There are ‘many politics’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006/1977: 190) in any dialogical exchange – tangled lines of speech, silence, ambivalent desire, impasses, refusal, opacity. In this chapter, I consider the politics and ambivalences of attempts to support students and teachers in schools to ‘express’ themselves and come to ‘understand’ each other through dialogue. The opportunity for dialogue between students and teachers has been posited as enabling students and teachers to reach an understanding across diverging positions and perspectives – to see things from each other's view, to understand each other's pressures and desires, to reach an understanding (see Habermas 1984: 44; see also Chapter 1). At times, student voice initiatives jumble school hierarchies and roles: for example, where students conduct interviews or participant observational research with teachers, such initiatives unsettle established assumptions about who asks and who answers questions, and who understands and who needs to understand. When premised on liberal humanist concepts of agency, rationality and the possibility of equality, promises of reaching understanding through dialogue risk eliding the specificities of when, where and under what conditions the dialogical encounter is staged, and the differential experiences of these dialogical encounters.

My attention, in this chapter, is on how institutional policies and everyday practices invite students’ voices to speak, or to conduct interviews with teachers, but then turn around and interpret some students’ voices, bodies, thoughts and desires to be the problem. Returning to Spivak's (1987) critique of Deleuze and Foucault discussed in the previous chapter, this is to question the conditions for listening when voices speak.