Student voice and the politics of listening in higher education

Critical Studies in Education http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcse20

Student voice and the politics of listening in higher education

Julie McLeod a a Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Available online: 18 May 2011

To cite this article: Julie McLeod (2011): Student voice and the politics of listening in highereducation, Critical Studies in Education, 52:2, 179-189

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2011.572830

Critical Studies in Education Vol. 52, No. 2, June 2011, 179–189

Student voice and the politics of listening in higher education Julie McLeod∗ *Email: [email protected]

Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Australia

(Received 3 November 2010; final version received 8 March 2011)

The promise of giving voice to under-represented and marginalized groups has been a mainstay of emancipatory agendas in educational research. It has been an especially influential focus in feminist and gender equity reform projects and is increasingly a feature of policies and programs directed to enhance youth participation and civic inclusion. Voice typically signals a concern with representation and empowerment and associated claims for transformation have been criticized on several grounds, from offering only superficial forms of inclusion to the problem of power in the selective bestowing of voice. Yet the appeal of voice remains powerful. What can be learnt from feminist and other critical attention to promoting voice in education; and what might be the challenges – limitations and benefits – of adopting a pedagogy and politics of voice as a strategy to promote equity and wider participation in higher education? I outline an argument for how we might re-frame voice as problem not so much of expression and representation, but of listening and recognition, and consider some of the implications of such a reframing for student equity strategies in higher education.

Keywords: feminism; higher education; listening; student equity; student voice

Introduction The promise of giving voice to under-represented and marginalized groups has been a mainstay of emancipatory and radical agendas in educational practice and research. It has been an especially influential focus in feminist and gender equity reform projects and is increasingly a feature of policies and programs directed to enhance youth participation and civic inclusion. Attention to voice often signals a concern with representation and empowerment. It has been strongly linked to the politics of social movements – feminism, civil rights, gay activism, disability rights – and tied in with claims for political recognition of difference and identity politics, alongside struggles for equality. Associated claims for the transformative potential of voice politics have been criticized on several grounds, from offering only superficial forms of inclusion to essentializing group identities, and to the problem of power in the selective bestowing of voice. Yet the appeal of voice as a political project, as a metaphor for identity and agency and as a strategy for promoting empowerment, inclusion and equity, remains powerful. Arguably a certain romance attaches to calls to rescue and release the voices of the silenced and marginalized, allowing under-represented, excluded and neglected groups to have their say, for their perspectives to be heard and the value of their standpoints recognized. Acknowledging different voices

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unsettles the authority and perspective of the so-called ‘centre’, those whose voices are already well and truly heard, symbolically and practically dominating the seemingly natural ways of looking at and organizing the world. As I argue here, the apparent revival of voice as a political strategy warrants closer inspection, and revisiting some of its earlier incarna- tions and critiques is helpful for understanding its appeal and its dangers in the present.

This essay has been prompted by a series of discussion in Australia on strategies to promote student equity and widen participation in higher education. One immediate con- text for these discussions is the reception of the Review of Australian Higher Education (Australian Government, 2008, The Bradley Review), a report which includes recommen- dations for universities to diversify their student mix and meet specific equity targets – that is, to attract more students from social groups typically under-represented in higher education. Such imperatives are not unique to Australia, with systems of higher education globally facing the challenge of how to broaden participation (David et al., 2010; Rizvi & Lingard, 2009). Concerns about the role of higher education in perpetuating social inequalities are also not new. Contemporary political and cultural circumstances, however, present particular challenges as well as heightened pressures for universities, at the very least, to demonstrate a commitment to improving their ‘equity profile and outcomes’. Greater student mobility, the demands of the knowledge economy, transformations in work and technology, increasing polarization between rich and poor and increased social expec- tations for base-line higher education credentials are among the many factors informing renewed efforts for improving student equity in higher education. Calls for student equity can translate into a narrow focus on matters of access and entry points and, while these are crucial, they are only one measure of or element in creating a more equitable and just educational system. A longer and wider view of student experience – both prior to and dur- ing university life – is required in order to understand the complex, historically-embedded dynamics of equity and inequality and the subjective desires and anxieties that fuel students’ decisions to go, remain at or leave university. Gale (2010) argues that, following changes in the governance and cultures of universities, new conceptions of student equity are needed, ones that are able to account for a ‘changed structure of feeling’ (p. 2). And this, he proposes, invites us to consider important dimensions of student experience that are likely to be salient in their decisions to participate in higher education – among them are aspirations and voice. For example, Gale (2010) suggests that students’ aspirations for university are ‘no longer a given’ and that ‘due to increased enrolment of different students, the challenge now is how to give greater voice to this difference’ (p. 2).

The following discussion, then, is in part a response to an invitation to consider the significance of voice as a dimension of equity strategies in higher education. I ask what kind of policy, program and conceptual work the idea of voice provokes, what it obscures and what other questions and approaches might be posed alongside or instead of a reform agenda based on heeding voice. The essay is also in part a reflection on the effects and uses of voice in educational discourse and on what we can learn from – and what we appear to have forgotten about – earlier reform agendas, especially feminist critical engagements with voice as a political and conceptual framework. Finally, I outline an argument for how we might re-frame voice as a problem not so much of expression and representation, but of listening and recognition, and conclude by considering some of the implications of such a reframing for student equity strategies in higher education.

The many meanings of voice Despite its popular currency, it is often not clear what exactly is meant by ‘voice’ and, more particularly, what is actually being summoned in the notion of ‘student voice’. Voice is a

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resonant yet slippery term, sometimes used metaphorically, sometimes literally, sometimes with benign connotations, at other times with subtle regulatory and oppressive ones. Voice is not simply speech; it can mean identity or agency, or even power, and perhaps capacity or aspiration; it can be the site of authentic reflection and insight or a radical source for counter narratives. Voice can be a code word for representing difference, or connote a democratic politics of participation and inclusion, or be the expression of an essentialized group identity. It can evoke practices attuned to the power of inter-subjectivity and the politics of the personal; it can have a therapeutic resonance; it can be a latent yet need- to-be-released attribute attached to some groups and not others. It can suggest an ideal, a political agenda and a basis for policy reform and action; it can declare difference and it can homogenize it; it has methodological and pedagogical dimensions and is rarely – if ever – simply a matter of creating opportunities for unfettered expression.

The notion of voice has thus been put to work in diverse ways, often generating contradictory responses and ambiguous effects, as I elaborate below. Voice has been an especially influential concept in educational endeavours, overlain with multiple aspirations. We can identify at least four common and overlapping uses of voice in educational discourse: voice-as-strategy (to achieve empowerment, transformation, equality); voice- as-participation (in learning, in democratic processes); voice-as-right (to be heard, to have a say); and voice-as-difference (to promote inclusion, respect diversity, indicate equity). Linked historically to child-centred and progressive pedagogy, attention to voice is currently allied in school education with calls for inclusive education, for valuing difference and for building democratic and organic practices that are responsive to and reflective of the voices of diverse constituents. Valuing and enabling the articulation of student voice is often seen as integral to democratic and citizenship education (Biesta, Lawy, & Kelly, 2009), in which respecting (other) voices and having the capacity to express voice is part of learning to be a good student and a responsible citizen. Initiatives such as youth forums or youth global citizen projects (Mitchell & Parker, 2008) position youth or student voice within participatory and sometimes emancipatory discourses. A belief in the intrinsic value of respecting student voice informs the promotion of student participation and recasts the position of learners, granting them expertise on their learning. While there has been a robust critique of some of the limitations and dilemmas associated with the concept and practice of student voice (Fielding, 2004, 2007), in school-based projects voice is typically seen as powerful, a force that needs to be released and harnessed and as having a radical potential for transformative practice.

In higher education, we find voice similarly deployed in a variety of ways. Student voice is drawn upon to frame and support inclusive curriculum projects, with learning initiatives that celebrate diversity and create spaces for students deemed ‘different’ or non-traditional to have their say, to have their point of view and experiences expressed, and possibly heard (e.g. Hockings, this issue). While student voice-as-participation and as-difference are mobilized in self-consciously participatory initiatives and innovative programs that aspire to reflect the diversity of the student body, the authority of student voice-as-strategy is also evident in quality assurance discourses and the status accorded to student evaluations of teaching and course satisfaction. In this respect, attention to student voice is caught up in the performative and regulatory regimes of contemporary university life and is one of the mechanisms for judging and constructing the good academic. This reflects what Seale (2010) describes as the two most commonly cited purposes of student voice projects in higher education: ‘quality enhancement and assurance’ and ‘staff or professional development’ (p. 996). She suggests that the these ‘two broad purposes of student voice work in higher education tend to be aligned to higher education policy or practice agendas such as evaluation and feedback . . . and reflective practice’ (p. 996). There is, she notes, also

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a ‘strong student engagement or involvement agenda’ (p. 996). Focusing on the ‘student engagement agenda’, a guiding assumption is that in being able to express their views and participate in major decisions about their learning (voice-as participation, voice-as-right), students will ‘become more engaged’ and, one presumes, their learning will improve. The current take-up of voice in higher education and equity discussions thus comes with an over-determined and even contradictory agenda. In looking to voice as one of the strategies for enhancing student equity – and as one of the discourses propelling the ‘inclusion of difference’ juggernaut – there is value in pausing and reviewing some of the concept’s different histories and uses. Too much educational reform suffers from a kind of habitual forgetting of what has gone before, or of re-inventing what has already been scrutinized and found wanting in other spheres.

In contrast to voice research in school settings, Seale (2010) observes that there has been little research on voice in higher education that unpacks the meaning and effects of key concepts such as participation, or relations between learners and teachers, which are central to how we understand the mediation, listening to and reception of student voice. Indeed, Seale argues, ‘in higher education, the student voice literature is relatively silent on the issue of power relationships between teachers and students’. Consequently, she continues, ‘little consideration is given to issues such as equality and empowerment’ (p. 997). What, then, might such assessments mean for the potential of student voice projects to advance student equity agendas in higher education? To address this question, I turn now to consider the use of voice in three related arenas, draw- ing out different dimensions to the promise and problems of voice in order to explore their implications for student equity projects in higher education and to suggest some lessons and insights that might be remembered and brought forward into current reform activities.

Finding voice as a contested practice The three uses of voice noted here have each directly and indirectly had an impact on educational research and practice, and in each the giving, finding and power of voice has been both lauded and critiqued. They are: social and participatory research methods, critical pedagogy and feminist and postcolonial theory and politics. The contests over voice in these fields illuminate tensions and double-edged effects and this is helpful for rethinking the place of voice in equity initiatives in higher education. Baker argues that across the twenti- eth century, voice has been rendered as either an emancipatory and democratic expression of homogenous group identities wanting to get things on the agenda or as a ‘monolithic, falsely representational, essentializing concept’ that does injustice to the politics of difference and to the complexities of contemporary societies (Baker, 1999, pp. 369–370). Revisiting these important debates helps point to some of the ambiguities, dangers and uncertainties in building a voice-based equity politics. Perhaps the bluntest tension lies in the political effect of calling forth or releasing voices and the problem of how to recognize and represent difference.

Social and participatory research – giving voice and speaking for The transformative aspect of voice – voice-as-right, voice-as-participation – has been especially prominent across a range of social research methods and methodological debates. Such transformative potential is not confined to changes in individual participants – though this is not unimportant – but also encompasses epistemological change and shifts in


disciplinary and popular understandings. One example is the oral history movement of the 1960s that sought to hear ‘The voice of the past’ (Thompson, 1978) through the memories and voices of ‘ordinary people’. Similarly, the parallel rise of women’s history sought to bring into the picture women’s experiences and ways of doing, seeing and saying. In these projects, voice stood for more than point of view, but represented a paradigm shift in what counted as historical knowledge and what mattered in narratives about the past – questions of politics, counter stories and subjugated knowledges were central. Since these earlier efforts to recover and reclaim the authenticity of silenced or neglected voices, there has been a wholesale interrogation of the authenticity of voice in social research and of the complicated and complicit role of the researcher in rescuing voices and speaking on, for, with or about the identities (mis)represented by different voices. This accompanied a wider problematization of the research subject and power relations in social research (e.g. Denzin & Lincoln, 2005).

In social research, the attitude to voice tends to take two main directions. First, there is a privileging and celebration of voice: voice is given to, and heard from, the excluded, the neglected, the ordinary; prominence is given to the perspectives and experiences (voice- as-difference) of research participants, commonly with a radical and social change agenda (feminist research and labour histories are key examples here). This celebratory mode, however, is countered by recognition of the ethical and epistemological dangers of speaking for, or on behalf of, others: this includes questions not only about the violence of speaking for others and but also about whose voice speaks loudest. The perception that there was a danger in speaking for others arose from two sources, Alcoff (1991) argued. The first was the recognition ‘that a speaker’s location . . . has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker’s claims and can serve to either authorize or de-authorize one’s speech’ (p. 7). And second, that ‘certain privileged locations are discursively dangerous. In particular, the practice of privileged people speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for’ (p.7).

Inequalities of power were identified between the researcher and researched, even in emancipatory and radical projects (McLeod & Yates, 1997). Uncertainty about participant voice was also registered in methodological anxieties about whether it is possible for the researcher not to impose their perspective: can the voice of the research participant be heard through the organizing voice of the researcher and writer (or teacher)? Can research be conducted that does not turn the subjects of research into the ‘objects’ of research, and how might attention to voice mitigate or exacerbate these dangers? Such dilemmas spawned many types of strategies, including a heightened concern with researcher reflexiv- ity, notions of research as co-constructed and new ways of writing about and representing participant voice (Richardson, 1997). There have been many legacies of these debates. Among them, the messages to take in terms of equity and inclusion projects are the loss of innocence in claiming and calling for voice, the insinuation of power and relational inequalities and the problem of representation, that is, the seemingly indissoluble connec- tion between the positive discovery and recovery of voice and the danger of speaking for and on behalf of others.

Critical pedagogy – and when voice isn’t empowering Empowerment and emancipation are central tropes in radical and critical pedagogy, ges- turing to the intrinsically political character of teaching and learning and the place of pedagogy in social justice struggles (Friere, 1972; Giroux & McLaren, 1989). The promise

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of voice-as-participation underpins the transformative agenda of critical pedagogy, with the classroom a microcosm of wider social relations in which radical educators could consci- entize students, giving them the tools to find and express their authentic voice. The voice of the charismatic teacher often rang more loudly than the voices being coaxed and released. Through rational persuasion and sheer charisma, pupils would be brought to ‘see the light’, be free to express and thereby find themselves and, embracing the voices of school com- munities, would unleash more organic and socially-responsive forms of schooling. Here giving voice is a story about ‘giving freedom’, giving power and equality – a contradictory impulse, as many critics have observed.

Much has been written criticizing the triumphalist hubris of critical pedagogy in bestowing freedom and giving voice and it does not warrant rehearsing these critiques at length here, except to note the enduring impact of feminist and poststructuralist inter- rogations in exposing the dangers of giving voice and the unacknowledged consequent power asymmetries between the giver and receiver of freedom (Ellsworth, 1988; Luke & Gore, 1992). In her analysis of the repressive myths of critical pedagogy, Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989) forcefully asked why all the incitements to empowerment did not actually feel empowering and argued that there were fundamental contradictions and lacunae at the heart of critical pedagogy. ‘Strategies such as student empowerment and dialogue give the illusions of equality while in fact leaving the authoritarian nature of the student/teacher relationship intact’ (p. 306).

When giving and expressing voice is made synonymous with empowerment, silence becomes problematic. Ellsworth argues that the radical pedagogy literature assumes ‘silence in front of the teacher or professor indicates “lost voice”, “voicelessness”, or “lack of social identity” from which to act as a social agent’; this, she argues, ‘betrays deep, and unacceptable gender, race and class biases’ (Ellsworth, 1989, pp. 312–313). At the very moment of inviting transformation, some approaches to critical pedagogy idealized a type of voice practice that risked (re)inscribing long-standing forms of discrimination and perpetuating cultural and gender exclusions. For student equity in higher education, the messages to take from these debates concern juggling the benefits of being responsive to student voice alongside the limits and risks of programs designed to ‘give voice’ and the ideals of the good student that accompany this desire to set free: what counts as voice and which or whose voices are recognized?

Feminist and postcolonial interventions – who is speaking and what is heard? Feminist activity has spearheaded a good deal of attention to voice and in much of this voice has symbolised a radical shift to allow the entry of gendered voices, to create another history and to claim another way of being in the world. From works as diverse as Carol Gilligan’s (1982) In a different voice to the French feminists on writing the female body and the cultural feminists’ ‘women’s ways of knowing’ (Irigaray, 1985), there has been a focus on the specificity and distinctiveness of women’s voice. The political imperative has been to make sure it was heard and, in turn, to transform the apparently universal, yet deeply gendered conceptions of, for example, morality, learning and epistemology (McLeod, Yates, & Halasa, 1994). But even a cursory glance at the history of feminist ideas indicates some of the troubling effects of women’s voice. As many have argued, the idea of women’s voice served to essentialize group differences, installing universal gender binaries and neglect- ing other social differences that structured women’s lives – such as class, ethnicity, race, location, sexuality. From many directions, feminists of different political and theoretical orientations began to question the value of ‘voice’, with many seeing it as a dangerous


and spurious concept that silenced powerful differences among women, creating a false and profoundly disturbing sense of commonality. The process of insisting on the political necessity and epistemic value of women’s voices actually served to silence many and homogenize difference.

Among the many critiques of women’s voice, black and postcolonial feminists have made some of the most trenchant interventions (Hirsch & Keller, 1992; Mohanty, 1988), exposing the way feminism continued to erase their experience and ignore the intersec- tional layers of voice. For the discussion here, the central messages are the high stakes of voice, its political and paradigmatic effects in both naming and claiming gender difference as salient and in silencing difference within gender. Student voices may need to be heard, but the cautionary tale is to avoid essentializing that speaking position. This includes not underestimating the effects of calling for but not actually listening to diverse voices, and of not recognizing voices that are out of tune with idealizations of student voice.

The postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak (1988) famously asked in the 1980s, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ [where ‘subaltern’ refers to subordinate and colonized groups]. Too often, this question has been heard as a matter of access and rights to express voice: can a space be created for the subaltern, is the subaltern free to speak? But this account misses the central point of the question. Spivak’s question was whether the subaltern/the colonized can speak outside the language of the colonizer, and her answer put the case that ‘when the colonizer speaks back, what is heard is the colonizer’s worldview’ (Baker, 1999, p. 369). Reflecting on Spivak’s influential essay, the British feminist Michele Barrett (2004) observed that the ‘critical question is can the hegemonic ear hear anything, not the literal one of “can the subaltern speak?”’ (p. 359). In other words, the question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ is not so much about giving voice or empowered expressions of agency, but of how to listen and hear: the responsibility for recognition shifts from the speaker to the listener.

I have been arguing that to focus only on voice as expression – or as code for agency, perspective, difference – is to ignore the significance of listening and to skate over voice as a dimension of communicative practice that invokes self/speaker and others/listeners. This somewhat paradoxically constructs voice as non-dialogical, as disconnected from the contexts in which it is heard and in which it is recognized as mattering or not. I now turn to consider briefly recent debates in media and communication studies that offer some important directions for rethinking voice and listening in equity and higher education.

Listening and recognition Similar to the politics of voice in education, O’Donnell, Lloyd and Dreher (2009) suggest that much analysis of media is ‘modelled on a politics of expression, that is, of speaking up and out, finding a voice, making oneself heard, and so on’ (p. 423.) They propose a shift in focus to examine ‘the politics of listening’ which ‘provides a means of moving beyond questions of speaking and voice to canvass issues of dialogue and meaningful interactions across difference and inequality’ (p. 423). With such a refocus, they argue, ‘silence and silencing take on new meanings; misinterpretation and dissonance move to the forefront of our concerns, and the topography of disparities in the social distribution of media [and other] resources’ is revealed (p. 423). The immediate concern in O’Donnell et al.’s analysis is with the analysis of media communication and technologies, yet parallels can be drawn with the task of understanding difference, dissonance and inequality in education. Of particular relevance is their insistence that listening, like voice, is a socially embedded practice, with institutional, collective and cultural histories that shape not only what is

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heard and recognized but also how difference and inequality are registered and negotiated. In addition, they, along with Couldry (2009, 2010), link the rethinking of listening and speaking to broader democratic projects and the goal of fostering meaningful communication across difference. Voice – as speaking and listening – matters because it concerns ‘citizens listening and speaking together with the aim of engaging each other’s perspectives, even when discord marks this joint interaction and requires participants to change or modify their communicative practice’ (O’Donnell, et al., 2009, p. 429).

For Couldry, the politics of voice also evokes the human capacity to ‘give an account of their lives’ (Couldry, 2009, p. 580; Couldry, 2010, pp. 120–123; cf. Butler, 2005). This capacity, he argues, requires recognition and should set in train a ‘process of mutually recognizing our claims on each other as reflexive human agents, each with an account to give, an account of our lives that needs to be registered and heard, our stories endlessly entangled in each other’s stories’ (Couldry, 2009, p. 580). Such a conception of voice and listening is embedded in a particular communicative and communitarian democratic project, but the

points I wish to bring forward from these discussions are not exclusively tied to this project. No doubt, an exclusive focus on listening has the potential for as many pitfalls and

problems as a focus on voice-as-expression: listening can appear as a kindly gift, a benev- olent act of charity (O’Donnell et al., 2009, p. 436), a patronizing gesture to tolerance. But listening also forces relationality, intersubjectivity and power dynamics into view because it evokes the address and location of voice. Further, Dreher (2009) argues that in foreground-

ing reception and recognition, a focus on listening ‘brings the discursively privileged into analysis’ (p. 446) and consequently shifts ‘responsibility for change from marginalized voices and on to the conventions, institutions and privileges which shape who and what can be heard’ (p. 447). This argument speaks directly to equity initiatives in higher edu-

cation. How do universities respond to student voice/s and who bears responsibility for listening and for changing?

Voice, listening and student equity Following from these reflections on voice and listening, I now draw together a number of observations on the ambiguous status of student voice, all framed by questions about what a focus on voice offers for student equity in education, what it avoids and what else needs to be addressed. Giving attention to student voice can constitute a valuable acknowledgement of student point-of-view and experience, a strategy that stands in contrast to responding only to teacher or bureaucratically-driven conceptions of learning. It can mean not only recognizing ‘difference’ but also acting appropriately to make education more inclusive. One further virtue of taking student voice seriously is that it provides a reminder of the presence of embodied students, against the prevalence of abstract, disembodied equity cat- egories that beset discussion of inequality and representation in education. Voice thus has some immediate appeal and purpose – registering agency, responsiveness, difference – especially when it is presented as a more humanistic response to (1) the categorical discourse of target groups and (2) top down policy reforms that are inattentive to or even unaware of the voices and views of those who are the object of reform efforts. But I am not convinced that voice itself holds the answer to the equity puzzle. No doubt there is some therapeutic benefit in attending to voice: it can be a feel-good – if hard work – strategy for educators, evidence of the engaged teacher, the caring academic. Students, at least in my experience, are usually less easily won over by the rhetoric of inclusion and the romance of voice.


Immediately, however, the question arises regarding which students are invoked in the category ‘student voice’. In addition to the dangers and erasures of voice as outlined above, there is a risk of constructing voice as a compensatory attribute of the marginalized and the culturally-silenced, as a marker of ‘difference’ that needs to be acknowledged and managed in the foreign environment of a university. This extends to the work of student services in supporting such students (the non-traditional students) and to teachers being more attuned to student diversity in their classroom. But, following from the preceding discussions, all students have the capacity for voice, to give an account of themselves. To align voice with marginalized or under-represented groups is to further stigmatize such students – they are known and heard by their otherness; ‘traditional’ student groups are ‘normal’ and are not accorded a problematic voice; and it is also likely to diminish struggles for greater equity. In an important sense, the voices of certain privileged groups of students are indeed well- known, especially those for whom university is perceived as part of a normal pathway, a relatively familiar environment. Yet this sense of comfortable familiarity may change for some. The pressure to meet equity targets in Australian higher education is likely to have an impact not only on potential students who are members of equity target groups, but also on students who have a more historically-based sense of entitlement and belonging. What kind of tensions might this create among students, in the articulation of student voice and within university cultures? What other tensions and divisions exist within the student body, within classrooms? Any voice-based equity interventions need to be able to allow and respond to dissonance, to the likelihood of discordant voices and to all students not speaking as one. Here we strike the importance of listening across difference and the follow-up question of how to act after listening.

The matters that demand more critical and practical attention are those that compli- cate the giving and recognition of voice – of being able to hear what is said and of allowing alternative discourses to emerge through hegemonic registers. If higher education practitioners wish to court student voice, then something more meaningful needs to be done in response than a course evaluation questionnaire. What kind of conversations and actions are underway and what new ones should be initiated in order to address student equity in the present? Taking some lessons from feminism, we need to avoid homogenizing and romancing ‘student voice’, or the voice of the disadvantaged student, while also not doing symbolic violence and speaking on behalf of others. In part, this requires advancing sociological and psycho-social questions about which voices are heard and which voices sound or are heard as if they matter. Importantly, it is not about jettisoning completely the restorative and radical potential of voice politics. As O’Donnell et al. (2009) argue: ‘Attention to listening is intended as a shift away from speaking but not a shift against, and a strategic emphasis on neglected understandings of listening is seen as a means of developing complex understanding of listening and speaking, and of their interconnections’ (p. 436).

Students’ desires, the feelings and aspirations that motivate them to participate in or leave higher education are matters that warrant ongoing investigation, especially the experiences and perspectives of so-called non-traditional students (Funston, 2011), and student voice projects can shed light on these matters. However, as I have been arguing, reviv- ing voice as an equity and inclusion strategy is not sufficient unless it is accompanied by a more dynamic and situated account of voice-as-strategy and voice-as-communication. This requires reframing the problem of student voice as a matter of listening, recognition and engaged dialogue. How are universities listening to student voice/s and how are they are responding – in terms of curriculum, certification, access, support? Such an orienta- tion might also help unsettle the lurking idea of voice-as-difference, as a problem for the

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excluded and silenced rather than a capacity shared by all. And it might also help new understandings and even indicators of what counts as equity and what equity looks and sounds like.

Conclusion In this essay I have mapped some of the ways in which the appeal of voice has reverberated across feminist and educational research and interventions, noting problems and possibil- ities afforded by a focus on voice as part of struggles to achieve cultural, political and epistemic change. I have identified insights and lessons from earlier adoptions of voice as in part cautionary tales and in part to outline some of the history and legacies of hailing and attending to voice. Prompted by Spivak’s provocative question of ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ I have argued for an account of voice as inseparable from the practices and respon- sibilities of listening – intersubjectively, institutionally and collectively. Couldry (2009) suggests that one of the ‘banal oxymoron[s] of neoliberal democracy’ is the paradox that ‘voice can apparently be offered, without any attention to whether it is matched by processes for listening to, and registering, voice’ (p. 581). The challenge for equity initiatives in higher education will not be in inciting student voice, but in converting that opportunity into meaningful and practical recognition.

Notes on contributor Julie McLeod is Associate Professor in Curriculum, Equity and Social Change, Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. Her research areas are youth and gender studies, curriculum history and feminism, and subjectivity, inequality and schooling. She is currently working on a cultural history of adolescence and schooling, 1930s– 1970s. Publications include Researching social change: Qualitative approaches, 2009 (with R. Thomson); Troubling gender and education, 2009 (ed. with J. Dillabough & M. Mills); Learning from the margins: Young women, social exclusion and education, 2007 (ed. with A. Allard); and Making modern lives: Subjectivity schooling and social change, 2006 (with L. Yates).

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Student voice and the politics of listening in higher education

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