Eve Mayes
Deakin University Waurn Ponds, Department of Arts and Education, Faculty Member
- Youth voice, student participation, Gilles Deleuze, School Reform, Educational Equity and Justice, Affect/Emotion, English Education, and 11 moreCritical Literacy, Intersectionality, Critical Pedagogy, Teachers and Students Voices, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Sociology of Education, Student Voice, Felix Guattari, Student Climate Justice Activism, and Climate Justiceedit
- Eve Mayes is a Senior Lecturer in Pedagogy and Curriculum and currently Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2... moreEve Mayes is a Senior Lecturer in Pedagogy and Curriculum and currently Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2020-2021) at Deakin University. Her research is concerned with exploring and problematizing ‘experiences’ of educational institutions, through creative and philosophical experimentation with issues of ‘voice’, affect, space and materiality. Her current work is focused on school students’ participation in the transnational Student Strike for Climate (or Fridays for Future) movement, as well as with students’ experiences of education in de-/re-industrializing contexts, using ethnographic, participatory and arts-based research approaches. She was previously an English and English as a Second Language Teacher in government secondary schools.edit
Social movements are dynamic sites for radical experiments in learning, even though "education" is not their primary purpose. The radical learning at work in youth-led social movements remains under-explored, particularly in relation to... more
Social movements are dynamic sites for radical experiments in learning, even though "education" is not their primary purpose. The radical learning at work in youth-led social movements remains under-explored, particularly in relation to what young people are learning and educating others about climate justice beyond formal schooling. This chapter synthesizes what young people engaged in climate justice activism are learning, outside of school, through climate justice activism, in alternative sites of learning that mobilize hands, heads, and hearts. The chapter also considers the inequitable access to these learning opportunities, and the affective and epistemic challenges of these learning experiences. The chapter concludes with suggested potential directions for future research with young people involved in climate justice activist networks.
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This article presents an account of a collaborative inquiry engaging with sympogogy as proposed by Flynn (2021). Sympogogies are pedagogic processes of learning-with (and in) this more-thanhuman world as methodological and pedagogical... more
This article presents an account of a collaborative inquiry engaging with sympogogy as proposed by Flynn (2021). Sympogogies are pedagogic processes of learning-with (and in) this more-thanhuman world as methodological and pedagogical entanglements. We take up sympogogy specifically in relation to practices of play. Our sympogogical method of inquiry involves the enfolding of writing-100s-as-method (Berlant & Stewart 2019, PlayTank, 2020) and digital artifacts of sympogogical encounters with play, care, and violence. We curate a series of [d]artifacts (digital artifacts that include data and artistic responses) created through anarchival practices that invite you to join our sympogogical inquiry into play (Manning, 2020; SenseLab, 2016). Unmooring the shape of the sympogogical (pedagogically posthuman) event as it reveals itself today, we attend to play as multifariously produced in and through a complicated bundle of ethical and political forces which, if rendered carefully (not cautiously but full of care), may become a sympogogical practice that we call ana-play.
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Climate activists and environmental communicators stress that addressing the climate crisis requires both global and local advocacy for transformational change-making. While journalists in small, rural communities are known to actively... more
Climate activists and environmental communicators stress that addressing the climate crisis requires both global and local advocacy for transformational change-making. While journalists in small, rural communities are known to actively advocate on issues for the common good, there has been little investigation of local media advocacy on climate change in rural Australia: a region at the forefront of global heating. This paper analyses the accounts of local journalists of their media coverage of the School Strikes 4 Climate in rural and regional Australia, as an empirical entry point for a conceptual discussion of local media advocacy in reporting climate change. We find that normative ideas about journalism coupled with polarised community views on climate change hindered these journalists from taking an advocacy stance. We explore and critique the tacit 'quiet advocacy' practices used by these journalists reporting on climate in rural and regional Australia.
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A marked feature of the political tactics of the transnational School Strike 4 Climate movement (also known as Fridays for Futures and Youth Strike for Climate) has been the use of humour on cardboard signs, digital memes and social media... more
A marked feature of the political tactics of the transnational School Strike 4 Climate movement (also known as Fridays for Futures and Youth Strike for Climate) has been the use of humour on cardboard signs, digital memes and social media posts. Young people's cardboard signs, memes and social media posts have frequently mobilised humour as public pedagogy and political intervention-to emotionally stir and to politically engage others. In this article, we argue that the school strikers' creation and mobilisation of humour demonstrate a critical affective climate justice literacy that educators committed to pursuing climate justice have much to learn from. In analysing examples of humour in contemporary student climate justice activism, this article brings previous analyses of the potential of humour in social movement studies and climate change communication into conversation with calls from environmental education scholars to pay greater attention to the potency of emotion for climate justice education, beyond a rationalistic focus on climate science literacy. We outline four pedagogical propositions for working with humour, accompanied by their own perplexities, in moving towards critical affective climate justice literacies.
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This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective explores the ethical, political and pedagogical challenges in addressing climate change, activism and justice. The provocation Earth Unbound: the struggle to breathe and the... more
This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective
explores the ethical, political and pedagogical challenges in addressing
climate change, activism and justice. The provocation Earth Unbound:
the struggle to breathe and the creative thoughts that follow are
inspired by the contagious energy of what Donna Haraway (2016) calls
response-ability or the ability to respond. This energy ripples through
monthly reading groups and workshops organised by this interdisciplinary collective that emerged organically in January 2020.
explores the ethical, political and pedagogical challenges in addressing
climate change, activism and justice. The provocation Earth Unbound:
the struggle to breathe and the creative thoughts that follow are
inspired by the contagious energy of what Donna Haraway (2016) calls
response-ability or the ability to respond. This energy ripples through
monthly reading groups and workshops organised by this interdisciplinary collective that emerged organically in January 2020.
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The history of Australian mass schooling has seen contestations over school and curriculum purposes, zig-zagging across conservative and progressive directions. In this paper, we examine how possibilities for students to have ‘voice’,... more
The history of Australian mass schooling has seen contestations over school and curriculum purposes, zig-zagging across conservative and progressive directions. In this paper, we examine how possibilities for students to have ‘voice’, ‘participation’ and ‘leadership’ in their learning are currently limited in Australia. Policy framings, we argue, dampen potentials for connecting young people’s democratic and activist impulses – manifest, in our example, in the School Strike for Climate movement – with curriculum activity that responds to local-global challenges such as the viral-ecological crisis. We propose an activist curriculum praxis wherein young people undertake action-research – in collaboration with diverse community actors, teachers and academics – on problems that matter for local-global future life with others. Since local-global emergencies are emergent, curriculum must build citizen-capacities to work together, apprenticing to problems that matter for social futures, creating emergently needed knowledge-in-action. This participatory-democratic curriculum approach challenges schools to become more socially just and proactive institutions.
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Student voice has been heralded as a practice that provides all children with the opportunity to exercise their right to participate in matters affecting them. However, a common research concern is that not all student voices are... more
Student voice has been heralded as a practice that provides all children with the opportunity to exercise their right to participate in matters affecting them. However, a common research concern is that not all student voices are consistently or comprehensively attended to. What is often under scrutinised is how this uneven distribution of opportunities that students have to voice may be felt by students, in particular by those who have the opportunity to voice. This paper examines a point of perplexity in data generated with members of student representative councils who participated in focus groups. These focus groups were conducted as part of a study that evaluated a primary school student voice programme facilitated by an external provider. We found that participants’ feelings about the ‘privilege’ of being involved in student voice practice belied their assertions about student voice as a ‘right’ that all students have. Claire Hemmings’ concept of affective dissonance is used to guide our thinking about this disparity between what students think and feel about voicing. We argue for the importance of attending to how students feel about voicing as how they feel may impact on their potential to act as agents of change.
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This article extends recent attempts to think (post)qualitative research together with decolonial, postcolonial and other critiques-as a fric-tional, fraught encounter. I review how the concept of voice has been used in past and present... more
This article extends recent attempts to think (post)qualitative research together with decolonial, postcolonial and other critiques-as a fric-tional, fraught encounter. I review how the concept of voice has been used in past and present research with children and young people: from research speaking about children and young people, dialogical speaking with the 'agentic' young person, poststructural refusals of 'raw voices' speaking for themselves, and (post)qualitative onto-epistemo-logical experiments with utterances spoken in research assemblages. Reading one of my research practices-the mis/use of cloth puppets with high school students-through recent critiques of (post)qualitative work, two particular concerns materialize: accounting for relations between past and present research, and accounting for what comes to matter during and after research encounters. ARTICLE HISTORY
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Inequitable outcomes from schooling are an enduring and global concern. Large scale data sets of achievement in the form of international and national standardised tests provide geographies of the effects of schooling. Our interests as... more
Inequitable outcomes from schooling are an enduring and global concern. Large scale data sets of achievement in the form of international and national standardised tests provide geographies of the effects of schooling. Our interests as educational researchers have focused on mapping the local contours of schooling through the use of ethnographically informed approaches to research. In this paper, we consider the implications for ethnographers of schooling of setting aside standard measurements of space and time, for example, to examine how these phenomena are made meaningful and made to matter in particular ways through practices of knowing. We investigate what changes when processes intended to reflect what is 'real' are replaced by performative understandings of knowledge-making. We ground this discussion in three ethnographic studies that provide starting points for reconceptualizing the meaning making of ethnographic practices.
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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a broad theoretical orientation for the themed section of History of Education Review, “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”.... more
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a broad theoretical orientation for the themed section of History of Education Review, “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”. Through the conceptual frame of “contrapuntal historiography”, it commends the practice of re-looking at taken-for-granted concepts and re-readings of the cultural archive of Australian schooling, with especial attention to silences, discontinuities and the movements of concepts.
Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on Edward Said’s approach of “contrapuntal reading”, this paper refers to the recent work of Bruce Pascoe as an exemplar of this practice in the field of Australian
history. It then relates this approach to the study of the history of Australian schooling as demonstrated in the three papers that make up the themed section “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”.
Findings – Following in the style of Said’s contrapuntal reading and the example of Pascoe’s work, this paper argues that there are inerasable traces of historical politics – that is, the records of constitutive exclusions and silences – which “haunt” taken-for-granted concepts like the migrant, the secular and the radical in the history of Australian schooling.
Originality/value – Taken alongside the three papers in the themed section, this paper urges the proliferation of different theoretical and disciplinary approaches in order to think anew about silences, discontinuities and movements of concepts as a counterpoint to dominant narrative lines in the history of Australian education.
Keywords Historiography, Australian schooling, Bruce Pascoe, Contrapuntal reading, Edward Said
Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on Edward Said’s approach of “contrapuntal reading”, this paper refers to the recent work of Bruce Pascoe as an exemplar of this practice in the field of Australian
history. It then relates this approach to the study of the history of Australian schooling as demonstrated in the three papers that make up the themed section “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”.
Findings – Following in the style of Said’s contrapuntal reading and the example of Pascoe’s work, this paper argues that there are inerasable traces of historical politics – that is, the records of constitutive exclusions and silences – which “haunt” taken-for-granted concepts like the migrant, the secular and the radical in the history of Australian schooling.
Originality/value – Taken alongside the three papers in the themed section, this paper urges the proliferation of different theoretical and disciplinary approaches in order to think anew about silences, discontinuities and movements of concepts as a counterpoint to dominant narrative lines in the history of Australian education.
Keywords Historiography, Australian schooling, Bruce Pascoe, Contrapuntal reading, Edward Said
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In recent years, student voice has become a popular school reform strategy, with the promise of generating relations of trust, respect, belonging and student empowerment. However, when student voice practices are taken up by schools,... more
In recent years, student voice has become a popular school reform strategy, with the promise of generating relations of trust, respect, belonging and student empowerment. However, when student voice practices are taken up by schools, student voice may also be associated with less affirmative feelings: it is often accounted for in terms of teacher 'fear', 'resistance' or 'uncertainty' about altered power relations. Such explanations risk individualising and pathologising teachers' responses, rather than recognising the complexities of the institutional conditions of student voice. This article considers the affective politics of student voice: that is, the contestations that attend who gets to name how student voice feels in schools. Working with data from an evaluation study of three Australian primary schools who engage in 'exemplary' student voice practices, we listen to school leaders and facilitating teachers' accounts about the responses of other teachers at their schools to student voice. Parallels are drawn between the construction of some teachers as reluctant, and previous analyses of 'silenced' student voices in schools. We argue that, in order to analyse the enactment of student voice in more nuanced tones, it is necessary to consider the profoundly emotional experience of teaching and learning, the ambivalences of teachers' experiences of student voice, and contemporary reconstitutions of teacher subjectivities.
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This article reviews and reconceptualises-remembers and imagines-previous and possible methodological approaches to the study of the concept of school climate. Mapping three methodological approaches to school climate , we consider how... more
This article reviews and reconceptualises-remembers and imagines-previous and possible methodological approaches to the study of the concept of school climate. Mapping three methodological approaches to school climate , we consider how each approach brings the concept of school climate into being, and the in/exclusions at work in each approach. Questions are raised about the politics of forming and naming a climate, the effects of such measurement and inscription of a school's climate, and the affects that escape and exceed the measurement of a climate. We consider the value of the concept of climate-particularly its ecological connotations, and the possibility of this concept for moving beyond individualised, responsibilitised notions of reform in schools. Working with the conceptual resources of affect and feminist new materialist theories, school climate is re/imagined as indeterminate, exceeding the spatial boundaries of a school, and inescapably political. Such an approach to school climate affirms and creates possibility and alternative modes of being in schooling relations-beyond critique of present approaches to measure and intervene into a school's 'climate' alone. We reconceptualise school climate as processual, continually made and remade in and through the everyday practices of schooling, including the research event.
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This paper brings Barad's agential realism into relation with educational ethnographic work, and longstanding concerns with matters of inequality. We extend previous work that foregrounds time and space in particular places, and that... more
This paper brings Barad's agential realism into relation with educational ethnographic work, and longstanding concerns with matters of inequality. We extend previous work that foregrounds time and space in particular places, and that resists approaches to inequality that generalise about 'best practices' for schools in communities facing challenging circumstances. An Axminster Jacquard carpet loom-located in a particular place-the city of Geelong-becomes a specific point of entry to a discussion of agential realism, ethnography and inequality. This carpet loom was once a key machine in a thriving Geelong carpet factory employing families intergenerationally; it is now a demonstration machine in Geelong National Wool Museum, operated by skilled carpet weavers (now employed as demonstrators) formerly employed at the (now closed) factory. We read questions of deindustrialisation and schooling through the carpet loom as apparatus, working with the questions that it materialises about educational research, ethnography and inequalities. Abstract Agential realism; educational ethnography; inequality; educational reform; Karen Barad Acknowledgement of Country and other Acknowledgements
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Student voice has the potential to prompt creative and transformative teacher professional learning and practice. However, contemporary conditions of education – including policy priorities and institutional constraints – shape how... more
Student voice has the potential to prompt creative and transformative
teacher professional learning and practice. However, contemporary
conditions of education – including policy priorities and
institutional constraints – shape how student voice is taken up.
This article draws on data from an evaluation study of a student 10
voice programme (‘Teach the Teacher’) as enacted in two Australian
schools. Notwithstanding the possibilities of student voice, reductive
interpretations of teacher’s work risk translating student voice
into thin practices; the teacher becomes envisioned as technician
who needs to fill their ‘toolbox’ and find ‘what works’ by listening to 15
students. Analysing what is said and unsaid about student voice for
teacher professional learning in interviews with school leaders and
teachers,©as well as focus groups with students, this article explores
the problematics of mobilising student voice for teacher profes-
sional learning. Questions are raised for those seeking to promote 20
reciprocal intergenerational learning in democratic schools.
teacher professional learning and practice. However, contemporary
conditions of education – including policy priorities and
institutional constraints – shape how student voice is taken up.
This article draws on data from an evaluation study of a student 10
voice programme (‘Teach the Teacher’) as enacted in two Australian
schools. Notwithstanding the possibilities of student voice, reductive
interpretations of teacher’s work risk translating student voice
into thin practices; the teacher becomes envisioned as technician
who needs to fill their ‘toolbox’ and find ‘what works’ by listening to 15
students. Analysing what is said and unsaid about student voice for
teacher professional learning in interviews with school leaders and
teachers,©as well as focus groups with students, this article explores
the problematics of mobilising student voice for teacher profes-
sional learning. Questions are raised for those seeking to promote 20
reciprocal intergenerational learning in democratic schools.
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Student participation in school decision-making and reform processes has taken inspiration from reconceptualisations of childhood. Advocates for student voice argue for the repositioning of children and young people in relation to adults... more
Student participation in school decision-making and reform processes has taken inspiration from reconceptualisations of childhood. Advocates for student voice argue for the repositioning of children and young people in relation to adults in schools. This article works with data from a multi-sited case study of three primary schools and students’, teachers’ and school leaders’ accounts of their student voice practices. We consider the relationships between students in student voice activities in primary schools, and the possibilities and ambivalences of representative students ‘speaking for’ other students. We integrate recent insights from moves beyond voice in childhood studies, and from the turn to listening in cultural studies, and raise questions for students, teachers and researchers who seek to encourage student voice in primary schooling.
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This article considers ontological conceptualizations of shame-interest as experienced in educational research. Shame has frequently been reported in research as a property of the autonomous individual: the shame of the participant to... more
This article considers ontological conceptualizations of shame-interest as experienced in educational research. Shame has frequently been reported in research as a property of the autonomous individual: the shame of the participant to share with the researcher, and the shame of the researcher to reflexively eliminate. Shame-interest is re-theorized here as a generative research event, as intra-action, as one simultaneous movement in the on -going present. We attempt an ethical shift from a reflexive stance to fluxing movements of response-ability and co-consequence in order to encourage socially responsive educational research, informed through the conceptual resources of psychologist Silvan Tomkins, and feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad. Theory is threaded through a series of personal research vignettes to illustrate our thinking through ways shame-interest
materialized within research events. Shame is re/conceptualized as a contestable composite feeling entangled with interest that allows an alternate non-reductive and ethical approach to educational research. We amplify our researcher responsibility, and our shame, by placing ourselves as entangled with the research ‘problem’ under investigation.
materialized within research events. Shame is re/conceptualized as a contestable composite feeling entangled with interest that allows an alternate non-reductive and ethical approach to educational research. We amplify our researcher responsibility, and our shame, by placing ourselves as entangled with the research ‘problem’ under investigation.
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While ‘student voice’ is advocated as a means for school reform, studies of its enactment have noted how student voice can become a technology of governance. This article works with the perplexities of a four-year funded period of reform... more
While ‘student voice’ is advocated as a means for school reform, studies of its enactment have noted how student voice can become a technology of governance. This article works with the perplexities of a four-year funded period of reform at one secondary school, where a ‘student voice’ initiative and a Positive Behaviour Interventions and Supports programme gradually
entwined. Complementing and extending a Foucauldian account of power as productive, Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-analysis generates simultaneous accounts of governance, resistance and affirmation. Mapping what behaviour tokens did, and what was done with these tokens, does not undermine the importance of ‘listening’ to students’ (and teachers’) voices, nor the incisive potential of critique, but rather considers latent pathways out of present repetitious patterns of school governance. It is argued that working with these simultaneous movements of voice may foster more productive conversations about perplexing school reform processes.
entwined. Complementing and extending a Foucauldian account of power as productive, Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-analysis generates simultaneous accounts of governance, resistance and affirmation. Mapping what behaviour tokens did, and what was done with these tokens, does not undermine the importance of ‘listening’ to students’ (and teachers’) voices, nor the incisive potential of critique, but rather considers latent pathways out of present repetitious patterns of school governance. It is argued that working with these simultaneous movements of voice may foster more productive conversations about perplexing school reform processes.
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Inequalities have historically been conceptualised and empirically explored with primary reference to the human. Both measurements of educational inequalities through the production of data about students, teachers and schools, and... more
Inequalities have historically been conceptualised and empirically explored with primary reference to the human. Both measurements of educational inequalities through the production of data about students, teachers and schools, and ethnographic explorations of inequalities in the spoken accounts of human actors in schools can elide affective histories and material geologies of the earth that entwine with societal inequalities, and political questions of the relation between particular human bodies and the earth. In this article, we question: What might it do to rethink the concept of educational inequalities beyond human relations, from within a specific geographical territory? We seek to rethink inequalities including but exceeding these human relations; we argue that inequalities between humans, and between humans and the more-than-human, are materially generated and perpetuated. We offer three theoretical trajectories that consider the affective, spatial and material dimensions of inequality to rethink the relations between inequality, deindustrialisation and schooling. Educational research is implicated in the (re)production of inequalities, as well as having the potential to be part of the production of more equitable relations.
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As student voice has become popularised as a school reform strategy, it has been critiqued as another instrumental strategy that schools may use to govern students’ speech, bodies and subjectivities. What necessitates further analysis is... more
As student voice has become popularised as a school reform strategy, it has been critiqued as another instrumental strategy that schools may use to govern students’ speech, bodies and subjectivities. What necessitates further analysis is the relation between student voice and regulatory modes of governance entwined with geopolitical attention to security in and beyond disciplinary institutions. In this article, ethnographic accounts from students at a comprehensive coeducational public secondary school where student voice was adopted as a school reform strategy are read with and through a policy context concerned with security (in particular, the Australian Government’s Schools Security Programme and the Living Safe Together policy strategy), and Foucault’s problematisations of ‘security’ in lectures published in Security, Territory, Population. It is argued that student voice is entwined with contemporary security policies and practices; securing the material borders of the school is inextricable from limits placed on the discursive articulation of feeling in and beyond school gates.
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Standardised testing regimes, including the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Australia, have impacted on relationships between and within schools, and on teachers’ work and on pedagogies. Previous analyses of... more
Standardised testing regimes, including the National Assessment
Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Australia, have
impacted on relationships between and within schools, and on
teachers’ work and on pedagogies. Previous analyses of the
effects of NAPLAN have been generated outside of the test
situation: frequently through attitudinal surveys and qualitative
interviews. This article takes as its point of departure two intensely
affective events associated with the NAPLAN test day itself. These
events erupted in two qualitative studies of students’ schooling
experiences: a study of students’ experiences of NAPLAN and a
study of students’ experiences of student voice at school. We ask,
after Deleuze and Guattari, What can a NAPLAN test do? Exploring
the entangled corporeal (physical and embodied) and incorporeal
(psychic and subjectivating) wounds effected in and through
these events, we analyse the dynamic constitution and reconstitutions
of ‘at risk’ categorisations. While the NAPLAN test is
not claimed to cause physical and psychical injury, we argue that
standardised test conditions, in these singular events, are
inextricably entwined with the formation of particular students’
schooled subjectivities.
Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Australia, have
impacted on relationships between and within schools, and on
teachers’ work and on pedagogies. Previous analyses of the
effects of NAPLAN have been generated outside of the test
situation: frequently through attitudinal surveys and qualitative
interviews. This article takes as its point of departure two intensely
affective events associated with the NAPLAN test day itself. These
events erupted in two qualitative studies of students’ schooling
experiences: a study of students’ experiences of NAPLAN and a
study of students’ experiences of student voice at school. We ask,
after Deleuze and Guattari, What can a NAPLAN test do? Exploring
the entangled corporeal (physical and embodied) and incorporeal
(psychic and subjectivating) wounds effected in and through
these events, we analyse the dynamic constitution and reconstitutions
of ‘at risk’ categorisations. While the NAPLAN test is
not claimed to cause physical and psychical injury, we argue that
standardised test conditions, in these singular events, are
inextricably entwined with the formation of particular students’
schooled subjectivities.
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This article conceptualizes the materialities of school governance council meetings. A concern for the material a/effects of spatial positioning emerged during a participatory action research project exploring secondary school students’... more
This article conceptualizes the materialities of school governance council meetings. A concern for the material a/effects of spatial positioning emerged during a participatory action research project exploring secondary school students’ sense of the benefits and challenges of student representation on school councils. Attending to affective, spatial and material dimensions of power with the conceptual resources of new materialisms, I question representational logics in policy, research and practice related to school councils. In particular, I interrogate whether the presence of human bodies representing interest groups necessarily promotes more democratic relations, and whether questions of power are best explored through discursive analysis alone. School council meetings are understood to be events where the political philosoph(ies) of a school
materialize in concrete relations between bodies, and where subjects form, re-form (and deform) in and through material-discursive practices.
materialize in concrete relations between bodies, and where subjects form, re-form (and deform) in and through material-discursive practices.
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• This article brings together high school students, teachers, and researchers to think about the issue of power in student voice work. • Each author uses a metaphor or a theory to explain how they think about power in schools and in... more
• This article brings together high school students, teachers, and researchers to think about the issue of power in student voice work.
• Each author uses a metaphor or a theory to explain how they think about power in schools and in student voice work.
• The authors, at times, have different ideas about power relations in student voice work.
• We argue that the way we think about power has effects on what we see, feel, and do in student voice work.
• Each author uses a metaphor or a theory to explain how they think about power in schools and in student voice work.
• The authors, at times, have different ideas about power relations in student voice work.
• We argue that the way we think about power has effects on what we see, feel, and do in student voice work.
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This article explores how two elementary school students responded to their teacher’s invitation in a civic classroom to make a difference to the world. We consider how the teacher framed the construct of civic efficacy and how the... more
This article explores how two elementary school students responded to their teacher’s invitation in a civic classroom to make a difference to the world. We consider how the teacher framed the construct of civic efficacy and how the students refracted these ideas in their navigation of a civic education project. Closely analyzing these students’ experiences and responses, we question what differences are made when students are encouraged to think of themselves as citizens who can make a difference. Noting dissonances and ambivalences in the students’ responses, the conceptual resources of ‘‘figured worlds’’ enable an analysis of the interplay of discourses, interactions, sensory experiences, and material artifacts as civic identities are constituted.
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The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is invested with an affectively loaded ‘knowledge economy optimism’. Drawing on recent work in affect and critical geography, this paper considers the e/affects of the promises... more
The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is invested with an affectively loaded ‘knowledge economy optimism’. Drawing on recent work in affect and critical geography, this paper considers the e/affects of the promises of the knowledge economy on its knowledge workers. We extend previous analyses of the discursive constitution of academic subjectivity through the figuration of ‘emotional knots’ as we explore three stories of the constitution of academic subjectivities in institutional spaces. These stories were composed in a collective biography workshop, where participants constructed accounts of the physical, social, material and imaginative dimensions of subjectivities in the ‘academic-city’ of higher education spaces. Identifying moments of ‘perturbation’ in these stories, this paper considers the micro-contexts of ‘becoming academic’: how bodies, affects and relations become knotted in precise times and places. The figuration of ‘knots’ provides an analytical strategy for unravelling how subjects affectively invest in the promises of spaces saturated with knowledge economy discourses, and moments of impasse where these promises ring hollow. We examine the affective bargains made in order to flourish in the corporate university and identify spaces of possibility where optimistic projections of alternative futures might be formed. These stories and their analysis complicate the metanarrative of ‘knowledge economy optimism’ that is currently driving higher education reform in Australia.
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The conception of the child that a researcher holds has implications for research methods. This article adds to work that mobilises Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-child in Childhood Studies, exploring what their conceptual tools do to... more
The conception of the child that a researcher holds has implications for research methods. This article adds to work that mobilises Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-child in Childhood Studies, exploring what their conceptual tools do to research methods and analysis. I map how puppet production emerged as a research method during an ethnography at a high school and how the students and I co-theorised the methodological value of puppet production. Exploring one particular puppet production, it is argued that puppet productions, analysed with young people, may open up conceptual possibilities, but must be examined alongside the dynamic conditions of their creation and analysis.
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Students as co-researchers is a mode of engagement between students and teachers in school systems that has been likened to a bridge. This article explores the bridge metaphor with reference to one school’s experience of a students as... more
Students as co-researchers is a mode of engagement between students and teachers in school systems that has been likened to a bridge. This article explores the bridge metaphor with reference to one school’s experience of a students as co-researchers project involving students and teachers in the school and a university partner. We use the bridge metaphor, inspired by the imagist poet Ezra Pound, to explore particular challenges faced in this project, and to envision new modes of teacher/ student relationships in education. We argue that the purpose of building such a bridge between students and teachers is not an instrumental one (to reach the other side), but rather that the bridge offers up zones of affective relational encounters between students and teachers.
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Garth Boomer’s ideas in Negotiating the Curriculum (1992a) resonate with discussions of shifting teacher and student roles and relationships in the ‘student voice’ movement. Boomer (1988) critiqued his earlier conception of power in... more
Garth Boomer’s ideas in Negotiating the Curriculum (1992a) resonate with discussions of shifting teacher and student roles and relationships in the ‘student voice’ movement. Boomer (1988) critiqued his earlier conception of power in Negotiating the Curriculum, asserting that he would ‘now like to write a book on Negotiating the Hidden Curriculum’, in which he would conduct an ethnographic ‘micro-analysis’ of the ‘moment-by-moment dance’ between teachers and students and the fluctuations in the ‘flows and ebbs of affect and primal resistance in teachers and taught’ (p.171). This article takes up this provocation, considering a 2013 meeting of a cross-age student voice group where students, teachers and researchers collectively discussed the meanings and manifestations of the hidden curriculum through exploring Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall (Waters, 1979), other film representations of school, and their own school. Four students and I analysed a transcript from this meeting, considering the dynamics of power and affect in negotiated classrooms.
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It is well-understood that systems of education tend to disproportionately benefit already advantaged social groups. Students have been positioned in recent reform e orts as agents with the right to be involved in decisionmaking on an... more
It is well-understood that systems of education tend to disproportionately benefit already advantaged social groups. Students have been positioned in recent reform e orts as agents with the right to be involved in decisionmaking on an increasing range of issues related to their education, in practices commonly termed "student voice" in policy, practice, and research. Student voice has been argued to be a mechanism to intervene in educational inequalities and a means to enhance studentsʼ choices at school. Student voice is frequently represented as a neutral proposition: that is, that studentsʼ involvement in decision-making will directly benefit both the school and the students themselves. This apparently neutral proposition elides how, in practice, some students may benefit from experiences of "student voice" more than others. Critiques of student voice, as well as contemporary calls for a return to class analysis in education, compel attention to the potential ways that student voice practices can aggravate existing inequalities. Classed dynamics contour even well-intentioned attempts to intervene in educational inequalities. The dynamic experience of class has shi ed in relation to student voice across contexts and over time, particularly in individualistic, market-driven educational systems structured by the rhetoric of "choice." Further research into the shi ing nature of class in relation to student voice may include longitudinal processes of "studying up" to understand how student voice can be mobilized to cultivate educational advantage and distinction in class-privileged schooling contexts. What is also needed is a renewed uptake of the concept of class consciousness in student-voice practice-that is, beyond voice as a strategy to personalize individual studentsʼ learning and toward enactments of student voice as collective work-if student voice is to disrupt the reproduction of structural inequalities through schooling.
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Social movements are dynamic sites for radical experiments in learning, even though “education” is not their primary purpose. The radical learning at work in youth-led social movements remains under-explored, particularly in relation to... more
Social movements are dynamic sites for radical experiments in learning, even though “education” is not their primary purpose. The radical learning at work in youth-led social movements remains under-explored, particularly in relation to what young people are learning and educating others about climate justice beyond formal schooling. This chapter synthesizes what young people engaged in climate justice activism are learning, outside of school, through climate justice activism, in alternative sites of learning that mobilize hands, heads, and hearts. The chapter also considers the inequitable access to these learning opportunities, and the affective and epistemic challenges of these learning experiences. The chapter concludes with suggested potential directions for future research with young people involved in climate justice activist networks.
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This entry considers the possibilities, tensions, and politics of student voice and educational partnerships in forging relationships of reciprocity, mutual respect, and shared concern in school communities – sometimes known, in political... more
This entry considers the possibilities, tensions, and politics of student voice and educational partnerships in forging relationships of reciprocity, mutual respect, and shared concern in school communities – sometimes known, in political theory and popular culture, as ‘solidarity.’ Historical rationales for student voice are reviewed, including their connections to the social justice concerns of feminist standpoint theories and critical pedagogies. Critiques of these theories and pedagogies and implications of these critiques are considered for student voice and educational partnerships. The fraught notion of solidarity is then taken up for educational partnerships, where “political solidarity refers to the reciprocal relations of trust and obligation established between members of a political community that are necessary in order for long term egalitarian political projects to flourish” (Hooker 2009, p. 4). Lessons from contemporary political theoretical debates surrounding the politics of solidarity are explored in relation to persisting historical injustices in education, and the possibilities of solidarity with students’ social justice activism beyond formal education.
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Online evaluations (like Rate My Professors and Rate My Teachers) have been celebrated as forming wider publics and modes of accountability beyond the institution and critiqued as reinforcing consumeristic pedagogical relations. This... more
Online evaluations (like Rate My Professors and Rate My Teachers) have been celebrated as forming wider publics and modes of accountability beyond the institution and critiqued as reinforcing consumeristic pedagogical relations. This chapter takes up the websites Rate My Professors and Rate My Teachers as empirical entry points to a conceptual discussion, after Félix Guattari, of the ontological plurality of digital voice, and its associated refrains and universes of reference. I turn attention from analysis of the effects of these digitized student evaluations to the moment of their formation-for example, when a student's finger clicks on a particular star rating. Refusing to separate human bodies from objects, environment and affects, inside from outside, 'real' from 'digital', I consider how emerging modes of online student evaluations of teaching shift individual and collective relations to 'expression' and subjectivity. This chapter also explores the transversal possibilities of de-subjectification offered in when the digital is understood as intercesseur: intersection/intercession.
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Cautious about the dangers of ‘authentic experience’ and confessional narrative, this chapter uncreatively assembles accounts of the complexities of women’s lives in academia. Online sources of information about navigating academia as a... more
Cautious about the dangers of ‘authentic experience’ and confessional narrative, this chapter uncreatively assembles accounts of the complexities of women’s lives in academia. Online sources of information about navigating academia as a woman become elements for artistic experimentation. Purposely juxtaposing official university web accounts of valuing equity, diversity and flexible working arrangements with online newspaper, blog and social media accounts of the lives of women in universities, the tensions, contradictions, perplexities (and potential liberties) of women’s lives in academia are foregrounded. These words, images and screenshots are re-arranged into a form akin to a poem with footnoted weblinks.
Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) has described this form of writing as “uncreative”, “patchwriting”: “a way of weaving together various shards of other people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole” (p. 3). This chapter appropriates Goldsmith’s methodology of writing into feminist methodologies of “collective memory” (Haug et al., 1999) and “collective biography” (Davies & Gannon, 2006). Working with digitised fragmentation (and/ or proliferations) of subjectivities, uncreative writing forms a “postidentitarian literature” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 85).
To deliberately sort, manipulate, move and manage words, images and screenshots from webtexts performs and parodies the sorting, manipulations, movements and management strategies of the corporate university, even as there are concurrent, latent modes of agency at work. Creative combinations of information become “moving information” – language is “push[ed]” around while, simultaneously, the author/ reader is “emotionally moved by that process” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 1). These new assemblages may not always “make recognisable sense”, but “express intensities” “capture forces” and “act” (Lecercle, 2002, p. 195), to make a “different sense” (St. Pierre, 2008, p. 330). In these re-arrangements, the reader (and writer) become disoriented, amused, and impelled to re-think habitual modes of reading, writing and living our shared lives.
Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) has described this form of writing as “uncreative”, “patchwriting”: “a way of weaving together various shards of other people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole” (p. 3). This chapter appropriates Goldsmith’s methodology of writing into feminist methodologies of “collective memory” (Haug et al., 1999) and “collective biography” (Davies & Gannon, 2006). Working with digitised fragmentation (and/ or proliferations) of subjectivities, uncreative writing forms a “postidentitarian literature” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 85).
To deliberately sort, manipulate, move and manage words, images and screenshots from webtexts performs and parodies the sorting, manipulations, movements and management strategies of the corporate university, even as there are concurrent, latent modes of agency at work. Creative combinations of information become “moving information” – language is “push[ed]” around while, simultaneously, the author/ reader is “emotionally moved by that process” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 1). These new assemblages may not always “make recognisable sense”, but “express intensities” “capture forces” and “act” (Lecercle, 2002, p. 195), to make a “different sense” (St. Pierre, 2008, p. 330). In these re-arrangements, the reader (and writer) become disoriented, amused, and impelled to re-think habitual modes of reading, writing and living our shared lives.
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(English translation) This chapter is a reflection on the first three years of a student voice project where Year 9 students were positioned as co-researchers in a low socio-economic school. Three vignettes of students’ performances are... more
(English translation) This chapter is a reflection on the first three years of a student voice project where Year 9 students were positioned as co-researchers in a low socio-economic school. Three vignettes of students’ performances are explored in order to consider the significance of adopting alternative positions for reflection in individuals and schools. We argue that student voice opens a space where students and teachers can step outside of their conventional roles, shifting the traditional ‘script’ of deficit messages in school environments. At the same time, the vignettes also point to the multiplicity of possible responses to the invitation to adopt an alternative position.
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Participatory research with young people might be re-conceptualised as ethico-aesthetic experimentation (Guattari, 1995). Such an approach unthreads the discursive and affective constraints, contradictions and pressures of voice (cf.... more
Participatory research with young people might be re-conceptualised as ethico-aesthetic experimentation (Guattari, 1995). Such an approach unthreads the discursive and affective constraints, contradictions and pressures of voice (cf. Jackson, 2003; MacLure, 2009), as well as the creation of new collective subjectivities in participatory research. This presentation will briefly review poststructural critiques of voice, power/ knowledge and subjectivication in participatory research, before considering how the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari might shift the questions asked by participatory researchers about particular methodological impasses. Examining particular participatory research encounters when there were blockages, leaks and tears in co-theorising ‘student voice’ in a low socioeconomic school reform process, connections are made to other economic, historical, political and social forces and struggles (Albrecht-Crane & Slack, 2007; Mulcahy, 2012). This process of transversal connection is a “political and social psychoanalysis” that explores “unconscious libidinal investment[s] of sociohistorical production” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 98).
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Students’ voices in schools have been historically associated with the chaos of the irrational, immature and irresponsible: to be quietened, curtailed and disciplined. This chaos has been “hidden” through the reinforcement of discursive... more
Students’ voices in schools have been historically associated with the chaos of the irrational, immature and irresponsible: to be quietened, curtailed and disciplined. This chaos has been “hidden” through the reinforcement of discursive habits and models of recognition (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994/2009, p. 216) that block, prohibit and invalidate students’ speech and affects.
“‘New wave’ student voice” (Fielding, 2004a) has emerged in the past twenty years, framed by its proponents as a “radical collegiality” (Fielding, 1999) that might provide the conditions for “radical interruption[s] to the normal asymmetries inherent in school relations” (Mockler & Groundwater-Smith, 2015, p. 54). In student voice work, students are re-positioned to research issues surrounding teaching and learning. ‘Student voice’ encounters where students, as those “directly concerned” with the practices of schooling, “speak on their own behalf” (Deleuze, in Deleuze & Foucault, 1977, p. 209) in “collective elaborations” (Guattari, in Rolnik, 2004/ 2008, p. 9) might manifest new subjectivities, social relations and environment-worlds in the striated spaces of schooling.
At the same time, ‘student voice’ is concept that “zigzags” and passes “through other problems or onto different planes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994/2009, p. 18). ‘Student voice’ has proliferated in recent years in school improvement literature as a mechanism by which to increase engagement and school ‘effectiveness.’ In the movement of the concept of ‘student voice’ through the terrains of education, ‘student voice’ has been de- and re-territorialised by capital, sedimented into formations that encourage students to self-style their speech to become diplomatic and their subjectivities to become enterprising (Bragg, 2007; Foucault, 1991, 2007; Rose, 1999). However, these discursive critiques of student voice marginalise the affective, sensory and material movements of student voice work that exceed and escape molar relations of power.
This paper maps discursive, affective and material currents as the concept of ‘student voice’ was animated in a low socioeconomic high school during a four-year period where ‘student voice’ was employed as a reform strategy. In processes of participatory schizoanalysis in the final year of the reform, the students and I formed and re-formed collective assemblages of enunciations to create concepts, produce art and analyse the (scientific) variables that constitute and re-constitute the “micropolitical vitalit[ies]” (Rolnik, 2004/ 2008, p. 9) of student voice work. The students’ and my collective theorisations are schizo-analytically intersected with flows of signs and machinic flows in social, political and economic machines beyond the school that shape how ‘voice’ is perceived, interpreted and evaluated. Artistic and philosophical collective assemblages of enunciation about ‘voice’ are juxtaposed with the school’s documented evaluation of the ‘effectiveness’ of the student voice work. It is argued that the molar lines that construct social faces and project specific forms of subjectivities of ‘student’ and ‘teacher’ might be (momentarily) suspended and redirected, even while smooth spaces will not suffice to save us (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/ 1987).
“‘New wave’ student voice” (Fielding, 2004a) has emerged in the past twenty years, framed by its proponents as a “radical collegiality” (Fielding, 1999) that might provide the conditions for “radical interruption[s] to the normal asymmetries inherent in school relations” (Mockler & Groundwater-Smith, 2015, p. 54). In student voice work, students are re-positioned to research issues surrounding teaching and learning. ‘Student voice’ encounters where students, as those “directly concerned” with the practices of schooling, “speak on their own behalf” (Deleuze, in Deleuze & Foucault, 1977, p. 209) in “collective elaborations” (Guattari, in Rolnik, 2004/ 2008, p. 9) might manifest new subjectivities, social relations and environment-worlds in the striated spaces of schooling.
At the same time, ‘student voice’ is concept that “zigzags” and passes “through other problems or onto different planes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994/2009, p. 18). ‘Student voice’ has proliferated in recent years in school improvement literature as a mechanism by which to increase engagement and school ‘effectiveness.’ In the movement of the concept of ‘student voice’ through the terrains of education, ‘student voice’ has been de- and re-territorialised by capital, sedimented into formations that encourage students to self-style their speech to become diplomatic and their subjectivities to become enterprising (Bragg, 2007; Foucault, 1991, 2007; Rose, 1999). However, these discursive critiques of student voice marginalise the affective, sensory and material movements of student voice work that exceed and escape molar relations of power.
This paper maps discursive, affective and material currents as the concept of ‘student voice’ was animated in a low socioeconomic high school during a four-year period where ‘student voice’ was employed as a reform strategy. In processes of participatory schizoanalysis in the final year of the reform, the students and I formed and re-formed collective assemblages of enunciations to create concepts, produce art and analyse the (scientific) variables that constitute and re-constitute the “micropolitical vitalit[ies]” (Rolnik, 2004/ 2008, p. 9) of student voice work. The students’ and my collective theorisations are schizo-analytically intersected with flows of signs and machinic flows in social, political and economic machines beyond the school that shape how ‘voice’ is perceived, interpreted and evaluated. Artistic and philosophical collective assemblages of enunciation about ‘voice’ are juxtaposed with the school’s documented evaluation of the ‘effectiveness’ of the student voice work. It is argued that the molar lines that construct social faces and project specific forms of subjectivities of ‘student’ and ‘teacher’ might be (momentarily) suspended and redirected, even while smooth spaces will not suffice to save us (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/ 1987).
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Student voice research most frequently reports students and teachers’ accounts of recent experiences of ‘student voice’. The participatory ethnography that this paper discusses extends previous explorations of young people’s accounts of... more
Student voice research most frequently reports students and teachers’ accounts of recent experiences of ‘student voice’. The participatory ethnography that this paper discusses extends previous explorations of young people’s accounts of their experiences of participation (e.g. Hill, 2006; Morgan, 2009; Rudduck & McIntyre, 2007), while also responding to calls for temporally distanced accounts from students (Hampshire et al., 2012) and for young people to be part of methodological and ethical discussions surrounding participatory research (Bishop, 2009; Uprichard, 2010).
The participatory ethnography discussed in this paper included discussions with students surrounding their memories of a four-year student voice in school reform process at a low socio-economic school in Sydney, Australia. In informal and formal conversations, focus groups and co-theorising sessions, students currently in a ‘student voice’ group as well as older students previously involved in the student voice group created accounts and theories surrounding ‘voice’, power and emotion in student voice work. In this paper, I compare students’ accounts to teachers’ accounts and to the official evaluation documentation of student voice as a reform strategy. Comparing these accounts raises political questions surrounding voice, emotion, power and change in low socio-economic settings: who is expected to reform, what reform feels like, and who decides if reform has happened. In exploring these accounts, I engage with Fielding and McGregor’s (2005) statement that “student voice work explicitly committed to work with those who are most disadvantaged within schools […] has yet to emerge with any significance” (p. 13). I argue that, to advocate for student voice in low socioeconomic communities, it is necessary to interrogate institutional affective investments in conceptions of the student, student/ teacher relations, and the ways in which ‘voices’ and ‘emotions’ are encountered and evaluated in ‘the low socioeconomic’ school.
The participatory ethnography discussed in this paper included discussions with students surrounding their memories of a four-year student voice in school reform process at a low socio-economic school in Sydney, Australia. In informal and formal conversations, focus groups and co-theorising sessions, students currently in a ‘student voice’ group as well as older students previously involved in the student voice group created accounts and theories surrounding ‘voice’, power and emotion in student voice work. In this paper, I compare students’ accounts to teachers’ accounts and to the official evaluation documentation of student voice as a reform strategy. Comparing these accounts raises political questions surrounding voice, emotion, power and change in low socio-economic settings: who is expected to reform, what reform feels like, and who decides if reform has happened. In exploring these accounts, I engage with Fielding and McGregor’s (2005) statement that “student voice work explicitly committed to work with those who are most disadvantaged within schools […] has yet to emerge with any significance” (p. 13). I argue that, to advocate for student voice in low socioeconomic communities, it is necessary to interrogate institutional affective investments in conceptions of the student, student/ teacher relations, and the ways in which ‘voices’ and ‘emotions’ are encountered and evaluated in ‘the low socioeconomic’ school.
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‘Voice’ is a contested concept in qualitative research (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009; Mazzei, 2013). The notion of ‘student voice’ in particular has been critiqued for its disembodied nature (Thomson, 2011), its privileging of particular forms... more
‘Voice’ is a contested concept in qualitative research (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009; Mazzei, 2013). The notion of ‘student voice’ in particular has been critiqued for its disembodied nature (Thomson, 2011), its privileging of particular forms of linguistic/ verbal communication (McIntyre, Pedder, & Rudduck, 2005), and the complexity of power/knowledge relations in ‘student voice’ initiatives (Bragg, 2007; Robinson & Taylor, 2013). The project that this paper discusses explores the discursive practices, affective intensities and embodied experiences of ‘student voice’ in one low socioeconomic high school’s reform process. During a year-long ethnography, students previously and currently involved as researchers in the school’s student voice initiative and I collaboratively created concepts surrounding ‘student voice’, and power/affect relations in ‘voice’ endeavours. Re-working Deleuze’s question “what can a body do?” (1988) to ask, “what can student voices do?”, I trouble the singularity of ‘voice’ and shift attention from pinning down what voices mean, to mapping what they do discursively, affectively and (in)corporeally in school reform processes.
This paper focuses on one puppet show created by student co-researchers that provokes a re-consideration of ‘voice’ and ‘reform’. In this puppet show, a ‘student’ (represented via a chicken puppet) ‘speaks’ unintelligibly (in ‘boks’), the teacher shouts at the student and another student suggests and facilitates a focus group with the teacher and student. Students’ collaborative analyses of this puppet show are combined with a schizoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983; Guattari, 1989/2013) that intersects subjectivities with broader economic, historical and social forces and pressures on the low socioeconomic school. Establishing transversal paths (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 6), I draw connections between the psychical effects of speech in classrooms, reform logics that seek to ‘measure’ the ‘effectiveness’ of a student voice in school reform initiative, and the productive force of students’ silence.
This paper focuses on one puppet show created by student co-researchers that provokes a re-consideration of ‘voice’ and ‘reform’. In this puppet show, a ‘student’ (represented via a chicken puppet) ‘speaks’ unintelligibly (in ‘boks’), the teacher shouts at the student and another student suggests and facilitates a focus group with the teacher and student. Students’ collaborative analyses of this puppet show are combined with a schizoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983; Guattari, 1989/2013) that intersects subjectivities with broader economic, historical and social forces and pressures on the low socioeconomic school. Establishing transversal paths (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 6), I draw connections between the psychical effects of speech in classrooms, reform logics that seek to ‘measure’ the ‘effectiveness’ of a student voice in school reform initiative, and the productive force of students’ silence.
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Observers of teachers’ practice in their classrooms have typically been adults: academic researchers analysing professional practice, school executive members assessing teacher quality and colleagues engaged in professional development... more
Observers of teachers’ practice in their classrooms have typically been adults: academic researchers analysing professional practice, school executive members assessing teacher quality and colleagues engaged in professional development and school reform initiatives. This paper discusses observations of teachers’ practice from a different vantage point: students. In 2011, two Year 9 students observed a teacher in her classroom. This student research event was part of a broader four-year Students-as-Co-Researchers initiative investigating teaching and learning in a low socio-economic high school receiving targeted funding. In 2013, these students were invited to remember and re-construct the 2011 research event in various configurations. This paper examines the affective flows at work in re-positioning students and teachers using the concepts of the “assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/ 1987), subjectivity as “lines” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006/ 1977) and “rhizoanalysis” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/ 1987). It is argued that lines of flight - ruptures in thought and experimentation in practice - escaped in and through the 2011 research event and the 2013 research assemblages for both the students, the teacher and the researcher. Alternative ways of speaking, relating, teaching, learning and becoming prompted by these encounters in the classroom, the staffroom and the school are considered for their potential to convert the “education assemblage” (Youdell, 2011, p. 137).
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Scholars and practitioners who align themselves with the ‘student voice’ movement call for the participation of young people in the reform of and research about their schools (Cook-Sather, 2006; Czerniawski & Kidd, 2011; Fielding, 2009).... more
Scholars and practitioners who align themselves with the ‘student voice’ movement call for the participation of young people in the reform of and research about their schools (Cook-Sather, 2006; Czerniawski & Kidd, 2011; Fielding, 2009). Research on students in schools has been eschewed in favour of research with or by students (Kellett, 2011). In this paper, I attempt to give an account of how I have come ‘undone’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) as a researcher and a teacher in the process of research ‘in the fold’ (Deleuze, 1988/ 1993; cf. St. Pierre, 1997) of a school where I previously taught and facilitated a student participation initiative. Over a year of ethnographic fieldwork, students and teachers were invited to discuss their experiences of students’ involvement in the National Partnerships for Low Socio-Economic Schools reform process. I examine my initial desire to ask those ‘directly concerned to speak on their own behalf’ (Deleuze, in Deleuze & Foucault, 1977, p. 209). I then discuss my anxieties surrounding speaking for the students (cf. Alcoff, 1991; Spivak, 1987), and what Deleuze and Guattari’s preposition before (Deleuze & Foucault, 1977; Deleuze & Guattari, 1994/2009) has produced in these methodological experiments. The affective intensities at work in a particular vocal and non-vocal pedagogical encounter provoke the questions: What does student participation do? What does it produce? And: What does research about student participation do? What does it produce?
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What does it add to practice for the teacher to identify him/herself as a researcher? What can it add to their effectiveness, even their sense of teacher identity? This presentation discusses the context in which a group of teachers were... more
What does it add to practice for the teacher to identify him/herself as a researcher? What can it add to their effectiveness, even their sense of teacher identity? This presentation discusses the context in which a group of teachers were positioned as researchers of their own and others' practice - teachers who were regarded by their peers as highly successful at engaging students from low SES backgrounds. This positioning of the teacher as researcher is discussed here from the points of view of an academic researcher and a teacher researcher on this project.
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Evaluations of schools’ performance have increasingly moved into the public domain. Both policy formation and critiques of the evaluation of schools on the basis of statistical data from standardised tests have predominantly been... more
Evaluations of schools’ performance have increasingly moved into the public domain. Both policy formation and critiques of the evaluation of schools on the basis of statistical data from standardised tests have predominantly been generated by politicians, academics, the teaching profession and parent groups, all of whom are adults. This paper explores critical evaluations of schools and the state of education from a different vantage point: students’ perspectives about their cross-school research experiences within a broader four-year Students as Co-researchers initiative at a low socio-economic school in Sydney, Australia. Two focus group discussions that are part of a participatory ethnography of students’ experiences of participation in school reform are analysed. We explore how students made meaning of their observations of other schools in their Students as Co-Researchers project, and how their discussions might contribute to wider debates about the evaluation of schools. Deleuze and Parnet’s discussion of subjectivity as lines (2006/1977) is drawn upon to analyse how the visits prompted not only responses that aligned with the school’s purposes, but also lines of critique of the surveillance of bodies, interactive habits, and socialisation practices at work in the school visits and their own school. In the final section of the paper, we examine students’ imaginings of how these patterns of speaking, listening, teaching and learning might be constituted otherwise. It is argued that the experience of participation, connection and rupture across school settings might result in uncomfortable critique, but also to new imaginings of alternative constructions of teacher/ student relationships and education itself.
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‘Student voice’ has risen in prominence in educational discourses in the last twenty years. Frequently framed as a pedagogical movement that seeks to shift the “locus of authority” (Cook-Sather, 2002, p. 7) in school reform, many student... more
‘Student voice’ has risen in prominence in educational discourses in the last twenty years. Frequently framed as a pedagogical movement that seeks to shift the “locus of authority” (Cook-Sather, 2002, p. 7) in school reform, many student voice initiatives draw on the critical pedagogy legacy of Freire (1970) to argue for their emancipatory potential (Taylor & Robinson, 2009). However, post-structural critiques of ‘voice’ (Alcoff, 1991; Ellsworth, 1989; Jackson & Mazzei, 2009) have implications for considerations of subjectivity and power/knowledge relations in student voice (Bragg, 2007; Whitty & Wisby, 2007).
This paper will consider representations of students who do not speak, or who withdraw their speech from these initiatives. While student voice researchers/ practitioners desire to foster forms of student voice that are genuinely representative and inclusive, issues of how to include students who reject, resist or appropriate opportunities to participate in school decision-making have been raised (Bragg, 2001; Silva, 2001). I will briefly recount two of my own encounters with students that have shaken my own understandings of inclusion and student voice.
In reflecting on the place and representation of ‘speechless’ students in student voice, this paper will then consider Butler’s (2005) discussion of Kafka’s short story The Judgment and Deleuze’s exploration (1997a) of Artaud’s disorganisation of the voice in his radio play To have done with the judgment of God. While maintaining the radical potential of student voice, it will be argued that the multiplicity of possible responses to the invitation to ‘have a voice’ necessitates openness to student responses and resistance to attempts to pin down the outcomes of voice initiatives.
This paper will consider representations of students who do not speak, or who withdraw their speech from these initiatives. While student voice researchers/ practitioners desire to foster forms of student voice that are genuinely representative and inclusive, issues of how to include students who reject, resist or appropriate opportunities to participate in school decision-making have been raised (Bragg, 2001; Silva, 2001). I will briefly recount two of my own encounters with students that have shaken my own understandings of inclusion and student voice.
In reflecting on the place and representation of ‘speechless’ students in student voice, this paper will then consider Butler’s (2005) discussion of Kafka’s short story The Judgment and Deleuze’s exploration (1997a) of Artaud’s disorganisation of the voice in his radio play To have done with the judgment of God. While maintaining the radical potential of student voice, it will be argued that the multiplicity of possible responses to the invitation to ‘have a voice’ necessitates openness to student responses and resistance to attempts to pin down the outcomes of voice initiatives.
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"This paper questions current conceptions of student participation in school decision-making and reform. Within social inclusion policy rhetoric, participation of ‘all stakeholders’ is asserted to result in improved engagement and... more
"This paper questions current conceptions of student participation in school decision-making and reform. Within social inclusion policy rhetoric, participation of ‘all stakeholders’ is asserted to result in improved engagement and educational outcomes. These declarations potentially reinforce existing binaries of adult/child, teacher/student, voice/voiceless, reforming/reformed in the school institution. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the rhizome (1987) and societies of control (Deleuze, 1992), this paper challenges this rhetoric and points to cracks through which rhizomatic versions of participation might irrupt.
Deleuzian thought and the rhizome in particular have recently been applied in educational research to sociological debates about conceptions of children as “beings”/ “becomings” (Dahlbeck, 2012; Lee, 2001; Prout, 2005), to conceptions of classroom interactions (de Freitas, 2012), to examinations of teachers’ use of policy documents in their daily practices (Honan, 2007). In this paper, I extend these productive lines of thought in searching for alternative ways in which the place of the learner in educational decision-making and educational reform might be considered. The rhizome, as a “subterranean stem” that assumes different forms and directions, has multiple points of entry and exit, and is perpetually “becoming” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 6-12, 21) presents an alternative to the arborescent “Ladder of Participation” (Hart, 1992) that is frequently referenced as the conceptual foundation of student participation. Rhizomatic versions of student participation might move outwards in all directions without origins - multiple, divergent, as well as aware of their own historical contingency, partiality, and the discursive difficulty of their categorisation. These rhizomatic versions of student participation might complicate ethical discussions surrounding the roles of young people in education, but also might form into creative assemblages or “new weapons” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 4) that challenge present binaries and dramatically alter adult conceptions of human development, schooling and social inclusion.
References
Dahlbeck, J. (2012). On children and the logic of difference: Some empirical examples. Children & Society, 26, 4-13.
de Freitas, E. (2012). The classroom as rhizome: New strategies for diagramming knotted interactions. Qualitative inquiry, 18(7), 557-570.
Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3-7.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hart, R. (1992). Children's participation: From tokenism to citizenship. Florence, Italy: Unicef.
Honan, E. (2007). Writing a rhizome: An (im)plausible methodology. International journal of qualitative studies in education, 20(5), 531-546.
Lee, N. (2001). Childhood: Growing up in an age of uncertainty. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood: Towards the interdisciplinary study of children. Oxon: Routledge Falmer.
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Deleuzian thought and the rhizome in particular have recently been applied in educational research to sociological debates about conceptions of children as “beings”/ “becomings” (Dahlbeck, 2012; Lee, 2001; Prout, 2005), to conceptions of classroom interactions (de Freitas, 2012), to examinations of teachers’ use of policy documents in their daily practices (Honan, 2007). In this paper, I extend these productive lines of thought in searching for alternative ways in which the place of the learner in educational decision-making and educational reform might be considered. The rhizome, as a “subterranean stem” that assumes different forms and directions, has multiple points of entry and exit, and is perpetually “becoming” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 6-12, 21) presents an alternative to the arborescent “Ladder of Participation” (Hart, 1992) that is frequently referenced as the conceptual foundation of student participation. Rhizomatic versions of student participation might move outwards in all directions without origins - multiple, divergent, as well as aware of their own historical contingency, partiality, and the discursive difficulty of their categorisation. These rhizomatic versions of student participation might complicate ethical discussions surrounding the roles of young people in education, but also might form into creative assemblages or “new weapons” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 4) that challenge present binaries and dramatically alter adult conceptions of human development, schooling and social inclusion.
References
Dahlbeck, J. (2012). On children and the logic of difference: Some empirical examples. Children & Society, 26, 4-13.
de Freitas, E. (2012). The classroom as rhizome: New strategies for diagramming knotted interactions. Qualitative inquiry, 18(7), 557-570.
Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3-7.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hart, R. (1992). Children's participation: From tokenism to citizenship. Florence, Italy: Unicef.
Honan, E. (2007). Writing a rhizome: An (im)plausible methodology. International journal of qualitative studies in education, 20(5), 531-546.
Lee, N. (2001). Childhood: Growing up in an age of uncertainty. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood: Towards the interdisciplinary study of children. Oxon: Routledge Falmer.
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"“The teachers [at our school] need to be kind and not so arrogant all the time and give us a chance to say something and complete our work with a friend. Don’t just cut us off when we are trying to speak because it makes us really angry... more
"“The teachers [at our school] need to be kind and not so arrogant all the time and give us a chance to say something and complete our work with a friend. Don’t just cut us off when we are trying to speak because it makes us really angry and we lash out.” – Year 9 student.
Words, words, words. According to Year 9 students at a low-socioeconomic school in Sydney, the words that they hear in the school setting dishearten and enrage them. Critical pedagogy has traditionally sought to awaken students to read the “word” and “the world” (Freire and Macedo, 1987). The utilisation of students’ voices as co-researchers has the potential to lead to a radically different approach to research, as well as reorienting students’ views of themselves, their literacies, their school and their futures. This paper will discuss a school-based project that has intended to engage and empower students who have previously felt disconnected, disaffected and disempowered.
Words, words, words. According to Year 9 students at a low-socioeconomic school in Sydney, the words that they hear in the school setting dishearten and enrage them. Critical pedagogy has traditionally sought to awaken students to read the “word” and “the world” (Freire and Macedo, 1987). The utilisation of students’ voices as co-researchers has the potential to lead to a radically different approach to research, as well as reorienting students’ views of themselves, their literacies, their school and their futures. This paper will discuss a school-based project that has intended to engage and empower students who have previously felt disconnected, disaffected and disempowered.
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Book review of Miriam David's (2016) A Feminist Manifesto for Education (part of review symposium).
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Evaluation report for VicSRC Primary School Engagement Project - see https://drive.google.com/file/d/15Rk2kmkMH4f9NSJAdV8Me2odXXufoN0o/view
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This literature review synthesises recent research surrounding the recruitment, development, support, retention/ sustainability of high-quality teachers in low socio-economic (SES) schools. It contributes to the scoping project that is a... more
This literature review synthesises recent research surrounding the recruitment, development, support, retention/ sustainability of high-quality teachers in low socio-economic (SES) schools. It contributes to the scoping project that is a partnership between Social Ventures Australia (SVA) and Australian Council for Deans in Education (ACDE), funded through the Office for Teaching and Learning (OLT) (see http://socialventures.com.au/work/growing-great-teachers/). This literature review analyses existing research and other documents and reports derived from practice and policy. It builds on the work of the SVA’s Growing Great Teachers report and 11 case studies (December 2013) with recent research. The aim is not to establish agreement on empirical truths or identify state-of-the-art forms of measurement. Instead, the landscape of the debates and tensions surrounding socio-economic status and schooling, Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and Early Career Teaching (ECT) are mapped. This literature review establishes that further work on the recruitment, development, support and retention/ sustainability of teachers in low SES schools is worth undertaking, and recommends gaps in the research literature to be investigated.
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This study explores the ambivalent affective intensities surrounding a four-year student voice in a school reform initiative at a comprehensive coeducational public Australian high school. Student voice, an educational movement with... more
This study explores the ambivalent affective intensities surrounding a four-year student voice in a school reform initiative at a comprehensive coeducational public Australian high school. Student voice, an educational movement with rationales that zigzag between standpoint epistemology, dialogue, critical pedagogy, and school improvement, does not necessarily “feel empowering” in its enactment (Ellsworth, 1989, my emphasis). Propelled by prior affective perturbations, I engaged, over a year of participatory ethnographic fieldwork, in processes of methodological and conceptual experimentation with students, teachers, parents and the philosophical resources of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Deliberately working with the problematic concept of voice, I sought to think and feel voice beyond the autonomous liberal humanist subject, to attend to what exceeds the verbal and linguistic in and beyond schools, and to map the simultaneous liberations and co-options of voice. The question What can ‘voice’ do? is concerned with the capacity of voice to affect and to be
affected – as a concept, as a felt force, in methodological configurations, and in writing. I examine common sense ways of knowing students’ voices, emotions and bodies: according to age, ability, emotional expression, and imperatives to produce data demonstrating progress. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of affect, assemblages, lines, order words, desire, and concept creation are employed to rethink the political, pragmatic and affective dimensions of the communicative act and social (re-)production in schools, and to re-tool participatory and ethnographic methods. Mapping what voice does, I explore the refrains that murmured and metamorphosed around voice in a school reform process: respect, understanding, responsibility and change, and their intersections with affects articulated in language as doubt, fear, shame and joy. I argue that what student voice can do depends on conceptions of the body of the speaker, and the opportunities available to trouble these conceptions. What student voice can do depends on the ways in which relations between bodies are felt and interpreted, the configurations and conditions of communicative events, and how student voice events are evaluated. Creating accounts and theories with students about student voice in school reform compels attunement to the dynamic movements of the concept of voice, the material force of language and affect in the formation of subjectivities, the porousness of boundaries between bodies, and the fluidity of the authorial I. This thesis contributes a theorisation of the relationship between affect, desire and voice to the literature on student voice in school reform. Theories and processes of collaborative concept creation with students offer conceptual and methodological tools to affective methodologies. Pedagogically, this thesis contributes to broader conversations about the words, relations, educational configurations and environments that compound positive affects between bodies, augmenting the capacities of bodies to act and the mutual learning that is possible.
affected – as a concept, as a felt force, in methodological configurations, and in writing. I examine common sense ways of knowing students’ voices, emotions and bodies: according to age, ability, emotional expression, and imperatives to produce data demonstrating progress. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of affect, assemblages, lines, order words, desire, and concept creation are employed to rethink the political, pragmatic and affective dimensions of the communicative act and social (re-)production in schools, and to re-tool participatory and ethnographic methods. Mapping what voice does, I explore the refrains that murmured and metamorphosed around voice in a school reform process: respect, understanding, responsibility and change, and their intersections with affects articulated in language as doubt, fear, shame and joy. I argue that what student voice can do depends on conceptions of the body of the speaker, and the opportunities available to trouble these conceptions. What student voice can do depends on the ways in which relations between bodies are felt and interpreted, the configurations and conditions of communicative events, and how student voice events are evaluated. Creating accounts and theories with students about student voice in school reform compels attunement to the dynamic movements of the concept of voice, the material force of language and affect in the formation of subjectivities, the porousness of boundaries between bodies, and the fluidity of the authorial I. This thesis contributes a theorisation of the relationship between affect, desire and voice to the literature on student voice in school reform. Theories and processes of collaborative concept creation with students offer conceptual and methodological tools to affective methodologies. Pedagogically, this thesis contributes to broader conversations about the words, relations, educational configurations and environments that compound positive affects between bodies, augmenting the capacities of bodies to act and the mutual learning that is possible.
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Maps how the concept of voice has moved and metamorphosed to become a popular educational reform policy priority Highlights the ambivalences of student voice in educational reform Crafts an account of the ontology, ethics and politics of... more
Maps how the concept of voice has moved and metamorphosed to become a popular educational reform policy priority
Highlights the ambivalences of student voice in educational reform
Crafts an account of the ontology, ethics and politics of voice in education
Brings students’ and educators’ accounts of voice into conversation with historical and contemporary philosophical debates
Offers examples of transversal experiments in the politics of education
Engaging with the voices of students and educators and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Mayes crafts an account of what voice can and must do in education. The book works with the textures, tremors and murmurs of voice felt over ten years of ethnographic and participatory research in Australian schools – from research encounters with students and puppets, to school governance council meetings, to school reform evaluation processes, to students’ political activism. It offers a timely critique of the liberal humanist and late capitalist logics of student voice in educational reform, entwined with an affirmation of other possibilities for transversal pedagogical relations in and beyond institutional sites of education.
Highlights the ambivalences of student voice in educational reform
Crafts an account of the ontology, ethics and politics of voice in education
Brings students’ and educators’ accounts of voice into conversation with historical and contemporary philosophical debates
Offers examples of transversal experiments in the politics of education
Engaging with the voices of students and educators and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Mayes crafts an account of what voice can and must do in education. The book works with the textures, tremors and murmurs of voice felt over ten years of ethnographic and participatory research in Australian schools – from research encounters with students and puppets, to school governance council meetings, to school reform evaluation processes, to students’ political activism. It offers a timely critique of the liberal humanist and late capitalist logics of student voice in educational reform, entwined with an affirmation of other possibilities for transversal pedagogical relations in and beyond institutional sites of education.