Page 59 - Getting of the fence

3.1 Introduction
Despite the increasing interest in actively engaging students in research in subject
areas such as sociology and education, in foreign language research students are
either routinely excluded or primarily involved as objects of study (Pinter, 2014;
Pinter & Zandian, 2014). However, excluding the voice of students from research
leads to an incomplete picture of the educational system. Indeed, Cook-Sather
(2002) argues that there is “something fundamentally amiss about building and 3 rebuilding an entire system without consulting at any point those it is ostensibly
designed to serve” (p. 3). Such participation, however, is not self-evident (Könings, Brand-Gruwel, & van Merriënboer, 2005), and it was only in the late 70s and early 80s, that the exclusion of student voice was noted by several educators and educational researchers (Cook-Sather, 2006). The prevalent image of students was, and unfortunately sometimes still is, as passive recipients of education determined by others (Lodge, 2005; for a brief historical overview see McCallum, Hargreaves, & Gipps, 2000). Remarkably, this is in spite of the student-centred approaches of pedagogues from the 19th and early 20th century such as John Dewey and Janusz Korczak who implored educational researchers and teachers to “listen to students and to be alive to their thinking and learning” (Dewey, 1933, p.56).
The different ways in which student voice can be included in research have been described in a variety of typologies, which place student voice on a continuum from practically no involvement through to learner-initiated research. Typical of these typologies is that they are generally hierarchical, moving from lower to higher levels, and suggesting that rather than viewing learners as providers of data, more value should be placed on learners as initiators of research. However, the overwhelming majority of educational research in general includes student voice primarily as data providers, which is generally perceived as the lowest level (Pinter, Mathew, & Smith, 2016).
In this chapter we extend the discussion of the inclusion of student voice in research in two ways. Firstly, we argue that the leading hierarchical ideas mentioned above and the prevalent current practice result in a mono-dimensional and limited view of including the student’s voice in research. We present different approaches to the issue and propose that including the student’s voice from different perspectives will enhance research and will “open up unchartered territories” (Pinter, 2014, p. 180). Our second contribution takes this theoretical position and provides a detailed example of a study in which this involvement was brought
Connecting students and researchers
57