Pupil voice has become increasingly important in school improvement, planet climate warnings and the Brexit referendum, perhaps the biggest pretence at listening to the voices of the British people in recent years.
It has been central to much child centred learning pedagogy across the world too with the attendant risk that claiming to privilege children’s voice becomes a tokenistic attempt at democratic education which masks several other agendas – pupil compliance, customer satisfaction, and the inexorable marketisation of education – in full flow.
This paper explores the phenomenon of ventriloquation (Wertsch, 1991, Bakhtin, 1981), hypnotism and impersonation as channelled through Disney’s Toy Story 4 and identifies the challenges to fighting for the creative voice of children and young people. It discusses this in the context of Lundy’s work (2007) (“Voice” is not enough: conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child”, British Educational Research Journal, 33:6).
Always in transition, the paper argues that voice is not a fixed entity. We do not speak consistently for long. We are always learning; and always listening to new voices which we try to ignore, assimilate, pass off as our own or wrestle into a completely different form. Our authentic voice – or true children’s voice – can never be completely pinned down or determined because our lives depend on flux and flow, confluence and influence. By placing this argument in the context of the work of Schaffer and Korza (1999, Animating Democracy. The Artistic Imagination as a Force in Civic Dialogue, Washington DC: Americans for the Arts), the paper argues that the very presence of the multiplicity of voices leads to civic dialogue and democracy.
You can see the presentation of this paper here:
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