Students’ Critical Commentaries: Unfettered Voices

Abstract

Changes to educational practices have been proposed, with some being adopted globally, on a continuous basis. However, student opinions have seldom been invited into discussions. This article was written following an invitation from the Dialogic Pedagogy Journal “to write a critical response to” Eugene Matusov’s editorial “A student’s right to freedom of education”. The inclusion of student voices in educational forums is integral for a more complete understanding of the position of all participants and, whether one considers students to be representative of one of Gramsci’s subaltern classes, students as an active group have historically been denied “the basic rights of participation” (El, H., 2012), with their absence from educational discussions having become the status quo. The following article introduces the critical commentaries from seven students who were members of a university level Discussion and Debate class in Seoul, South Korea. Their views were shaped from their previous schooling experiences and their hopes for positive changes. The students’ commentaries are responded to by Eugene Matusov. It is the hope of this author that this classroom process may act as one potential model for further educators to invite student voices into academic discourse. In the spirit of Gayatri Spivak’s 1998 essay (Spivak and Riach, 2012), it is time to let the subaltern speak.