ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989, p. 312) was keen to draw attention to the precarious nature of ‘student voice’ discourse as a result of exploring her own university’s anti-racist interventions almost twenty-five years ago. Moreover, her argument that ‘strategies such as student empower - ment and dialogue give the illusion of equality while in fact leaving the authoritarian nature of the teacher/student relationship intact’ continues to remain relevant today, and perhaps of interest here, maybe in the context of co-operative schools too. Therefore, this chapter pays close attention to (extra)ordinary encounters with ‘student voice’ that emerged in the course of this critical ethnographic research and focuses on the moments where the taken for granted emancipatory qualities of ‘voice’ were contested and ‘worked out’ within impromptu focus groups, on the margins of field notes and in re-reading conflicting accounts. This offers an alternative reading of ‘voice’, one that considers the notion of ‘student voice’ as an instance of provocation or as an illustration of a ‘rupture of the ordinary’ (Fielding, 2004, p. 296). And as I will go on to argue, if one also attends to the peculiar places and curious forms in which the more unconventional readings of ‘student voice’ contradict and collide with taken for granted notions of voice as ‘empowerment’, this may offer the means to examine the potential of ‘co-operative’ student voice to create such a ‘rupture of the ordinary’
or whether, in fact, it might merely support the illusion of equality as Ellsworth suggests above.
