TPCS 12: Analysing Voice in Educational Discourses

By Kasper Juffermans and Jenny-Louise Van der Aa

Introduction

Education can be defined as the institution that organises learning by bringing together teachers (at least one) and learners (usually more than one) in a given space (e.g., a regular classroom). Learning, or the process of transferring knowledge and/or competences is always a communicative activity, involving verbal and non-verbal interaction between a teacher and students as well as between students. 

This is where voice comes in. In plain words, voice is about who says what in which way to whom. The concept of voice highlights the connection between what gets said and who says it. Voices, in education and elsewhere, are always situated, socially determined and institutionally organised. A point fairly easy to make with respect to educational settings is that teachers’ voices are differently positioned and evaluated than pupils’ voices. Other voices that make up the nexus of education include the principal’s voice, the parents’ voices, the politicians’ voices, the curriculum designers’ voices, the textbook writers’ and publishers’ voices, the inspector’s voice, the neighbours’ voices and the media’s voice or voices. Thus, voice is first of all a sociolinguistic concept that focuses our attention on the various agents within educational settings. 

Voices are also ideological, i.e., they contain explicit or sometimes more implicit ideas about language and social relations, or in the case of educational discourses, about education and language in education, as well as about identity. Different stake holders in education have different invested interests so their voices show traces of their respective interactional and institutional positions. Within the study of educational voices, we cannot assume that the different actors are always consciously aware of their voice(s) and actively choosing what sort of voice(s) they produce. If educational research on voice is indeed occupied with the sort of discourses that are heard in a particular socio-cultural space, it should equally be occupied with the processes through which identifications and interests in the classroom are (un)authorized, (il)legitimate and (un)marked – thus with what gets left out (Kulick 2005). 

As voice or voices provide the concrete material to work with in qualitative studies of language and education, i.e. the actual or micro discourse to analyse, it is important to contextualize these voices with respect to macro issues of power and inequality. And it is precisely this ethnographic perspective that gives us “an awareness that discourse is contextualized in each phase of its existence, and that every act of discourse production, reproduction and consumption involves shifts in contexts” (Blommaert 2001: 26; see also Silverstein and Urban 1996). Voice is that perspective, embedded deeply in ethnography, that offers a method to investigate educational discourses as an arena of (conflicting) contact between different actors, their identities, identifications, desires and interests. 

Voice therefore is an “analytical heuristic” (Hornberger 2006) for an empirically-based sociolinguistics or linguistic anthropology of education. Through studying voice, we can search in our data for instances of conflict, inequality and power as well as resistance, creativity and counter-hegemonic practices. Voice provides a tool for finding and dealing with alternative understandings of language, education and society. Taking ordinary educational voices seriously has the potential to challenge our scholarly understandings of our research object and its subjects, and to renew our theoretical and conceptual apparatus. 

In this paper, we first outline the academic etymology of the concept of voice in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (which are more or less synonymous to us). We then address the question of individual vs. social voice, and place the notion of voice as a central concept in an ethical ethnographic research program, as a methodological tool for empowering research subjects. Finally we elaborate this ethical program by linking voice to a democratic vision on education and society.

Keywords: voice, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, education, discourse

How to quote: Juffermans, K. C. P., & Van Der Aa, J. (2011). Analysing Voice in Educational Discourses. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 12).

Read the full working paper here: Analysing Voice in Educational Discourses.