Over the past thirty years, student voice has become a popular educational reform strategy, particularly across education systems in Western liberal democracies. The term ‘student voice’ is frequently used to describe a range of initiatives where students contribute to decision making about matters affecting them, including on classroom- or school-wide practices, curricula and pedagogies, educational governance and policy and educational research. Student voice is argued to play a pivotal role in crafting relations of respect, understanding, empowerment and trust in educational institutions.

Proponents of student voice draw on international rights to advocate for the active participation of students in school decision making. Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC; United Nations 1989) declared the ‘right’ for children and young people to ‘express’ their views ‘in all matters affecting them’. The UNCRC became ‘the most ratified human rights treaty in history’ (UNICEF 2021), though it is still not ratified by the USA. Following the UNCRC, the term ‘voice’ has been used to describe ‘the enactment of the child's participatory rights to express an opinion, remain silent, access information and be included in the decision-making processes on matters affecting them’ (Gillett-Swan and Sargeant 2019: 400). In multi-medial worlds, voice also takes many more-than-linguistic and more-than verbal forms – including gaze, facial expressions, silence, stance, gestures, touch, adornment, body art, clothes, drawings, emojis and digital/arts creation in spatial-material arrangements of power (Mannion 2007; McGregor 2004; Thomson 2011: 23). An expansive definition of voice is ‘any expression of any student, anywhere, anytime about anything related to learning, schools or education’ (SoundOut 2021: para. 1).

Student voice can take myriad forms, with multiple political trajectories and consequences. From the early years of student voice research, Michael Fielding (1999a) has advocated for ‘radical collegiality’ between students and teachers as a ‘rupture of the ordinary’ in schools (Fielding 2004: 296). Yet, as Fielding maps, there are many ways in which students can be positioned in student voice endeavours – from ‘data sources’, ‘active respondents’, ‘co-inquirers’, ‘knowledge creators’, ‘joint authors’, to being part of collective processes of ‘intergenerational learning as lived democracy’ (Fielding 2011: 12).