Implications of a Sociocultural Concept of Voice

• In Event: “Voice” in the 21st Century and the Development of Today’s Young Learners

Abstract

Researchers and educators interested in children’s rights often emphasize the importance of eliciting children’s voices. Because the voices of children in minority groups are particularly muted, those of us concerned about educational equality focus on the inherently social nature of knowledge, thought, and literacy. No meaning is possible, after all, without culture and the use of cultural tools to mediate a world that would otherwise be meaningless (Vygotsky, 1978). Although there is great consensus around theoretical statements like “No one is the first to disturb the silence of the universe” (Bakhtin, 1986), designs for research and practice often imply conceptions of voice as individual agency, emerging from inside a person. In this paper, Colette Daiute will, thus, focus on implications of a socio-cultural conception of voice for literacy research. Toward that end, I review explicit and implicit rationales in educational research designs and practices aimed at eliciting voice among children and adolescents in challenging or unequal contexts. The presentation identifies three qualities for using narrative genres in recent research, considers those qualities in the light of principles of socio-cultural theory (Bakhtin, 1986; Vygtosky, 1978), and offers alternative concepts for each with examples of research designs consistent with these alternative concepts. I first present two foundational socio-cultural principles: 1) all meaningful expressions are relational, with purpose, audience, and other aspects of context integrated in the expressed content, and 2) to be meaningful, voice develops relationally, as a cultural tool in activities, like thinking, learning, and communicating. The focus of the presentation is, then, to identify and illustrate three qualities most commonly used to explain the use of narrative in research and practice designs: expressiveness, authenticity, and coherence, and the three corresponding alternatives of analysis, connectivity, and complexity (diversity & contradiction). The presentation concludes the proposal to design research and practice with activities allowing for socio-biographical voices rather than autobiographical voices. We would then be seeking a range of relevant voices by creating designs that allow participants to interact from diverse perspectives (rather than only a first person perspective), for diverse purposes, for diverse audiences, and in a range of genres (fictional as well as autobiographical).

Author

• Colette Daiute, The Graduate Center - CUNY