Relational agency and pre-service trainee teachers: using student voice to frame teacher education pedagogy

Abstract

This article explores the nature of the reflective learning undertaken by pre-service trainee teachers training to teach in the lifelong learning sector in the UK. The argument made is that reflecting on the student voice can support novice teacher’s boundary-crossing and legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Heggen, 2008). This article frames student voice practices as essential within teacher education pedagogy. As a counterpoint to post-Fordist and post-modern challenges to education in late capitalism, student voice practice is used to demonstrate to novice teachers the pedagogic and democratic value that ‘listening to learners’ brings. While recognising the highly contested nature of voice, value is held in both listening to trainee teachers and their anxieties and concerns and providing a reflective and reflexive context through which these can be expressed; and the value to be had for (new) teachers to listen to their own learners. Student voice practice is held to have significance for teachers’ iterative identity (Giddens, 1991), and is seen to provide pedagogic opportunities for the framing of relational agency (Edwards, 2005).