Critiquing the use of children’s voice as a means of forging the community in a Polish democratic school

ABSTRACT

The paper examines school meetings held in a small democratic school in Poland in order to explore how school communities are formed. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of power, the authors analyse fieldnotes and interview excerpts to reveal how voice and scripted bodily expressions accompanying verbal utterances are privileged in these school meetings to forge a community. Rather than being merely a space where students can act as empowered participants in democratic school governance, the school meetings are also argued to reduce the modalities of participation to voice and embodied forms of action and attention. Voiced participation is thereby instrumentalised to construct a democratic community with its dynamics of inclusions and exclusions. The paper concludes by pointing to reflexive engagements with utilising voice in democratic communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s voice
• silence
• democratic school meeting
• community
• Foucault

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The names of both the school and the research participants are pseudonyms.

2 In order to avoid confusion, we will nevertheless use the terms ‘meeting’ or ‘gathering’, rather than a ‘community’, to refer to this specific practice. The notion of ‘community’ will be applied to talk about the specific understanding of the school adopted by the Bright School.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Centre, Poland [grant number project no. 2014/13/D/HS6/01896].