A Mechanism-Based Understanding of the Student Voice Process

• In Event: The Roles of Student Voice, Participation, and Youth-Adult Partnerships in Promoting Student Development

Abstract

To address what Rudduck and Fielding (2006) called innovation overload, we argue in this theoretical review that student voice is best conceptualized as an active ingredient in a larger process of student development and school transformation rather than a specific intervention. Conceptualizing student voice as an active ingredient activated by various educational practices allows for the study of existing practice and activity within school settings through a student voice lens.

To support such a conceptualization of student voice and to initiate such a mechanism-based theorizing effort, we review current literature using a context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) framework to describe what we call the student voice process (SVP). Pawson and Tilley’s (1997) CMO model focuses on how the activation of active ingredients that function as mechanisms must counteract or disable existing problematic social processes to successfully alter regularities that exist in a particular context. A thorough scan of the literature conducted through January 2013 resulted in a set of 186 research articles, reports, and documents identified in the keyword search. A total of 89 were determined to meet our criteria for inclusion in the present review. Once the sample of manuscripts was assembled, text excerpts within each manuscript were categorized when claims were made by authors about existing problematic social processes, relevant contextual factors, and outcomes—all components of the conceptual model we develop in this review. This analysis generated the identification of three problematic social processes (alienation, rejection and resistance of the school experience and school staff, negative public policy or media representations of youth), three relevant contextual factors (authenticity of the initiator of or initiating activity related to the SVP, school-based power distribution and participation structures, community dynamics) as well as multiple student-level (developmental) outcomes, classroom-level outcomes, and school-level outcomes. This analysis also revealed numerous as-yet-unexplored factors pertaining to the SVP that warrant attention and might productively animate future research.

We offer the following four conjectures on gaps in our understanding of SVPs we believe are of particular import to advancing empirical theory related to student voice: (1) Active ingredients have varying degrees of potential, (2) The outcomes of a SVP can occur directly or indirectly as a function of the interconnectedness of the multiple levels of the school ecology, (3) Students’ perceptions of the role of their voices in the SVP can impact student-level outcomes, and (4) There are multiple avenues for the formation of students’ perceptions that their voices were authentically considered. Through describing the implications of these conjectures for research, policy, and practice, we build upon existing literature in a way that demonstrates the promise of the CMO perspective in terms of: conducting evaluative studies of student voice initiatives as to meaningfully bridge research and practice; revising the all-too-common notion that process and outcome are synonymous in student voice initiatives to instead empirically investigate the complex interplay between existing problematic social process, initiator, outcome, and the contextual factors which may enhance or inhibit the SVP; and extending student voice research beyond the traditional focus on program/initiative conceptualizations.

Authors

• Tanner LeBaron Wallace, University of Pittsburgh

• Matthew J. Bundick, Duquesne University

• Russell J. Quaglia, Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations