Abstract
This is a dauntingly exciting book. As a handbook it is just under 500 pages, and is packed with so many great chapters with authors that I want to read in ways that it is un-put-down-able. Access and reading the text are helped by sectioning with an editorial overview of the aims and chapter content, and each chapter has an abstract. It is unlikely that a reader will go through the text from cover to cover due to the amount of material as I did for this review, but I would recommend such an approach in order to obtain a full view of what is on offer. However, for the busy reader the dipping into and out of chapters is also of interest, and the detailed index is very helpful.
The book contains 34 chapters, and when the introduction and conclusion are taken out of this number, the remaining 32 chapters are divided into five sections. The first section is about theorising and two of my favourite people and writers are in there with excellent chapters by Fielding and Thomson. Both write so well in support of student voice and both are troubled by the dangers to students and to schools by its misuse. Notably, both are democrats and through their analysis they are concerned with the understanding of the issues to do with the conceptualisation and practice of student voice. The context of the book is further established through chapters by Wisby on teacher professionalism, Cheminais on policy, Breslin on citizenship, and Chadderton on social justice. My descriptive labels here do not do the chapters justice; they are fascinating and helpful in thinking through the issues, and I know I will keep revisiting them in order to replenish my scholarship.
Part 2 contains nine chapters with accounts from various projects within all phases of education, and part 3 has five chapters about the relationship between student voice and the professional preparation and development of the educationalists. I found these chapters to be challenging, and also they demonstrate the range of positions and possibilities for student voice. Only detailed reading by yourself can give justice to these chapters, as no summary can adequately grasp or characterise the range of experiments and programmes that are taking place.
Part 4 covers an area that Pat Thomson and I recognised is an issue for the field when we first developed a students-as-researchers project. Under the heading ‘capturing student voice’ there are seven chapters on methodological matters. Arguably this is the most important section in the Handbook as all who are interested need to locate projects, no matter how small, within a robust design. The research integrity and ethical issues regarding this type of work are vitally important for all children and parents. Children may have to attend school but they do not have to participate in a student voice project, and the relationship between assent and consent needs to be central to thinking and planning.
The final section has six chapters from outside the UK, with accounts of student voice projects in Australia, Brazil, China, Sweden, the US, with one chapter that draws on research in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa. These are fascinating and can stand by themselves, but in placing them towards the end of the Handbook they can be held as a mirror to look at the state of the field both in the UK and elsewhere. The potential for learning about methodology, methods and theorising is huge, and there is much that this book stimulates in relation to thinking and ideas.
In my view the book needs to be on the shelf of staffrooms and offices in all phases of education, and should be on reading lists for professional training and development. What is important about this book is that it won’t give people answers and it does not provide recipes but it does invite us to think and to develop pedagogy. Producing a ringbinder on student voice just would not do − we need a new approach to professional engagement with pedagogy and this Handbook is a good starting point. The editors speak to this type of issue:
We recognise that bringing about the transformation argued for by many of the contributors in this book will require substantial changes in the nested cultures permeating schools, colleges and teacher education institutions. Such transformation will take time but must happen (p.431).
A particular strength is in the fact that the ideas cannot be turned into bullet points and flashed up on a screen, and it suggests that our professional voice is where the starting point needs to be. And I would like to suggest a starting point for this. The strap line of the Handbook is ‘bridging the academic/practitioner divide’ and I would like to suggest that this needs to be challenged as an artificial construction. The world I inhabit is as a practitioner in a university but I am also labelled an academic, and when I was a school teacher I was a practitioner in a school but I was also an academic through the scholarly work I did in support of my teaching and postgraduate studies. Field members are located in a range of workplaces, and we have a range of interests in our focus on children and learning, and so perhaps our ability to speak might be facilitated by not accepting artificial boundaries designed to separate and isolate those with a common cause. There are two useful starting points for this: first, the book shows a range of small projects where from the bottom up new ideas and strategies can and are being developed, and we need to show the validity of this approach to change; and second, a useful follow-up would be for the authors to work with students and give them voice through a handbook so that first-hand accounts and analyses can be presented. Wainer and Islam provide a useful model of one way in which this might be done, and so I look forward to a companion handbook where humans from nursery to university can speak about the processes that the authors in this book argue are important. I realise that having done a brilliant and exhausting job in commissioning the chapters and putting this Handbook together the editors may think their work is done… but it has only just started.