When students speak in classrooms, why is this speech sometimes interpreted as ‘disruptive’, as in the puppet scenario that opens this chapter? The scene played out in this puppet scenario is familiar to me and was familiar to the students who analysed this puppet scenario: some bodies, no matter what they say, are habitually apprehended and interpreted as too ‘disruptive’. In 2010, during a student voice research day run by a group of Year 9 students in the public secondary school where I worked, a Year 9 boy wrote on a black and white photo of the school's office area: ‘This school is shit’. This student used to be in the ‘students as co-researchers group’ – the Steering Committee – that was facilitating a student voice morning with all of Year 9. The Steering Committee had designed five arts-based research stations for students to rotate through during class time, facilitated by the student researchers; teachers of these classes were there to supervise the morning. One of these stations was a graffiti station – students were invited to tag black and white photos of various areas of the school in terms of how they felt about their ‘learning environment’. At this station, a supervising teacher observed this student writing the words ‘this school is shit’. The teacher sent him to a deputy principal. He was stood down from classes and later had a parent interview. While this student wrote ‘this school is shit’ during a so-called ‘student voice’ activity, this ‘expression’ of voice in this place and time was interpreted as a behaviour issue by supervising adults. There are some voices that educators ‘don't want to hear’ – bodies habitually known to be ‘incomprehensible [or] recalcitrant’ (Bragg 2001: 70) or interpreted to be ‘aggressive, rude or obnoxious’ (Pearce and Wood 2019: 21).

This chapter considers the ordering of voices and bodies in the history of education: that is, what happens when words are spoken (or written), and what words do to bodies. To invoke Paolo Freire's (1996) pedagogical entanglement of ‘reading the world’ and ‘reading the word’, this chapter explores the relationship between ‘speaking the word’ and ‘speaking the world’ in and through schooling. The chapter begins an exploration of the politics and materiality of voice in schools – the felt force of sounds issued forth from human bodies, viscerally apprehended by bodies.