Student voice in school reform? Desiring simultaneous critique and affirmation

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Student voice
• school reform
• desire
• partial object
• Deleuze and Guattari
• positive behaviour

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback on this manuscript. I am grateful to the students, teachers and school leaders at this school for their generosity and trust. Thanks to Deb Hayes and Susan Groundwater-Smith for their support and skilful supervision during this project, and to Deborah Youdell, Emma Renold and Anna Hickey-Moody for their encouragement and engagement with an earlier version of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Student names in focus group transcripts are pseudonyms invented by the students. Names in partial accounts are pseudonyms invented by the author.

2 It has been acknowledged that Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freud may, at points, over-simplify Freud’s theories (Buchanan, 2013; Hickey-Moody, 2013). Below, I engage primarily with Deleuze and Guattari’s extension and amendment to Freud’s interpretation of Little Hans, and Melanie Klein’s conception of partial objects. It is beyond the scope of this article to explicate Deleuze and Guattari’s relationship with psychoanalysis (and the misinterpretation of their position as critique in the secondary literature), and particularly their extension of Lacan’s critique of psychoanalysis (see Smith, 2005).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Federal Government (Australian Postgraduate Award).