Browser does not support script.
Receive regular email updates and personalise your pages. Register now!
If student voice is to bring about school improvement, it is imperative that teachers listen to students. As Galloway and Davie (1996) argue, ' teachers become more effective in the education of all their pupils by recognising and responding to what their pupils tell them ' (p.142).
With this in mind, it is sensible to ensure that preservice teacher education encourages student teachers to listen to children, so that the need to listen to children is understood by new teachers. Teachers in training needs to learn the skills necessary to actively and sensitively listen to children.
This paper focuses on a small-scale project designed to encourage first year teacher education students to listen to a group of middle school children. Specifically, the project involved an asynchronous online discussion between 57 first year teacher education students and nineteen Year 8 pupils (12 year olds). The focus of the discussion was Information and Communication Technology, and specifically how ICT can be used to enhance learning, both within the classroom and outside of school as we know it, and how teachers and children might learn together through ICT. For two weeks, the student teachers and pupils participated online, exchanging ideas, debating and engaging in co-construction of understandings around the place of ICT in teaching and learning.
This paper will briefly consider the role of ' student voice ' and why it is important to listen to children. The online discussion project will then be described, in terms of how this was arranged and some highlights of the discussion online will be shared. The paper will conclude by suggesting possible implications for the power of student voice and how this can be used to bring about school improvement.
The need to listen to children ' s perspectives has long been overlooked, but is now gaining recognition (Crozier, 2000; Russell, 1996; Warren, 2000). Historically, ' the emphasis was on children listening to adults, not the other way round ' (Pollock, 1996, p.15).
The reluctance to listen to children has its roots in a deficit model of childhood, where children have been regarded as the property of parents, and as passive recipients of decision-making about their lives (Lloyd-Smith & Tarr, 2000; Taylor, 2000). Children have been regarded as incompetent and not to be taken seriously. Since the 1980s, however, with the development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), a more active and participatory role for children has started to emerge (Taylor, 2000). There is now growing acceptance of ' the notion that children ' s voices should be heard on matters that affect them ' (Morrow, 1999, p.203).
There are a number of reasons for listening to children. These include moral reasons, educational arguments and pragmatic benefits (Galloway and Davie, 1996). On moral grounds, there is ' an ethical imperative that children have a basic right to be heard ' (Lloyd-Smith and Tarr, 2000, p.60). If children ' s voices are overlooked, they become one more marginalised group in society. Listening is fundamentally a mark of respect. In educational terms, listening enables children to participate in democratic pedagogies (Taylor, 2000), and learning improves (Charlton, 1996). Listening actively to children is a vital part of a teacher ' s role, and effective listening is essential to the constructivist classroom, whether online or face-to-face.
In Charlton ' s (1996) view, ' Listening to pupils is a fundamental component of good teaching ' (p.51). In addition, listening to children often makes good practical sense, when their views shed light on what would otherwise be unknown to adults. Children can give valuable feedback to teachers. For this reason, we should listen to children and allow them to teach us about their perceptions of problems and the environments that they experience (Charlton, 1996; McLaughlin, Carnell and Blount, 1999). If we do so, student voice can be used to bring about school improvement.
The online discussion between teacher education students and middle school pupils took place within the context of a first year online class, in which the teacher education students were enrolled. The subject of the class is ICT, so Information and Communication Technology is both the focus and the medium for this online class.
As a requirement for the class, students are expected to actively engage in online discussion. Three quarters of the way through the semester, a group of middle school children joined the teacher education students for an online discussion, which is at the centre of this study. The learning intention of this exercise was that the teacher education students would listen to the pupils ' perspectives on the use of ICT for teaching and learning. This intention stemmed from my observation that, at this early stage of their professional preparation, the teacher education students tend to emphasise teachers ' roles in transmitting information to pupils and controlling the class.
I hoped that listening to the pupils would challenge these early emphases, so that teacher education students might come to appreciate that teaching is not merely about one-way transmission, but rather, that children have valuable perspectives to share, and that children ' s voices need to be listened to, rather than controlled.
In this particular instance, the ' listening ' took place online because the teacher education class is an online class, as explained above. In addition, it was thought that the pupils would benefit from engaging in an academic online discussion, since they had not experienced this form of interaction previously. Finally, it is argued here that asynchronous online discussions lend themselves particularly well to listening because it is impossible to interrupt another participant in an online asynchronous discussion, as messages are posted consecutively, so all participants can have their say.
Furthermore, participants decide when they will contribute, and are not forced into immediate responses. For this reason, online responses are often more reflective and considered than those occurring face-to-face. Participants do, however, need to actively show each other that they are listening, since, in the absence of body language and other paralinguistic clues, it is necessary to use other means to convey active listening.
In this study, the teacher education students were very much a convenience sample (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2000). They were selected for the research because of their enrolment in my class. The middle school pupils were selected through contact with their ICT teacher, who was interested in offering some of her pupils the opportunity to engage in an asynchronous online discussion for the first time. The teacher and I agreed that the pupils who were invited to participate would be regarded by the teacher as socially mature, competent communicators, and be eager to take part. The reasoning behind these selection criteria is that pupils should be more likely to make high quality contributions to online discussion if they are able to take the netiquette and cybersafety requirements seriously, if their written communication skills are adequate, and if they are computer literate enough to work with the software.
Finally, we hoped that choosing ' those who were keen ' would safeguard the voluntary nature of the project (informed consent), and would increase the likelihood that the pupils would contribute regularly to the discussion. These selection criteria are not unusual, as children ' s linguistic competence and motivation are often considered when they are to be engaged in research (Dockrell, Lewis & Lindsay, 2000).
The online class consisted of 57 teacher education students organised into five groups of 11-12 students, for the purpose of online discussion. Original student-groupings were retained, as the teacher education students had spent eight weeks engaging in discussion within these groups and it would be unsettling to rearrange them. Twenty middle school pupils were invited to take part in the online discussion project, so that this would enable four children to join each group. It was hoped that having four children in each group would provide children with peer support and alleviate the pressure on fewer children, who might be expected to participate more often than they could manage.
Leading up to the discussion, face-to-face sessions were held, with both the middle school pupils and the teacher education students. For the teacher education students, the project was explained, permission to participate was sought, and further advice was given to the students online regarding how to interact appropriately with the middle school pupils. For the middle school pupils, the face-to-face session was used to establish a rapport with me, to establish some guidelines for cybersafety and netiquette, to introduce the online discussion topic specifically and the process of contributing to academic discussion online more generally, and to give technical guidance for using the software.
For two weeks prior to the commencement of the online discussion between the pupils and the students, the middle school pupils participated in a ' private ' online area with their teacher and with me, in order to try out the tools and become familiar with online discussion. During this time, a series of ' ice-breakers ' online, following Salmon ' s (2002) e-tivities, were facilitated in order to build rapport and to introduce the pupils to asynchronous online discussion. The importance of building rapport with research participants is widely emphasized in the literature (Anderson & Kanuka, 2003; Begley, 2000; Costley, 2000; France, Bendelow & Williams, 2000; Lewis & Lindsay, 2000; Morrow, 1999). Following these two weeks in the ' practice area ' , the discussion proper began.
As a starter for the discussion, the following questions were asked.
How is ICT used in schools to promote and enhance learning?
As is usually the case with asynchronous online discussions, the five discussion groups pursued different directions as they worked to address the above questions. There is room here to explore only a small number of highlights from the online discussions, in order to demonstrate the power of student voice and, in particular, how the middle school pupils made the teacher education students ' sit up and take notice ' . Teacher education students were forced to re-examine their preconceptions and to rethink both the role of ICT and the role of student voice in teaching and learning processes.
For example, within just one of the discussion groups, key themes explored in relation to the above focus questions included ' comparison of teacher education students ' primary school days with today ' ; ' computer suites versus computers within all classrooms ' ; ' how ICT is used at school, university and home ' ; and ' the distinction between learning about ICT versus learning through ICT ' . One strand of this group ' s discussion focused on whether computers should be kept in one central facility or ' suite ' or whether they should instead be placed within every classroom in a school. This entailed the following exchanges:
' What I am wondering is how do you think your use of computers might be different if you had several in every classroom, instead of just in the computer room ' . (lecturer, #17)
' I think it is a good idea to have a separate computer suite. If there was a computer in every room, it may become too much of a distraction. Do you agree? ' (TE stu, #18)
' Not all schools have computer suites to accommodate a large class. So a teacher may not be able to take the whole class to the suite, which means leaving some students unattended. Having the computers in the room means that students can use them to do their work but the teacher can be supervising both them and the rest of the class ' . (TE stu, #19)
Teacher education students suggested computers would also be useful in every class because:
' the children will not have to be unattended like they might be sometimes in a computer suite ' . (TE stu, #20)
' [computers are] an excellent (and educational) way for students to fill in spare time or for those who are fast finishers ' . (TE stu, #21)
A pupil then entered the discussion, and responded to the first teacher education student quoted above (#18):
' Emma, I think there is pretty much a computer in every room, and if there isn ' t there is one pretty close by! I don ' t think of them as a distraction exactly, they are more like something . . . well, in your pencil case. They ' re kind of like a tool, like a pencil or a compass; they help to extend your work ' . (pupil, #26)
Later, this prompted the initial student to re-enter the discussion to comment on the change in her thinking:
' J, I like your comparison of computers being like something in your pencil case! I can now understand how computers can be tools and not distractions ' .
(TE stu, #50)
In a related strand of discussion, the pupils challenged the teacher education students to think about the distinction between learning about ICT and learning through ICT. This strand commenced when teacher education students posed the following questions for the pupils:
' What aspects of ICT do you learn about at school? ' (TE stu, #33)
' Do you think learning about ICT in your school has helped you with other things outside of your school and how? ' (TE stu, #39)
A pupil entered the discussion to challenge the teacher education students ' use of language and the underlying assumptions:
' Adam, we don ' t learn about ICT, we learn through ICT. Yes, we do come to the computer room and we do use computers, but we don ' t learn about computers, we learn social studies, or science, or English. It ' s kind of like I said before, computers are like something in your pencil case. We don ' t learn about our ruler; we use our ruler to extend our work (excuse the pun). But as the years go by we learn how to use the ruler better, hold it straighter; but we still don ' t learn about the ruler, we use the ruler . . . We don ' t go on the Internet to learn how to hit the back key, we go on the Internet to learn about the hardships of a World War One soldier. You see? We don ' t learn about ICT, we learn through ICT ' . (pupil, #40)
These examples stem from just one of the five discussion groups involved in this project, and serve to illustrate the point that the pupils were able to challenge the teacher education students ' thinking, and that the pupils ' voices were indeed powerful. At the end of the online discussion, the teacher education students commented on the value of the learning that had taken place for them. They commented:
The discussion was ' informative, encouraging and fun ' .
' I believe that students must take a major part in their own learning and I have found out through this course, ways in which I can help them do this ' .
' The pupils showed us critical thinking skills in action ' .
' What it highlighted for me was that teaching students is not necessarily showing them how to use a computer but giving them opportunities to use a range of ICT tools to enhance their critical thinking skills ' .
' [I learned] that we are never too old to learn things and to be humble enough to accept good information from those who are much younger than ourselves ' .
' I learned that kids are sometimes capable of more than we think, we too often underestimate kids. Kids understand things really quickly, and sometimes they are more open-minded ' .
In turn, the pupils commented:
' It ' s good to hear other people ' s opinions and points of view ' .
' Before this project some of us hadn ' t thought about how we use ICT in school and now we have ' .
' We know more about ICT than we think we do ' .
' I learned something about what Uni might be like and gained an insight into the future ' .
' Teaching the teachers made me feel important ' .
The brief glimpses into the online discussion that occurred between the teacher education students and the middle school pupils show that this was a worthwhile learning experience for both parties. In general, the teacher education students learned to re-examine some of their initial preconceptions about the role of ICT in teaching and learning, and they learned to take children ' s voices seriously. In turn, the middle school pupils learned to think reflectively about their own learning, in order to share their insights with others.
The pupils learned that they themselves have a great deal to offer as ' teachers of teachers ' and that their voices are powerful when others are prepared to listen and learn.
This small-scale study raises a number of questions about the power of student voice and how this can be used to bring about school improvement. These questions include the following:
As we work toward school improvement, a key challenge is the consultation of children as partners in their education, and to ensure that teacher education students are listening to, and interacting with, children from the beginning of their teacher education.
This collaboration between teachers and children should be happening, not just face-to-face in regular classrooms, but also online utilising the technology we have at our disposal, so that the online learning environment can enable mutual learning.
Anderson, T., & Kanuka, H. (2003). e-Research: Methods, strategies and issues. Boston : Pearson Education, Inc.
Begley, A. (2000). ' The educational self-perceptions of children with Down Syndrome ' , in A. Lewis, and G. Lindsay (Eds.), Researching Children's Perspectives (pp. 98-111). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Charlton, T. (1996). ' Listening to Pupils in Classrooms and Schools ' , in R. Davie, & D. Galloway, (Eds.), Listening to Children in Education (pp. 49-63). London : David Fulton Publishers.
Cohen, L., Manion, L., and Morrison, K. (2000). Research Methods in Education. Fifth edition. London : Routledge Falmer.
Costley, D. (2000). ' Collecting the Views of Young People with Moderate Learning Difficulties ' , in A. Lewis, and G. Lindsay (Eds.), Researching Children's Perspectives (pp. 163-172). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Crozier, J. (2000). ' Falling out of School: A young woman's reflections on her chequered experience of schooling ' , in A. Lewis, and G. Lindsay (Eds.), Researching Children's Perspectives (pp. 173-186). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Dockrell, J., Lewis, A., & Lindsay, G. (2000). ' Researching Children's Perspectives: A psychological dimension ' , in A. Lewis, and G. Lindsay (Eds.), Researching Children's Perspectives (pp. 46-58). Buckingham: Open University Press.
France, A., Bendelow, G., & Williams, S. (2000). ' A 'Risky' Business: Researching the Health Beliefs of Children and Young People ' , in A. Lewis, and G. Lindsay (Eds.), Researching Children's Perspectives (pp. 150-162). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Galloway, D., & Davie, R. (1996). ' A Way Forward? ' , in R. Davie, & D. Galloway, (Eds.), Listening to Children in Education (pp. 137-142). London: David Fulton Publishers.
Lewis, A., & Lindsay, G. (2000). Emerging Issues ' , in A. Lewis, and G. Lindsay (Eds.), Researching Children's Perspectives (pp. 189-197). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Lloyd-Smith, M., & Tarr, J. (2000). ' Researching Children's Perspectives: A sociological dimension ' , in A. Lewis, and G. Lindsay (Eds.), Researching Children's Perspectives (pp. 59-70). Buckingham: Open University Press.
McLaughlin, C., Carnell, M., and Blount, L. (1999). ' Children as Teachers: Listening to children in education ' , in B. Carolin, and P. Milner. (Eds.), Time to Listen to Children: Personal and professional communication (pp. 97-111). London: Routledge.
Morrow, V. (1999) ' “ It's cool... 'cos you can't give us detentions and things, can you?â€: Reflections on research with children ' , in B. Carolin, and P. Milner (Eds.), Time to Listen to Children: Personal and professional communication (pp. 203-215). London: Routledge.
Pollock, L. A. (1996). ' Teacher-Pupil Relations in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Britain ' , in R. Davie, & D. Galloway, (Eds.), Listening to Children in Education (pp. 15-28). London: David Fulton Publishers.
Russell, P. (1996). ' Listening to Children with Special Educational Needs ' in R. Davie, & D. Galloway, (Eds.), Listening to Children in Education (pp. 121-136). London: David Fulton Publishers.
Salmon, G. (2002). E-tivities: The Key to Active Online Learning. London: Kogan Page.
Taylor, A. S. (2000). ' The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: Giving children a voice ' , in A. Lewis, and G. Lindsay (Eds.), Researching Children's Perspectives (pp. 21-33). Buckingham: Open University Press.
United Nations General Assembly. (1989). Adoption of a Convention on the Rights of the Child. New York: Author.
Warren, S. (2000). ' Let's do it Properly: Inviting children to be researchers ' , in A. Lewis, and G. Lindsay (Eds.), Researching Children's Perspectives (pp. 122-134). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Ms Dianne Forbes is a Lecturer in Professional Studies in Education at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New Zealand. Dianne has a background as a primary school teacher and associate principal in schools in Auckland, NZ. She taught in a digital classroom in Auckland, before moving to Waikato to teach in the Bachelor of Teaching Degree programme. Dianne teaches online and on campus, including teaching within Waikato ' s Mixed Media Programme, where teacher education students earn their degrees partially online. She teaches classes in professional studies, curriculum and assessment, ICT and telecommunications in education. Dianne ' s research interests relate to online teaching and learning, and she is currently working toward a Doctorate in Education, focusing on online pedagogies.
Buy publications by the author
Contribute a discussion paper to this year's online conferences on the transformation of education