The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) article 12 states that young people have a right to express their views in all matters affecting them and that these views should be given ‘due weight’ in accordance with the age and maturity of the child (United Nations, 1989). What might be the consequences if this right were extended to young peoples’ views about learning within formal educational spaces? This paper describes two research projects based in Scotland, UK, in which young people were given an opportunity to express their views in regard to formal education and to learn in different ways from that common in secondary schools. They used these opportunities to radically critique how knowledge and subjectivities are produced within school spaces and to construct alternative performances that critically explored their own implication within economies of desire, performance and consumption. In the first project, ‘Space Unlimited’, twenty students from a large inner city multicultural secondary school were given an opportunity to construct their own learning experiences using a wide variety of different learning resources. In a large open space students pursued a question or project that was of interest to them, by making use of dance, drama, music, recording and fashion making facilities etc. that could be assembled for their own purposes. They took photographs of this process which were then used as the focus for discussion with researchers back in their school context. The young people used this occasion to radically critique the Euclidean assumptions that inform learning within schools (Davis and Sumara, 2000) and the entrenched hierarchies that curtail possibilities of movement, connection and purpose (I’Anson and Jasper, 2006). Researchers returned to the school two years later to explore how the young people might construct their learning within a school context if some of the constraints they had identified were minimised and the shape of the project was left deliberately open. This project was disturbing in a number of senses; it did not ‘fit’ easily within school spaces: outcomes were not clearly specified in advance, did not lead to any recognised award, and the traditional roles of teacher – pupil were displaced within an emergent assemblage of people-technologies-space. A marginal space emerged that permitted the expression of different interests in the course of which the young people refigured the curriculum, focussing upon the body, desire and performance. The third part of the paper tries to make sense of what emerged in this process and in so doing, draws upon some of the multiple ‘turns’ within the social sciences and humanities (Lather, 2007). It is argued that an affective economy (Clough, 2007) displaced the traditional representative economy of sense-making within schools (Clancey, 1995). Some of the ontological, epistemological and ethical consequences of this are then considered.

Hybrid methodology - case study / photo-elicitation etc.

The outcome of listening to children's views is a different economy of sense-making from the modernist representationalist approach privileged within schools. Some of the conseuqnces of this are explored in the paper.