Consulting Students on Classroom Practice, ‘Good’ Teaching and Teacher Performance

Book excerpt: Consulting Students on Classroom Practice, 'Good' Teaching, and Teacher Performance is about the consultation of students on teaching and learning matters in schools, as part of typical school life as opposed to students being consulted as part of a project that includes some kind of external support. Craig Skerritt makes not only a conceptual contribution by providing new thinking tools and a new way of understanding and articulating student voice in relation to classroom practice, and by developing and presenting a heuristic device to aid research on student voice and classroom practice, but a series of empirical contributions by reporting on interview data with a range of school-based actors to spotlight existing views, practices and issues, and to call attention to hopes, desires, and fears for the future. The book provides a critical account of student voice in contemporary schools. Student voice is not taken at face value or accepted as being undisputedly positive, nor are schools or the people in them treated as homogenous entities devoid of context. Significantly, researcher subjectivity is central vis-à-vis the generation, examination, interpretation, and presentation of the empirical data. There is no claim to objectivity in this book and it is subjectivity that comes to the fore - through what Skerritt coins the 'I(nterest) behind this research', major emphasis is placed on his own experiences shaping his outlook. Skerritt occupies a certain vantage point and sees student voice through a particular lens, and this is reflected in the contents of this book.