The Politics of Voice in Education

Maps how the concept of voice has moved and metamorphosed to become a popular educational reform policy Engaging with the voices of students and educators and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Mayes crafts an account of what voice can and must do in education. The book works with the textures, tremors and murmurs of voice encountered during ten years of ethnographic and participatory research in Australian schools - from research encounters with students and puppets, to school governance council meetings, to school reform evaluation processes, to students' political activism. It offers a timely critique of the liberal humanist and late capitalist logics of student voice in educational reform, entwined with an affirmation of other possibilities for transversal pedagogical relations in and beyond institutional sites of education. Key features: - Highlights the ambivalences of student voice in educational reform - Crafts an account of the ontology, ethics and politics of voice in education - Brings students' and educators' accounts of voice into conversation with historical and contemporary philosophical debates - Offers examples of transversal experiments in the politics of education. Eve Mayes is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Education at Deakin University.