This proposal brings together work on participatory approaches and creativity in educational practice. It reports on a research project on ‘Youth Voice in the work of Creative Partnerships’ (2008-9). The research is based in the UK but has drawn on wider European and international work on creativity and performativity in education (Beach and Dovemark 2007; Jeffrey 2006, 2007: Craft and Jeffrey 2008) Creative Partnerships (CP) was established in 2002 and aims to foster innovative, long term collaborations between schools (often in areas of socio-economic deprivation) and creative practitioners, designed to ‘transform learning’ by encouraging schools to experiment with new ways of working. In particular CP claims to place young people ‘at the heart of what they do’, that its creative learning programmes are most effective when young people are actively involved in leading and shaping them, and that it has pioneered new approaches to youth participation. It highlights three key areas, relevant both to the discourses of children’s rights and of inclusive education: involving young people in governance (the design, delivery and evaluation of the programme of work); building and maintaining ‘positive relationships’ with young people; working as ‘co-constructors of learning’ with them. Our research aimed to: - Map existing youth voice initiatives in Creative Partnerships - Consider how far youth participation is perceived to be a necessary element of creative learning by those involved - Explore patterns of inclusion and exclusion in access to youth voice - Explore what skills, experiences, identities and relationships are developed through participation, for students, teachers and creative practitioners In this paper, we interrogate the discourses and frameworks drawn on by those involved in our research when explaining and justifying ‘youth voice’. Drawing on a Foucauldian framework, we argue that ‘youth voice’ does not simply exist, but has to be brought into being and rendered recognisable through specific organising practices and structures, which also ‘make up’ subjectivities for those involved. We outline the various ‘technologies’ (approaches) through which it is constructed and discuss these as ‘practices of freedom’ (Rose 1999) with ambiguous outcomes in terms of power relations within schools. We then draw on sociocultural approaches to explore the situated complexity of the practice of youth voice, exploring the way in which young people are positioned as ‘particular kinds of people’ (Gee, 2000) within ‘figured worlds’ that work to assign significance to certain acts and value some outcomes over others (Bartlett and Holland, 2002).

Our approach involved the collection and critical analysis of qualitative data in schools and other locations throughout England. We have interviewed different social actors in the initiatives involved, including the regional directors of Creative Partnerships, teachers and young people in schools, creative practitioners; observed lessons and other key events; collected visual and other materials that construct ‘youth voice’, eg guidance given to schools and training delivered to creative practitioners, young people and teachers; and we have conducted longer-term ‘ethnographic’ work in a small number of sites. We build on earlier critical interrogations of participatory work in schools (Bragg 2007, Lewis et al 2004; Arnot and Reay 2007), to understand, analyse and theorise some of the youth voice initiatives we have studied.

We argue that ‘youth voice’ is a contestable concept where rhetoric often outstrips reality (cf Fielding 2007). In particular, we point to the implicit ‘deficit’ model of young people employed by many adults, in which young people need to be ‘equipped’ with ‘skills’ they allegedly lack, in order to be ‘empowered’ to participate – a modernist understanding of power and agency. We argue that these models produce figured worlds in which young people are positioned as immature and therefore incapable of significant agency. We contrast this with other models, associated particularly but not exclusively with creative approaches, which have more complex understandings of power and that in attempting to draw on young people’s existing modes of participation in (youth) culture, offer rather different subject positions for those involved. We conclude by exploring how youth voice might be theorized and practiced beyond the confines of ‘empowerment’ models.