Disrupting student voice in education research through music

Abstract

Education policy in the contemporary context tends to produce reductive, oversimplified and essentialist notions of classrooms, teachers and students. An emphasis on quantifiable big data that provides for ‘evidence-based practice’ and focus on ‘what works’ permeates the education machine and limits the boundaries of what can be known. Yet the complex arrangement of policies, politics, philosophies, pedagogies, practices and people that we label the ‘classroom’ provides for rich study of the multiple ways that pedagogic encounters might be experienced by young people. This paper seeks to engage with the notions of student voice and agency within an alternative context of learning – an urban senior secondary music college. Experimenting in conceptualising classrooms as moments of becoming, music is proposed as a performative method for interrogating notions of student voice.