have a voice, to personalise, to explore and so forth.

On the basis of this argument, Prof Facer highlighted the need to explore new models of adulthood: "an alternative adulthood is needed", based on more 'fluid' social and personal relationships that allow us to move beyond simplistic generational accounts of society (the 'baby boomers', the 'GenX', the 'digital natives' and so on). This alternative model should take into account the context-dependent nature of our identities, and the fact that several multiple positions, for adults and young people, can be occupied in any given social context.

Zoe Redhead, Headteacher, Summerhill School

Summerhill School is a renowned self-governing democratic community that was founded in 1921 by AS Neill with the belief that the school should be made to fit the child, rather than the other way around. Neill's daughter, Zoe Redhead, is the current headteacher at the school and described the challenges and successes of applying Neill's philosophy to the day-to-day running of a school.

Though Summerhill recognises the different roles that adults and children have in such a community, it considers all its members to have equal rights and equal levels of importance in communication. At Summerhill, learners have the freedom to do what they like (including whether or not they attend classes), as long as they do not impinge on the freedoms of others. This is monitored and regulated by the community as a whole at regular meetings where votes are taken and school laws are made.

In terms of student voice and participation, Summerhill's experience has demonstrated the importance of giving learners real choice in how they participate rather than choices that are determined by adult-imposed structures. For example, at Summerhill, learners have the opportunity to sit on recruitment panels and help write policies around assessment but few actually choose to do these as they prefer other opportunities and are confident the adults will do it appropriately. Additionally, supporting the participation and voice of children and young people requires that adults be willing to take risks and share the control around decision making – and also the consequences of the decisions that get made!

Helen Manchester, Research Associate, and Sara Bragg, Research Council UK Research Fellow, The Open University

Project funded by the Arts Council, a qualitative research study ending in March 2009, evaluating some of the initiatives carried out by Creative Partnerships to enhance learner voice through creativity.

The session started with a distinction between 'youth voice' and 'learner voice'. According to Manchester and Bragg talking only in terms of learner voice is limiting as young people are not only 'learners'.

Therefore the main questions Manchester and Bragg asked in their research are:

• How do we categorise 'youth voice'
• Who is the audience for 'youth voice' work?
• What kind of relationships were there between the different actors involved in the project (ie students, teachers and artists)?
• What kind of 'creativity' was involved? Who was being creative? What’s the relationship between creativity and youth voice?

top of page