Finding a voice, finding self

Abstract

The term ‘pupil voice’ has, in recent years, become part of a wider discourse but tends to refer to a limited conception of young people ‘having a say’ within the bounds of school convention. This article is about what Henry Giroux terms ‘border crossings’, in which voice develops through a physical and intellectual journey beyond boundaries of classroom, of culture, of home and school learning. The story is told through the accounts of school students who crossed their own national borders to visit schools and families in other countries as part of a Scottish‐based project called the Learning School. It was an experience which for them brought into sharp relief questions of voice and sense of self. Through evaluating the experiences of their peers in the schools visited they learned to attune themselves to the hidden voices in classrooms in very diverse cultural settings, experiences which served to sharpen awareness of their own inner voice. Their diaries reveal ways in which the internalized voices of friends, parents and teachers shaped perceptions of who they ‘were’ and what they believed. Their descriptions of re‐entry to the schools they had left behind a year before illustrate some of the tensions that are faced by not only young people striving for resolution among multiple cultural identities but for all students who daily cross the borders of school and community, home and classroom. The broader lesson from this study for teachers is to recognize the hidden agency of the young people they teach and how their sense of self is shaped by the borderlands and ‘construction sites’ they inhabit. The challenge for schools is to reappraise their own identity and to discover what it means to become a genuine learning community.