This book celebrates the rights of the child, through including student voice in educational matters that affect them directly. It focuses on the experiences of children and young people and explores how our educational policies, practices and research endeavours enable educators to help young people tell their own stories. The respective chapters illustrate how listening to young people can help them attain new positions of power, even though doing so often creates discomfort and requires a radical change on the part of the adult establishment. Further, the book challenges researchers, teachers and practitioners to reconsider how students are involved in research and policy agendas, and to what extent radical collegiality can create fundamental and positive changes in the lives of these learners. In recent decades, greater attention has been paid across policy, practice and research discourses to involving children more meaningfully and actively in decisions about their participation in both formal and informal educational settings. The book’s goal is to illustrate how researchers have systematically involved students in the pursuit of a richer understanding of educational experiences, policy and practice through the eyes and ears of young people, and through their own cultural lens.

This handbook brings together scholarship from various subfields, disciplinary traditions, and geographic and geopolitical contexts to understand how student voice is operating in different higher education dimensions and contexts around the world. The handbook helps not only to map the range of student voice practices in college and university settings, but also to identify the common core elements, enabling conditions, constraints, and outcomes associated with student voice work in higher education. It offers a broad understanding of the methodologies, current debates, history, and future of the field, identifying avenues for future research.

This powerful resource is for researchers and educational leaders who are interested in understanding and applying research methods that emphasize youth voice. The authors argue that most educational research either omits critical understandings of youth or, even worse, presents inaccuracies due to faulty techniques. Researching how youth experience their schools and communities requires specific conceptual tools that address researcher bias, power dynamics, and the contextual considerations that impact meaning-making processes. Responding to these issues, the authors present the Student Voice Research Framework—an approach that both novice and advanced researchers can use to address assumptions and overcome bias as they engage with youth. Readers are provided with clear steps for implementing the framework, as well as examples of how some of the most innovative qualitative and quantitative researchers in the world are using it. The text includes numerous interview, survey, and other protocols with strategies that researchers can use immediately or adapt for their own studies. This comprehensive volume is a must-have for anyone doing research about and with youth. Book Features: Guidance for addressing persistent problems of bias in educational inquiry to better engage in study about and with students. Examination of student voice research as its own field with its own typologies and research questions.Chapters highlighting innovative qualitative and quantitative research methods and strategies with ready-to-use protocols and other tools.A forward-looking conversation about social justice and what democracy could look like in schools.A toolkit of research methods and school change processes to address difficult questions in education. Contributors include Alison Cook-Sather, Pat Thomson, Eve Mayes, Kate Wall, and William Frick.

Learning and personal development are integral to being a person, and learning and teaching are integral to life as a social being. Understanding Children’s Informal Learning presents children’s informal learning out-of-school and explores how this knowledge can enhance teaching and learning practice in the classroom.

This work interrupts the current “consulting students” discourse that positions students as service clients and thus renders more problematic the concept of student voice in ways that it might be sustained as a democratic process. It looks at student voice holistically across realms of classroom practices, higher education, practitioner inquiry and policy formulation. The authors render problematic the “empowerment” rhetoric that is the dominant and insufficient narrative justifying consulting children and young people. They explore the many contradictions and ambiguities associating with recruiting and encouraging them to participate and the varying impacts of different circumstances on the ways in which student voice projects are enacted. They perceive that it is possible for student voice projects to be subverted from both above and below as varying stakeholders with varying purposes struggle to manage and control projects. Importantly, the book reports on research that identifies and highlights conditions for initiating and sustaining student voice and include “beyond school” dimensions that consider young people as “audiences” who can inform community facilities, their development and design as well as undergraduate students in universities. These cases are not reported as celebratory, but rather act as narratives that illuminate the many challenges facing those who chose to work with young people in authentic ways. It both advances methodologies for engaging young people as active agents in the design and interpretation of research that concerns them and offers a critique of those methods that see young people as the objects of research, where the data is mined for purposes that do not recognise that students are the consequential stakeholders with respect to decisions made in their interests.​

Who's In? Who's Out? portrays the successes and the challenges inclusive education researchers take on in striving to dismantle barriers involving access, presence, participation and success in education.