The Politics of Voice in Education: Reforming Schools after Deleuze and Guattari

Maps how the concept of voice has moved and metamorphosed to become a popular educational reform policy priority 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 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 felt over 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. Contents 7 List of Figures 8 Breathing, Speaking, Writing Voices 11 1 Troubling Student Voice in School Reform 18 2 Mis/using Voices and Theories in Research with Children and Young People 56 3 Ordering Voices and Bodies in the History of Schooling 81 4 Representing Difference in School Governance 107 5 Understanding the Atmos-fear of the Dialogical Encounter 130 6 Evaluating the Perplexing Outcomes of School Reform 158 7 Conspiring with the Trees 184 Bibliography 214 Index 255