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Pupil voice, it seems, is the latest big idea to be embraced by government. In institutional attire, it is discernible in structures and protocols rather than constituting a paradigm shift as to the role of young people in their own learning. In common with many other important movements, 'voice' risks becoming another add-on, like citizenship, assessment for learning, and personal, social and health education. It is something else schools have to accommodate to, rather than embed in their thinking.
Understanding the complexity of 'voice', as expressed within the organisational life of schools, is a necessary precursor to innovation or implementation. Schools need to be understood as places in which voices carry, and carry in differing bandwidths. There are voices that demand to be listened to, by virtue of their status. Some voices have an inherent authority. Some are powerful because of their emotional resonance, while others, although reasoned and rational, fail to infect attitudes or practice. There are strident voices and voices that have been systematically silenced by rules and mores or by the weight of historical inertia and frustration.
It is in the counter weight and balance of the fluctuating acoustic of the voices of teachers, pupils and parents that cultures either flourish or diminish. The ability to listen and tune in to harmonies and discords marks out effective leadership. It is in the management of the blend that school improvement is realised.
'Pupil voice' can only be understood within the complex dynamic of beliefs, relationships, conventions and structures that characterise what has come to be known as the 'culture' of a school. Pupil voice is, in fact, something of a misnomer, since it implies a form of homogeneity. While, as institutional categories, there are clear lines of demarcation between pupils and teachers, the boundaries of their individual and collective power are less easily defined. Their latent differential power, and the challenge they offer to leadership, becomes explicit at times of crisis (for example, when the testimony of a teacher has to be weighed against that of a pupil). Adjudication at times of crisis crystallises issues of voice but it is in the moment-to-moment arbitration of voice that leadership is revealed and the character of a school exposed.
Voice is both an individual and a collective phenomenon. It is verbal and non-verbal. It is neither constant nor without contradiction. It is highly responsive to context, politically sensitive and socially conscious. Celebration of pupil voice, as if it were always naive, authentic and untrammelled by convention, may lead to an equivocal place. What is expressed by a child or young adult may be spontaneous or may be a studied choice with an acute grasp of audience. The choice of appropriate linguistic and social register is one of the principal lessons that schools teach but is learned more powerfully through the hidden, rather than through the formal, curriculum. The simple exhortation to pupils to 'have their say' in the formal setting of the classroom or school council tends to neglect the powerful process by which voice is given shape.
Expression of voice is not only bounded by precedent and protocol but assumes the presence of an appropriate metacognitive repertoire on the part of pupils. It further assumes that school staff have both the motivation and the skills to tune into hidden content and implicit meaning. To hear the authentic voice requires listening to what lies beneath the words, with a support sensitive enough to help young people expand their social and intellectual lexicon.
What is given expression by a child or young person reflects a prevailing internal voice, which may be that of a parent, an older sibling, a teacher or a specific peer group. This is what the sociologist, G.H. Mead, referred to as 'the internalised other'. What 'education' intends, whether by the agency of parents or teachers, is to help children unravel the disparate narratives that speak to them, so they find their own voice and discover the confidence to express it.
Transactional analysis is one of the most useful theoretical frameworks for explicating how different vocal registers work in the context of a school or classroom. In Berne's model the individual is portrayed as expressing a view in one of three internalised voices - child, parent or adult. The pupil's conscious, or more commonly unconscious, choice of voice is shaped by the voice in which he or she is addressed. So a response 'in the child' is most likely to be evoked by an admonition from a teacher who is 'in the parent'. Helping pupils to express their views 'in the adult' is most likely to occur when teachers or others also adopt the mature 'adult' register. Characteristic of such adult-adult transactions is the ability to listen and, most crucially, to listen to views that differ from your own.
Voice grows from the roots up and only when allowed the space to grow. A school culture that wishes to achieve the acoustic balance among all the competing desires to be heard will consciously strive to maximise adult-adult transactions. This implies a strategic approach on the part of leadership, neither achieved in the short-term nor by mandate but through a process that models from the top down and builds from the bottom up. It is an approach that recognises teachers will not listen to pupils if they are not listened to by their managers or peers. It is an approach that understands that teachers are unlikely to tolerate divergent views from their pupils in a professional culture that can only live with sterile consensus.
The genesis of 'voice' is in the day-to-day business of the classroom where, no matter the subject of study, there is a respect for persons, a positive embrace of diversity, and an anticipation of surprise. A day without surprise is a teaching, rather than a learning, day. Leadership, too, is nourished by surprise, by a continuing discovery of the talent and ingenuity that is uncovered in the dialogic classroom (see, for example, Alexander, 2004 and Pollard, 2002) and the dialogic school. 'Dialogue' as a search for meaning embeds the singular notion of pupil voice in a wider more multi-layered discourse.
'Organizations require a minimal degree of consensus but not so much as to stifle the discussion that is the lifeblood of innovation', write Evans and Genady (1999, p. 368), who argue that the constant challenge of contrasting ideas is what sustains and renews organisations. Schools that play safe, driven by external mandates and limiting conceptions of improvement, set tight parameters around what can be said and what can be heard. They are antithetical to the notion of a learning organisation which, by definition, is always challenging its own premises and ways of being.
School improvement, conceived in the house of school effectiveness, has by birthright tended to measure improvement by a trajectory of key indicators. Evans and Genady propose an alternate paradigm. For them, organisational effectiveness is inherently paradoxical. It is dynamically balanced between control and flexibility, and internal and external focus, by the tensions between means and ends. There is freedom to break rules because the culture is resilient enough to learn from it. The aphorism 'organize one way and manage another ' (p.369) implies that the greater the hierarchical constraints, as in institutions such as schools, the greater the need for flexibility and diversification.
While it is now widely accepted that the key to school improvement lies in self-evaluation, in most protocols the school speaks with a singular or a limited voice. In most schemata, typified by OfSTED, self-evaluation is designed to eliminate paradox and provide a definitive statement of quality and effectiveness. On each of the given criteria, or indicators, a grade is agreed (anything between a four and seven-point scale). This is often attended by defining labels, such as 'good' or 'excellent' . In the final reporting what is concealed, however, is the very essence of self-inquiry - the contested views and appeals to evidence that lead to the eventual compromise. The real story to be told lies in the process by which knowledge is created and recreated, the beginning of insights to come, rather than the extension of knowledge past. This does assume, of course, that the journey to the final reported grade was one of dialogue, in which pupils played their part in the chain of voices.
Such a messy and conflicted story of a school's inner life is not amenable to the tidy requirement of external review. However, for learning, developmental and improvement purposes, it is indispensable. Managing the tension between self-evaluation for accountability, on the one hand, and for deepening self-knowledge, on the other, is a challenge familiar to schools in every administration in which quality assurance has been embraced.
The vital process through which a school becomes a community of learners is what has come to be known as capacity-building. It is the means by which a school expands its intellectual and human potential. The term 'potential', as applied to individual pupils, is a confining and essentially undermining construct. When applied to a whole-school community, the inherent potential is similarly beyond realisation. Time, logistics and external pressures conspire to limit what schools can do to liberate the inner resources of their pupils and staff. However, tuning in to the range of voices, through self-evaluation, is the essential first step to transforming school life and learning.
Alexander, R. (2004). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk , University of Cambridge . http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/download/DialogicTeaching-OrderForm.doc.
Berne , E. (1964). Games People Play: The basic handbook of transactional analysis . New York . Random House.
Evans, P. and Genady, M. (1999). A Diversity-Based Perspective for Strategic Human Resource Management, in Research in Personnel and Human Resource Management , Supplement 4.
Pollard, A., with Collins, J. Simco, N., Swaffield S., Warin, J., and Warwick, P. (2002). Reflective Teaching: Effective and evidence-informed professional practice . London : Continuum.
Professor John MacBeath is Chair of Educational Leadership at the University of Cambridge and, until 2000, was the Director of the Quality in Education Centre, at the University of Strathclyde , in Glasgow , Scotland . He is Director of Learning for Leadership at the Cambridge Network and the Wallenberg Centre. Professor MacBeath is Chairman of the International Network for Educational Improvement and consultant to the Hong Kong Education Department on school effectiveness. Other consultancies have been with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), UNESCO and ILO (International Labor Organisation), the Bertelsmann Foundation and the European Commission on School Self-Evaluation and European Indicators.
From 1997 to 2000 Professor MacBeath was a member of the Governor's Task Force on Standards and, from 1997 to 1999, Scotland 's Action Group on Standards. He is also a member of a number of government working parties on Beacon Schools and Schools in Challenging Circumstances. He is also on Lord Puttnam's Education and the Media policy group.
His recent publications include:
MacBeath, J. and Mortimore, P. (2001). Improving School Effectiveness. Buckingham. Open University Press.
MacBeath, J. and Moos, L. (2001). Skolen kan svare for sig selv .
Fredrikshavn, Dafolo, MacBeath, J., Jakobsen, L., Meurat, D. and Schratz, M. (2000). Self-evaluation in European schools: A Story of Change . London. Routledge.
MacBeath, J. (1999). Schools Must Speak for Themselves: The case for school self-evaluation . London. Routledge.
MacBeath, J. and Myers, K. (1999). Effective School Leaders . London. Prentice-Hall.
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