Sara Bragg

“Student Voice” and Governmentality: The production of enterprising subjects?

“Student voice” is now taking a more central role in educational policy, guidance and thinking. As it does so, however, it becomes less clear how to interpret it: it can perhaps no longer be seen as a radical gesture that will necessarily challenge educational hierarchies. Drawing on qualitative research into one student participation project, “Students as Researchers”, the article explores how far Foucauldian concepts of governmentality may offer a more sophisticated understanding of the power relations embedded in student voice initiatives. From this perspective, for instance, such projects may be read as attempts to instill norms of individualism, self-reliance and self-management, which resonate with new configurations of power and authority under neo-liberalism, respond to specific debates about school standards, effectiveness and competition, and help construct young people as reflexive “knowledge workers”. Whilst a governmentality perspective does not preclude acknowledging the positive effects of participation projects, it does draw attention to their complexities, such as the new value hierarchies and exclusions they may create, problematising particular groups of young people and limiting possibilities for resistance.

‘But I listen to children anyway!’—teacher perspectives on pupil voice

This paper explores the perspectives of teachers who initially observed, and later came to participate in, a pupil voice initiative in a primary school. Such ‘marginal’ points of view are often neglected in discussions of youth participation. The article aims to demonstrate that whilst adult support for pupil voice is crucial in ensuring its success and sustainability, it is important to recognise the demands it places on teachers, for instance in changing their identities as professionals and their relations both with children and with other staff. Methodologically, it offers a case‐study approach, drawing on research notes and data gathered during a two‐year period in which a deputy head attempted to develop pupil voice in a primary school and focusing on her own account of how the other teachers responded to her work. It shows that, whilst children seemed to rise quickly to the challenge of pupil voice ways of working and being, the perceptions, experiences and reactions of the teachers tell a more ambiguous story of the complexities that emerge as intentions are implemented. At the same time, the article offers insights into how pupil voice can be implemented in ways that help achieve positive outcomes for all involved.

“It’s Not About Systems, It’s About Relationships”: Building A Listening Culture In A Primary School

The International Handbook of Student Experience in Elementary and Secondary School is the first handbook of its kind to be published. It brings together in a single volume the groundbreaking work of scholars who have conducted studies of student experiences of school in Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, England, Ghana, Ireland, Pakistan, and the United States. Drawing extensively on students’ interpretations of their experiences in school as expressed in their own words, chapter authors offer insight into how students conceptualize and approach school, how students understand and address the ongoing social opportunities for and challenges in working with other students and teachers, and the multiple ways in which students shape and contribute to school improvement. The individual chapters are framed by an opening chapter, which provides background on, bases of, and trends in research on students’ experiences of school, and a final chapter, which uses the interpretive framework translation provided to explore how researching students’ experiences of school challenges those involved to translate the qualitative research methods they use, the terms they evoke to describe and define students’ experiences of schools, and, in fact, themselves as researchers.

‘Having a real debate’: using media as a resource in sex education

This article describes the genesis, development and evaluation of Media Relate, a project and teaching pack about media images of sex and relationships for use in school sex and relationship education and citizenship curricula, with young people aged 12–15. Media Relate was based on the findings of an earlier research project into young peoples views on media portrayals of sex and relationships, key aspects of which are summarised here, including the young peoples views on school sex education. The article goes on to contrast approaches to the media within existing sex education materials and in established programmes of media education. In particular, it discusses the pedagogy of open‐ended practical and experiential work in media education, and how this informed both the methodology of the earlier research and the teaching approaches developed within the Media Relate materials. The article explains the content of the Media Relate teaching materials and explores findings from the piloting carried out in various schools. It argues for greater attention to the media as a resource and object of critical reflection and analysis in schools.

Wrestling in Woolly Gloves: Not Just Being Critically Media Literate

Abstract The author argues that media literacy typically overestimates the importance of theory or critique and underestimates what media production may contribute to learning. Through detailed study of a students “violent” video, the author considers the informal knowledge evidenced in practical work and suggests how to mobilize such “ways of knowing” pedagogically.

Pedagogies of Student Voice

For many years, the concept of ‘student voice’ was seen as a marginal issue for educators, the preserve of a passionate, dedicated minority. The literature on voice had to persuade and convince as much as to analyze, whilst the ‘emancipatory’, democratic intentions and outcomes of practitioners were often taken for granted. Now, however, ‘student voice’ is being endorsed and elaborated across a remarkably broad spectrum of contemporary educational thinking, policymaking and provision. It therefore risks being caught up in generalized denunciations of ‘neoliberal’ trends in education. Yet both excessive optimism and undue suspicion represent inadequate responses. ‘Student voice’ is enacted, brought into being, rather than immanent or pre-existing: the term designates a diverse range of practices that require careful, situated interpretation if we are to understand their meanings and effects, and this paper attempts to provide an example of such an analytical approach. It draws on research into how one organization, the flagship English ‘creative learning’ programme Creative Partnerships, attempted to ‘put young people at the heart’ of its work. The paper takes a broader frame than is often the case in student voice literature, locating Creative Partnerships within national government policy and regional and local contexts, and attending to the multiple, sometimes conflicting, practices, processes and sites through which ‘youth voice’ was produced. It analyses the subjectivities, self-imaginings, capacities and narratives that ‘voice’ practices offered to teachers, students, artists and others involved. Through such interpretive frames, the paper hopes to produce more complex ‘ways of seeing’ student voice projects, better able to acknowledge their ambivalent effects in reconfiguring educational power relations and processes, but also more attuned to moments of creativity, surprise and difference of the kind that might make a difference to schooling.

Opting in to (and out of) Childhood: Young People, Sex and the Media

Children today are growing up much too soon, or so we are frequently told. They are being deprived of their childhood. Their essential innocence has been lost. Indeed, some would say that childhood itself is effectively being destroyed. For many people, perhaps the most troubling aspect of this phenomenon is to do with sex. Young people seem to be maturing physically — and showing an interest in sex — at an ever-earlier age. Even quite young children appear to adults to be alarmingly knowledgeable about the intimate details of sexual behaviour. Children, it is argued, are being prematurely ‘sexualized’.

Engaging with the Bailey Review: blogging, academia and authenticity

This article reproduces and discusses a series of blog posts posted by academics in anticipation of the report on commercialisation, sexualisation and childhood, ‘Letting Children Be Children’ by Reg Bailey for the UK Department of Education in June 2011. The article discusses the difficulty of ‘translating’ scholarly work for the public in a context where ‘impact’ is increasingly important and the challenges that academics face in finding new ways of speaking about sex in public.

What I heard about sexualisation†: or conversations with my inner Barbie

This thinkpiece arises from personal reflection on researching ‘sexualisation’, on the individuals and issues encountered and on elements that were unspoken or more rarely voiced. It suggests that the discourse on sexualisation tends to construct an ‘other’ from which speakers distance themselves, variously defined as ‘bad’ mothers, sexualized girls, ‘unhealthy’ sexuality, undesirable or wrong values, an exploitative industry, and so on. The grip that ‘sexualisation’ has on the public imagination may be due less to the social problems it identifies, and more to how it serves as a repository of disavowed or unacknowledged parts of our (social) selves. Ethically and politically, the paper suggests, we should pay more attention to the relations between self and ‘other’ constituted in and through the debate about sexualisation.

Education, ‘consumerism’ and ‘personalisation’

Extended review of John Hartleys book Education and the culture of consumption: personalisation and the social order 2012