A Teacher's Reflexive Story of Student Voice Pedagogies: An Autoethnography

This study is an autoethnography of my experiences with student voice reforms. Ultimately, I am concerned with better understanding the possibilities for student voice as a transformative teaching and learning practice within the context of neoliberal education. The discussion is anchored in two past student voice projects in which I was involved, one as a researcher and one as a facilitator. As method, I revisit these experiences through memory and various artifacts by way of field notes, personal journals, lesson plans, and email correspondences, to unpack embodied voices of difference that frame contemporary epistemological questions of how we come to know and understand our life worlds. More specifically, I am concerned with how teachers take up student voice in their pedagogies, how teachers come to understand themselves and their students in terms of student voice, and how social differences come to contour student voice pedagogies. I query: How do teachers understand student voice? What are the ways in which teachers experience student voice? How does the experience of student voice organize and inscribe teacher ←→ student relationships? And, how are student voice practices shaped, organized, and inscribed through social difference? Grounding this inquiry is poststructural feminist anti-racism as an interwoven discursive orientation and politics for troubling and transforming schooling and education. My analyses address how my presence as an individual and as a member of socio-historical groups in the student voice initiatives affected the projects' dynamics. My findings amplify the necessity of time and space for educators to critically reflect on their practices when implementing reforms, time and space that were provided by engaging autoethnography. The study contributes important strategic processes towards realizing the necessary goals of critical reflexive practices in teaching and learning, addressing the question of `how' to do critical reflection through autoethnography.Ph.D