ABSTRACT

Increasingly, there is an awareness that we cannot continue to debate the nature of schooling without consulting the consequential stakeholders, the students themselves. During the 1960s the Observer newspaper in the UK ran a competition asking children of secondary-school age to design the school of their dreams. Edward Blishen used the 1000 entries to put together a book that clearly indicated the difficulties that students were experiencing with their schools (Blishen, 1967). Some 40 years later the Guardian newspaper ran a similar competition, K-12. This time they received 15,000 entries, many of them being multimedia. Again a book resulted from the competition which indicated that not much has changed. In their introduction to the book Burke and Grosvenor (2003) wrote: ‘There is a history of not attending to the expressed experience of children within schools; everyday neglect in this sense has become institutional’. While, in the main, it is true that schools rarely consult their students and take them seriously, it is the case that there are schools both in the UK and in Australia where there have been systematic policies and practices that have enabled students’ voices to be heard and have even given students agency in designing, investigating, analysing and interpreting studies of learning (Needham and Groundwater-Smith, 2003; Groundwater-Smith and Mockler, 2003; Arnot et al., 2004). That being so, there are serious ethical issues to be considered when schools engage in practitioner inquiry where students become integral to the research. These ethical issues revolve around vulnerability and the extent to which young people may be manipulated or coerced. As well, there are matters of various and competing accountabilities and the ways that these are played out in the many and diffuse practices of the school.