Student Voice, Inequalities, and Class

Table of Contents

Keywords

Subjects

Curriculum and Pedagogy
Educational Politics and Policy
Education and Society

Introduction

Wealth inequalities continue to rise globally. In 2019, 1% of the world’s population was reported to own 45.6% of the world’s wealth, according to the Credit Suisse (2022) Global Wealth Report. Government funding, too, is unevenly distributed across compulsory schooling systems in many countries, with widening gaps in the material resources available for the schooling of children and young people from higher and lower socioeconomic backgrounds. In some countries, the differential economic resourcing of schools exacerbates disparities in academic outcomes for children and young people situated across different socioeconomic backgrounds; results from previous Programme for International Student Assessment tests demonstrate that the educational achievement of students from low socioeconomic status (SES) contexts is lower than for those from higher SES backgrounds (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2019).

This article focuses on a particular school-reform strategy that has been argued to ameliorate such educational inequalities: student voice. Student voice can broadly be understood as a pedagogical practice that purposely creates a space in which students can make decisions on issues that are important to students themselves in their school environment, whether individually or collectively. Student voice practice can involve an individual student, a class of students, the whole school’s student body, a Student Representative Council, or similar formal decision-making structures , as well as other social actors such as teachers, school leaders, external practitioners, and other community members. It can be driven by a concern for those students who are seen as lacking “voice,” but as this article argues, it may also reinscribe relations of privilege and exclusion. student voice as an educational practice is bound up with conventional hierarchical relations of power and knowledge. These include hierarchical relations of socioeconomic dis/advantage and class.

This article argues for the need for renewed attention to class and class relations in analyses of schooling inequalities and student voice. By “class,” we explicitly draw attention beyond the individualizing language of “socioeconomic inequality” and “disadvantage,” to consider “inequality a public issue anchored in economic structures and social/cultural institutions” including schools. The concept of class can be broadly described as an inequality which is an accident of birth that is held in place by social and economic processes that work to reinforce privilege and distinction. the egalitarian mythology of voice as a concept may be co-opted in policy rhetoric to shift attention away from increasingly aggravated social inequalities. It also builds on long-standing sociological analyses of how educational institutions tend to disproportionally benefit already advantaged social groups by recognizing and rewarding those with inherited social and cultural capital.

In what follows, we review rationales for student voice, particularly those that argue that student voice can work to intervene in educational inequalities and that it enhances students’ choices at school. We then return to earlier critiques of these two rationales for their classed dynamics and their potential to aggravate existing inequalities, and review contemporary scholarly calls to return to class analysis. We draw attention to dynamic, shifting experiences of class in relation to student voice across contexts and over time, particularly in individualistic, market-driven educational systems structured by the rhetoric of “choice.” We argue for the necessity of longitudinal analysis, through processes of “studying up”, to understand how student voice can be mobilized to cultivate educational advantage and distinction, particularly in class-privileged schooling contexts. We call for renewed uptake of the concept of class consciousness in student-voice practice—that is, beyond voice as a strategy to personalize individual students’ learning, toward enactments of student voice as collective work—if student voice is to disrupt the reproduction of structural inequalities through schooling.

Student Voice and Inequalities

Student voice, from its early invocations, has been argued to have the potential to intervene in the reproduction of inequalities through schooling. The inclusion of students’ voices in school-reform processes accords with the long-standing logic that schooling should be socially just, affording educational opportunities for all. Student voice is argued to challenge the power imbalance between teachers and students, moving away from adult- or institution-driven projects toward projects that reposition students as “partners of change” , as leaders of research projects. It is argued that when students interrogate inequalities and injustices in their own lives and schools, student voice can empower young people toward social and institutional change.

Student voice research has particularly been argued to have transformative potential in disadvantaged schooling settings and for students who have been historically underserved by schooling. Research about student voice practices has frequently been undertaken in schools characterized by low socioeconomic advantage, exploring the ways that students otherwise identified as “invisible” or labeled as disengaged or marginalized respond to student voice initiatives. Student voice has been argued to be a way to engage “disengaged” students in decision-making on issues related to the existing schooling “architecture” of curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy. In participating in matters directly impacting them at school, it is argued that student voice counters students’ negative feelings of alienation or disaffection.

At the same time as student voice has been argued to be a mechanism for intervening in educational inequalities, it has also been mobilized as a strategy to enhance students’ sense of their choices at school. In an earlier rationale for student voice, SOME argued that children have the “right to be individually and collectively heard—to have their voices respected, their preferences considered, their critiques engaged, and their choices matter.” From our context of writing in Australia in recent years, student voice has made a resurgence in several state jurisdictions, as it has internationally. In the Australian state of Victoria, for example, the Amplify program is an educational policy intervention designed to support and encourage schools to foster “student voice, student agency and student leadership” to “empower” children and young people to “find their own voice” within the school as well as to develop “a capacity to act in the world, and a willingness to lead others” (Department of Education and Training, 2019, p. 4). In many educational jurisdictions in the Global North, too, educators are encouraged to adopt personalized approaches by giving students “greater freedom to exercise preferences over topics and areas of study” to suit the “needs and aspirations” of each individual student irrespective of their social status. This resurgence of student voice as a reform strategy has taken place in tandem with the rise of education discourses that render responsibility, choice and competition as common sense. These calls for increased student choice have come at a similar time to calls for increased parent choice—for example, for families to be able to “choose” the type of school that they would like their children to attend.

These rationales for student voice, as ameliorating inequalities and as enhancing students’ choices, have been challenged, with critics drawing attention to the classed dynamics and inequalities at work when student voice is enacted in schools. Student voice in policy has been argued to have been conceptualized largely based on dominant norms, which privilege rationality and individualism. High income, Global North countries have monopolized published student voice research, resulting in the conceptualization of student voice practice as something that is devised in response to the particular social structures and inequalities found in these contexts. These nations, which hold similar Euro-Western sociocultural conceptions of the participatory rights of the child, have defined and normalized certain dispositions and ways of being that are perceived to be needed for students’ successful participation in the practice of student voice. These include verbal competencies, decision-making abilities, and being at ease with authority figures such as teachers; these are resonant with white, Euro-Western, middle-class ways of being . In the context of the United Kingdom, that SAR (Students as Researchers) projects may require the students involved to adopt “a voice and an identity that is implicitly middle class,” one that constitutes “students as active, responsible, able to take charge of their own learning.” She also notes that while student voice projects such as SAR have the potential to make curriculum learning explicit, certain aspects of the hidden curriculum, through the creation of new value hierarchies and exclusions, may lead to the exacerbation of existing social inequalities in schools. Further, some authors suggested that students involved in SAR projects may select “safe” topics to research: that is, the topics they consider will align with the school’s agendas. In this way, they argue, these students are involved in the reproduction of the school’s dominant cultural capital, reproducing inequalities rather than disrupting them.

Logics of “choice” have, similarly, also been critiqued for leaving their consequences of class stratification unquestioned. Sociologists of education such as Diane Reay and Stephen Ball have long argued that choice as an ideal has become a mechanism for class stratification. It was suggested that parents’ choices in education are framed as being based on personal or family preferences without consideration as to how choice is constructed in, and may be limited by, social, cultural, and economic restraints. As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (2010,) asserted, the “freedom of choice” is held by those at a distance from economic necessity, leaving those not at sufficient distance from economic necessity as having “no choice but the taste for the necessary.” The structural inequalities of “the right to choose” are masked in discourses of “choice,” making choice the exclusive and exclusionary ambit of the advantaged: that is, those parents who are in possession of the necessary resources (e.g., time and resources to transport their children to the “best” schools in neighboring areas) and who can make the “best” schooling “choices” for their children.

To return to student voice, when voice and choice are presented as neutral in policy or curriculum documents, the reality is that not all students’ choices are equal. We argue here for the need to return to explicit attention to class in studies of student voice—in particular, for the need to challenge the class structures and classed norms for speaking and listening that perpetuate differences in educational experiences and outcomes.

Returning to Class

There is a long history of analyses of student voice that attune to its classed dynamics, frequently through employing the conceptual resources of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu showed how the social and cultural capital of the dominant social group are recognized and rewarded by schooling systems in Western societies in ways that preserve the social order by contributing to social and cultural inequalities and class distinctions. Bourdieu’s focus on culture and the social and symbolic dimensions of class have been important in thickening conceptualizations of class beyond traditional Marxism—to attend, beyond economic capital, to the cultural and symbolic codes of class: ways of speaking, dressing, and deporting oneself. His concept of capital has been mobilized to highlight the ways that practitioners in some schools, when listening to student voices, may be more likely to listen to those students who are in possession of the dominant cultural capital, making student input into decision-making at schools a privilege available more readily to certain social groups .

Bourdieu’s concept of field, which describes a space within which social actors occupy varying positions relative to each other depending on the capital they possess, has also been used to critically analyze student voice in practice and policy. In Australia, Pat Thomson and Roger Holdsworth (2003) have used the concept of field to review the history of the meaning of the term “student participation” in Australian educational policy since 1970. They have demonstrated that student participation policy produces and reproduces positions of advantage through practices of choosing young people—who tend to be those from middle-class backgrounds—to be involved in “valued and valuing initiatives” (p. 379). In New Zealand, Bronwyn Wood (2014) has drawn on Bourdieu’s work to illuminate how students in high socioeconomic communities are supported by their school in their choices to be involved in more global issues, while students at schools in working-class communities are supported by their schools in their choices to be involved in more local issues. Wood’s study suggests that these classed distinctions of students’ choices and voices are made in relation to the differences in spatial mobility of their lives. A subsequent study has also drawn on Bourdieu’s work to inform their call for the critical evaluation of the extent to which student voice contributes to socially transformative educational practices.

While these examples of student voice research explicitly examine its classed dimensions, these classed dimensions are sometimes left implicit. Within education policy, too, recent framings of “voice” risk universalizing the student subject and shifting attention away from the inequitable distribution of resources, both historically and in the present, in particular school contexts. The suggestion of these framings is that if only all students were “given a voice,” then they would be engaged at school. What more critical accounts have stressed is that this “universal” student defaults back to the speaking and listening norms of the white, middle-class student. Accounts of student voice may invoke class alongside other markers of identity—for example, gender, race, Whiteness, dis/ability, and sexuality—to gesture toward the heterogeneity of students’ subjectivities and the intersectional dynamics of voice in schools. Yet even in these critical analyses, class may be a dimension of marginality that exists in students’ “backgrounds” rather than foregrounded and teased out for its specific contouring of students’ experience of schooling and of “voice.”

Why has class receded to the analytic background in analyses of student voice initiatives? Part of the answer may lie in the debates over whether class was/is a “dead category” in theories of reflexive modernity that explain the apparent fall in “class consciousness” in an individualized society. Some researchers suggested that the ways that class contributes to inequality in the settler societies of Australia and New Zealand has been overlooked because of the invisibility of the ways that class works in these societies. For them, the way that class contributes to inequalities in students’ lives is even more invisible and analytically opaque given that school-aged youth are usually neither engaged in paid occupations, nor fully qualified, nor financially independent . the class may have become analytically backgrounded because the visibility of class as an axis of social difference contrasts with other axes of difference that are “more visible,” such as that of race or gender.xxx

At the same time, recent years have seen calls for renewed attention to class in education research. Steven Threadgold and Jessica Gerrard’s edited collection Class in Australia evidences this renewed interest. This collection has a particular focus on the role of settler colonialism as “the enabler—and contouring structure—of capitalism and the relations of class in Australia,” with settler colonialism connected not only to England, “but also to intertwining transnational practices of capitalism and colonialism” .They made the case for renewed theorizations and analyses of class, arguing that the “apparent decline of class consciousness and collectivity [. . .] was not an early indicator of the sociological decline of class as a valuable form of analysis” but, rather, a reflection of “the recent history of a radically transformed global context.” We understand, with these recent theorizations of class, that class “interconnects, and is articulated through, other modalities of difference and inequality” : it “interfaces with exploitative relations of gender, colonialism, race, ability and heterosexuality” .

“Class-ifying” Student Voice Research

Because schools are important sites in young peoples’ lives in which they develop understandings of the social world they are living in, it is important to consider the ways that class is manifest in schooling institutions and how schools work to reproduce inequality, even through strategies like “student voice” that purport to ameliorate educational inequalities. More nuanced understandings of contemporary class dynamics in student voice have the potential to illuminate the ways in which those with the power to name the “rules of the game” of student voice may seek to stay ahead of that game within school and beyond it. In this section, we outline three possible areas for future research.

Student Voice and Class Across Contexts and Over Time

Firstly, further analyses of class relations in relation to student voice are necessary because of the shifting nature of class and of the discourses used in education to name (or leave unnamed) class relations and dynamics.

Contemporary mobilizations of student voice in schools need to be examined in relation to these dynamic movements of class. To risk stating the obvious, class means something different and looks and sounds different in contemporary Australia than it did in the United Kingdom in the early 2000s, where many early class analyses of student voice were conducted. Classed interpretations of the norms for how a student should speak, knock on a classroom door, enter a classroom, and embody familiarity and/or deference with teachers look and sound different in different geographical and national contexts; these embodied relations are shaped by the histories and contemporary sociopolitical valences in these contexts. There are contemporary mis/alignments between how students and teachers speak and deport themselves: there are still concerns, for example, about teachers’ perceptions that some students do not yet have the language to sound the way we (adult, middle-class, often white, teachers) feel they need to in order to achieve well in school”. The classed dynamics of these relations requires further examination.

Relatedly, the rhetoric of choice that is invoked in relation to student voice needs to be analyzed in contemporary mobilizations of student voice. While the argument that student voice can enhance a school’s market appeal has been made for some time, further work is needed regarding how discourses of voice are currently adjacent to and intertwined with choice rhetoric in education. There have been important moves to unpack the gendered and racialized aspects of how students within student voice initiatives choose the issues they wish to address, and the reception of their schools. For example, in their 2021 analysis of an elite school setting in the United States, Amanda Keddie analysed how a group of junior girls’ Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project addressing the “micro-aggressions” perpetrated “by the majority white population towards minority students” was met with “strong backlash” from “some of the white males who were ‘offended’ and ‘strongly disagreed’ that they were perpetrating micro-aggressions.” They also tracked how a subsequent YPAR project at the same school focused not on social justice issues but on “student anxiety and work pressure,” leading to action that was supported by the school community and that did not create the same controversy as the previous project. In another recent YPAR study in the United States, Kevin Clay and David Turner reported that when a group of student researchers found that “Black students consistently reported their school to be a more negative environment than their Latinx peers,” the facilitating teacher directly intervened to remove references to students’ racialized identities, deracializing what the students felt was an explicitly racialized experience. The work of Clay and Turner (2021) importantly foregrounds the politics of voice in relation to the Whiteness of the teaching profession, contributing to the urgent project of naming and dismantling White supremacy of societal institutions, including formal schooling.

Alongside this significant recent work, further work is needed to better understand how different class contexts shape the interactions and experiences that student voice practice affords. This is certainly addressed by Craig Skerritt et al. (2021), who suggested that in an environment of high stakes testing, such as that which prevails in Australian schooling, more privileged students may develop a preference to focus on curriculum over other, broader social issues. Further attention is needed on the classed dynamics of why students might choose to be involved in student voice initiatives, in which issues they choose to be involved, in which contexts they choose to voice, and how adults in schools respond to their work. What do students end up “choosing” to “have a voice” about? What are the symbolic boundaries of the choices that they can make in relation to curricular, para-curricular, and extracurricular interests and across differing classed contexts? Asking these questions draws attention to a second potential area for future research: studying the enactment of student voice in class-privileged contexts.

“Studying up” in Student Voice

While it is important to analyze the ways that student voice can level the playing field for those playing at the “back of the field,” such studies can be characterized as “looking downward”; important insights can be gained from shifting the analytic focus. As Laura Nader posed in 1972, “[s]tudying up” can lead us to ask some “‘common sense questions’ in reverse” (p. 5). To give two examples of the potency of “studying up,” Reeves et al. (2017, p. 5) demonstrated that students from more privileged backgrounds are more likely to go on to occupy elite occupational positions due in part to the “preparatory power of elite secondary schools.” In another example, the Paired Peers project shed light on the role that higher education has in the reproduction of social inequalities by illuminating the experiences over time of students from different class backgrounds at two universities as well as their employment outcomes.

When applied to student voice research, Nader’s recommendation may enable us to view both sides of the coin of schooling inequalities and to understand how the practice of student voice may work to maintain or exacerbate them. For example, rather than asking how student voice practice might level the playing field for those playing at the back of the field, a “studying up” approach might ask how those with the power to name the rules of the game “do” student voice to stay ahead of that game. Studying up could also shed more light on the relationship between student voice, choice, and class. As an example, beyond the field of student voice, in the sociology of youth, there have been recent anecdotal observations that female and middle-class young people seem more likely than male and lower class young people to become involved in climate activism outside of school, such as that associated with the #FridaysforFutures/School Strike 4 Climate movement. However, there is more work to be done to understand how class dynamics in schools, in relation to intersectional identities, shape the extent to which students feel they can get involved in these kinds of political advocacy and activism beyond the school. Attending to the relationship between students’ experience of “voice” in school and their civic participation outside of school may bring these two fields into closer conversation.

We also suggest that there is a tendency for previous student voice studies to operate as snapshots of practice, and that future research may undertake more longitudinal analyses of the ways in which class contours the opportunities for students to develop their decision-making capabilities and leadership qualities through their participation in student voice projects, and the impacts of this participation on their future life trajectories. Such studies may draw on Bourdieu’s work to ask what kind of capitals are accumulated over time through students’ active engagement in student voice projects, and how those capitals are then converted. They may draw on the ways that Bourdieu (2010) methodologically approached the stratifying effects of consumption choices in Distinction to illuminate the choices students make, or are supported to make, in more advantaged school settings and the stratifying effects of those choices. As this french filosofo suggested, the “freedom of choice” is something that is accessible only for those at a distance from economic necessity, leaving others with “no choice but the taste for the necessary.”

Young people’s consumption choices of material goods have already been shown to communicate their social position. A closer examination of the choices that are made in student voice may illuminate the impact of class and the role of the school in maintaining or exacerbating inequalities in the ways that students are involved in decision-making. It might also highlight the issues in which students from more advantaged class backgrounds are interested in being involved, and their preferred ways of being involved. “Studying up” and making class more visible can lead researchers to ask such questions as: Does being involved in student voice practice secure more advantages for those whom the system serves best? Are students from more advantaged backgrounds more likely to engage in political participation beyond the school walls? Are those more actively involved in student voice projects at school more likely to go on to employment, or to more secure employment?

Class Consciousness and Student Voice

Finally, we conclude this article with a call for a return of educators’ and researchers’ attention to the language of class consciousness and critical collective action. Our review of past and recent work on the classed dynamics of student voice suggests that student voice risks becoming, in enactment, a matter of individual self-expression and personalized choices in learning experiences. We believe that it is time for a return to questions of young people’s class consciousness and political socialization through schooling—a return to some of the issues raised in 1970 by Raewyn Connell’s PhD work. It is only the shared consciousness of [class] membership which transforms class into a political and social force.” We suggest that in rebuilding this shared consciousness, educators and education researchers might return to the earlier rationales for student voice, in particular to those inspired by Paolo Freire and radical educators, and consider how these rationales might provide powerful foundations for forging new collective work that explicitly names and challenges contemporary educational inequalities. This work would differ from many of the current policy framings and enactments of student voice that focus on supporting individual students’ capabilities and choices. We believe that a cultivation of collective consciousness and collective action is needed among and between educators seeking to support student voice and students invited to take up opportunities for voice and action. Such collective consciousness and action could work toward disrupting the persisting class inequalities that circulate through schools and school systems in Australia and elsewhere and that shape students’ embodied experiences and political imaginaries.