Ten years ago, I regularly sat at a small table in a meeting room in a school library with small groups of secondary students who had been part of student voice initiatives at their school, for formalised research focus groups. Students and I sat with seven puppets and one marionette (borrowed from my university's library), as well as sheets of paper, coloured markers, postcards, an iPad and my university laptop. After a conversation about how they defined ‘student voice’ and their recollections of being a researcher as part of the school's student voice group, I invited students to speak, draw or compose a scenario relating to student voice, using any of the materials in the room. I told students that the scenarios could build on their personal experiences, or that they could compose a fictionalised story or explore an issue that they felt to be important surrounding student voice. Scenarios could be composed in written, visual or audio-visual form (e.g., write a narrative, draw a picture, video a puppet scenario, record a radio interview). Many groups elected to use the puppets and marionette for their scenario-creation, performing scenes that seemed to parody teachers’ responses to students’ speech in classrooms. During one conversation when I asked students whether the puppet scenarios were a form of data, one student said that they ‘show what happens daily in our school’ (see Figure 2.1).

Before, during and after these conversations, I questioned the ethics and politics of writing about what students said and produced in such research encounters. There are many uses that have been made of the voice of the child, and many theories to account for what voice does in and through research. I did not want to treat students’ words as extractible resources, objectified and abstracted from the specific material circumstances of their embodied formation. As I explain further below, I hoped to position students as theorists of their own lives and experiences; later that year, students viewed and analysed each other's scenarios (see below). Yet, I also was wary of making claims that positioning students as theorists of their own lives was necessarily liberating, or that co-theorising would necessarily change their school (Mayes 2016b).