Xiaomei Sun*

For more than a decade, focus on student engagement has been ubiquitous in higher education (HE) research, practice, and policy making, as it is regarded as an important factor in student attendance and retention rates of HE institutions. Compared with student engagement, student voice places more emphasis on student agency, stressing the active roles students could play in governance and policy-related decision making, as well as active citizenship building. When I applied for the Internship to the Student Voice team of Moray House School of Education and Sport (MHSES), I knew this job involved liaising with different school departments, conducting focus groups with students, and working with Reps to disseminate results. Other than that, I knew nothing. This internship lasted three months, under the supervision of Dr Deborah Holt whose democratic leadership made this experience pleasant and productive for me.

To recruit student participants, I sent a personalised email to all (undergraduate, PGT and PhD) students of MHSES, telling them the purpose of this project and what they could contribute. In total, 14 out of more than 2000 students responded to my email. One PGT student said they had nothing to contribute except confirming that ‘There are so many surveys. My god. What do they all even mean?’. Another PGT student responded from a non-university email account and they wanted to answer my questions by email to preserve anonymity. The other 12 students (1 UG, 6 PGT, and 5 PhD students) had online chats with me individually or in group according to their preferences. I asked participants the following questions:

1. How do you understand ‘student voice’?

2. What channels do you know to make your voice heard?

3. What may stop you making your voice heard?

4. How do you want your voice to be heard?

5. How do you want your voice to be responded to?

6. What elements do you want to hear in the response to your expressed voice?

Findings indicate that students’ overall attitudes towards Student Voice (SV) mechanisms were positives although some understandings were not adequate or accurate. For example, one student said: ‘If there’s opportunity, I will run for it.’ Students across programmes demonstrated different preferences for channels to make their voices heard: programme director for UG students; personal tutor (PT) and course organiser for PGT students; supervisor and reps for PhD students. Regarding factors that might prevent students from making their voice heard, being marked down seemed to be a main concern especially for PGT students. To be specific, since the workshop tutor in most cases is the marker of the course assignment, almost one third of the participants revealed that they preferred to keep silent about their dissatisfaction with the workshop tutor rather than take the risk of being marked down for reporting negative feedback. Other factors included ‘being too busy with studies to respond to any surveys’, personal characteristics (e.g., ‘reserved’ or ‘self-reliant’), and judgement about the nature of the problem: if it is a ‘personal/subjective’ issue, they would not report it; if it is a ‘collective/representative’ issue, they might unite others to report it.

There are some interesting and thought-provoking findings. First, the weekly news roundup, collated to reduce the number of emails students receive, seemed to receive minimal attention from students because ‘there is too much information in it’. Second, approximately one third of the student participants advocated online/live channels for students to voice opinions or report problems. However, they did not know that Moray House Student Experience and Support Office had already provided such services as ‘online live chat’ and ‘on-campus, in-person meetings’. Third, although the Personal Tutor is regarded as the ‘first choice’ to get ‘neutral and timely support’, on the other hand, they ‘take responsibilities for a lot of other things’ and sometimes are ‘unable to make prompt reply’.

Being a PhD student and an intern of the Student Voice team enabled me to understand students’ concerns and see what SV offices and staff have been doing to improve the mechanisms. Within marketisation, students have the power. Their voice can bring in ‘consumers’ or drive them away. Nevertheless, the ‘managerialistic rhetoric’ places student feedback within an existing system which hears what is meaningful to the way the ‘machine’ currently runs but without opportunity for transformational change. Therefore, the customer rhetoric or neoliberal discourse of student engagement may consolidate the dominant group in a power relation and constrain students from making a full and active commitment and render them more likely to conform and accommodate to the dominant discourse. From another perspective, staff can feel that they are subject to observation and scrutiny to the extent that lecturers can perform for students, giving them what they want to get a good ‘score’ rather than doing what is pedagogically most appropriate for the learning outcomes. In light of this, student voice, as an ‘agentic approach to engagement’, should go beyond managerial purposes and instrumental objectives.

Conceivably, such debates will be ongoing in the years to come. However, there are some less contentious propositions which are used here as the concluding remarks. First, institutions could enhance SV mechanisms through establishing multiple communication paths to offer an interactive and dialogic channel between students and the institution, without excluding or marginalising any voices. In addition, the notion of student speaking with rather than for others could be regarded as a key element of student voice initiatives.

*Xiaomei is a PhD candidate at Moray House School of Education and Sport, The University of Edinburgh. She has many years of teaching experience (English as a Foreign Language) in a secondary school in Beijing. In 2012-2013, she studied at The University of Liverpool as a visiting scholar. In 2017-2018, she was awarded her MSc TESOL degree from The University of Edinburgh. Xiaomei’s PhD research project focuses on extensive reading and its implementation in secondary schools. Her research interests also include children’s literature, teacher training and professional development and second-language pedagogies.

An internship experience of hearing student voices / Higher Education Research Group by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0