Identifying authentic enactment of children and student voices: An analysis of policy and methodologies across three diverse Australian contexts

Listening to children’s and students’ voices in authentic ways is integral in providing responsive learning experiences in an age of challenging, complex and dynamic socio-cultural contexts.  The enactment of children’s voice is less understood due to the broad contexts and varied methodologies for the enactment of children and student voices across educational research. This presentation focuses on the discernment of children’s and students’ voices, in ways that matter to them, across a range of contexts. We report on the first stage of our research collaboration focused on voice enactment in research and practice with children and students aged 3 to 12 across three different states in Australia - New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. To garner an understanding of authentic voice advocacy and enactment, we applied a shared constructivist sociocultural lens to identify intersectionality across policy, methodologies and pedagogies. A deeper understanding of children and students’ voices was revealed through a thematic analysis of contextual research methodologies identified shared patterns and understandings of responsivity across diverse contexts of learning. This analysis supported us to make connections to meaningful pedagogies that enabled authentic child and student voice in practice across three distinct contexts. Through this collaborative research, we seek to add to current understandings of generative enactment of voice research and pedagogies for varying contexts in Australia.