Spatialising student voice

Abstract

Spatialising student voice explicates how power relations influence the possibility of students’ epistemic becoming, as a starting point for (re)positioning their student voice agentically. With its roots in democratic mainstream school reform, and its position as an agent of transformation, student voice, in an inclusive culture, should equip students, through their involvement in shaping their curriculum, to find their voice as a process of epistemic development. In UK higher education, student voice is employed to “drive up the quality” of the new student experience. In my professional practice, I have worked to authenticate students’ voices through “rich exchanges”, initiating these in contradiction to the micropolitics of power. I have employed Q methodology to reveal students’ lived experience of student voice, drawing on it to operationalise their subjectivity. Forty-five students from five consecutive cohorts of undergraduate students at a post-1992 UK university Q sorted 42 propositions about student voice, and this work was enhanced by narratives from the students’ focussed discussions. Using a social constructionist interpretive framework, a sociological gaze was applied to illuminate students’ shared viewpoints. ‘Being’, ‘doing’ and ‘seeing’ student voice as distinct parameters, tells a story of students’ voices constrained within the university’s practiced space.