Students of reforms. Investigating and troubling the enactment of student voices in research on reform

Abstract

We investigate how students’ voices are enacted in reform processes and in research on reforms. Our theoretical stance on the concept of reform is performative and onto-epistemological; thus, we understand reforming as an entangled multiplicity, co-emerging and co-morphing. Reforming reconfigure what ‘is’ and intra-act with what is already there. The article focus on a reform of the Danish primary and secondary school. We work with three different cases, each with a different data-set, and analyse how research methodologies and findings in the field of reform research constitute ‘the student’ and ‘student voice’ as well as we look into dynamics of how reforms shape and change what counts as voices and how voices change and shape reforms.