Student Voice and Student Feedback: How Critical Pragmatism Can Reframe Research and Practice

This chapter recognises the diverse definitions and practices of student feedback; focussing on how student feedback can facilitate dialogue and thus contribute to the development of schools as democratic communities. Student feedback is thus positioned as a part of student voice, which has its roots in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF, 1989). We question the ways in which schools elicit the views of students and how students’ opinions are made use of, recognising the complexities arising from power relationships (Hart, 1992), the consumerisation of education (Whitty & Wisby, 2007) and the pressures of accountability. Furthermore, we consider ways in which researchers can address difficulties in the research-practice relationship (Chapman and Ainscow, 2019) and facilitate co-creation of research. We propose the perspective of critical pragmatism as a means to acknowledge the complexities of practice, whilst also highlighting the importance of critical reflection and dialogue. Critical pragmatism could move us from a “deconstructive scepticism toward a reconstructive imagination” (Forester, 2012, p. 6) in which schools and researchers collaborate to enable contextually rich practices of student feedback and student voice.