Page 78 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 3
question survey) views of dialogue. The second part of our research question asked what secondary school students can contribute to the development of a foreign language literature teaching model. As we showed in the previous section, the student voice had a major influence on our model of the Comprehensive Approach, helping us to reduce the number of elements to 15, adding new elements but also combining different elements and resolving ambiguities. We now turn to a fuller discussion of these two elements of our study.
One of our main arguments in this study is that the leading hierarchical ideas and the prevalent current practice result in a mono-dimensional view of including the student’s voice in research. We also argued that the Learners as data source perspective is not so much passive but can be construed as active and constructive. We offer an alternative view that asserts a multi-dimensional stance in which both the Learner as data source and the Learners in dialogue perspectives are considered unique and complementary. The account of this study demonstrates what this multi-dimensional stance looks like in empirical research.
Most importantly, because each of the perspectives offers a unique platform for student voice and therefore contributes unique and invaluable insights, they cannot and should not be compared, let alone be ranked. For example, integrating student voice through the Learner as data source perspective does not aspire to include students in its research design or analysis and should therefore not be judged as such. It could further be argued that because of their unique position, applying only one perspective of student voice in research could be considered limited, showing just one side of the multi-faceted notion of student voice. When the Learner as data source perspective is, for example, combined with the Learner in dialogue perspective, several dialogues are established through which the collective as well as individual students can be heard (Cook-Sather, 2002).
Furthermore, despite the consensus established in previous research that the Learner as data source perspective equals consumerism and degrades the students as passive agents, we have argued that, at this level too, the students can fulfil an active role, contributing their valuable perceptions. The open question survey, though technically using the learners as data sources, created a safe space through facilitating sufficient openness (Bergold & Thomas, 2012) for a large group of students where they could take the time they needed to share their perspectives on the benefits of EFL literature education. This is an altogether respectful and active role far removed from the understanding of this perspective by researchers ‘being suspicious of children’s trustworthiness and doubtful of their ability to give and
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