Student Voice: A Site for Developing Citizenship, a Vehicle for Improving Learning

Abstract

This chapter argues that engaging with students' voices by listening to the multiplicity of their views on learning and teaching in school helps teachers to construct learning communities with them and tune teaching and learning processes to the social and cognitive needs of students. It takes the view that students as citizens and members of school communities are partners with teachers in processes of learning even if the institutions in which students and teachers work are constructed with unequal power relationships that emphasise performativity in acknowledgement of the neo-liberal discourses of globalisation that surround and penetrate them. In giving students some ownership of the processes of teaching and learning by engaging them in dialogues about teaching and learning and the limits of choice in constructing these to achieve curriculum objectives in particular institutional and policy contexts, teachers encourage students to develop positive and pro-active identities as citizens and learners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)