Educational leadership that fosters ‘student voice’

Abstract

This special issue focuses on a controversial topic that has been kept off the official agenda for far too long in educational circles. The question of how to pursue forms of leadership that listen to and attend to the voices of the most informed, yet marginalized witnesses of schooling, young people, has to the most urgent issue of our times. It is no coincidence that disengagement from school by young adolescents has intensified at precisely the same time as there has been a hardening of educational policy regimes that have made schools less hospitable places for students and teachers. There can be little doubt from the accumulating research evidence that as conditions conducive to learning in schools deteriorate through emphases on accountability, standards, measurement, and high stakes testing, that increasing numbers of students of colour and those from urban, working class, and minority backgrounds are making active choices that school is not for them. When students feel their lives, experiences, cultures, and aspirations are ignored, trivialized, or denigrated by school and the curriculum, they develop a hostility to the institution of schooling. They feel that schooling is simply not worth the emotional and psychological investment necessary to warrant their serious involvement. If we want evidence that muscular policies of testing, scripted and prescribed teaching, an ethos of competition, along with dehumanized and irrelevant curricula are not working for large numbers of students, then we need look no further than the 30‐40% of students in most western countries who are not completing high school. The proportions of students of colour, those from working class families, and minorities for whom schooling is a diminished, humiliating, unsatisfying, and an unrewarding preparation for life, is even larger. Policies of fear, punishment, and retribution are a recipe for marginalization and exile. For all our futures, we need to explore the kind of options being advanced by the authors in this issue. To borrow from Australian sociologist Bob Connell, we are living in dark times in which the current policy direction in schooling can only be characterized as being an ‘amorphous mess’ (Connell 1985: 73). The notion of teaching as ‘a gift relation’ (Connell 1996: 6) founded on the notion of ‘a public rather than a private interest’, is under siege and possibly