Although it might have long been at play at micro-level in teaching practices, in recent decades European institutions are actively promoting in a variety of ways what is commonly referred as “student voice work” as part of the everyday functioning of European Higher Education (HE) institutions.
On the one hand, student voice is acknowledged as an opportunity to empower students to participate meaningfully and collaboratively in improving their educational and learning experience in higher education. On the other hand, student voice is identified as key to make higher education institution accountable and to improve their quality according to a New Public Management (NPM) agenda (Capano et al., 2016; Gunter et al., 2016).
Within the Italian context, student voice work has become a relevant feature of Italian Higher Education institutions in the 2000s and, in particular, with the institution of an operating national system of evaluation (2013). Indeed, while boosting the academic system to increase research productivity, recent policies are also asking universities to be accountable toward their students (Neave, 2012). A new field of policy activity has emerged creating new networks of relationships, which are contributing to reconfigure academic practices as more attentive to student experiences, degree completion, drop-out and “study-success”, didactic innovations (Romito, 2020).
In this context, and similarly to other European countries, today Italian higher education institutions provide platforms and instrument for student to have their voice heard.
As the institutionalization of student voice work has been consubstantial to the recrafting of the Italian HE through a NPM agenda, concerns arise on if, and how, student voice has been co-opted into a neo managerial discourse. Research carried out in other countries have shown how, instead of constituting a space where broader participatory and inclusive instrument aimed at reaching transformational outcomes (Seale, 2010), student voice work might function as governmental technologies subjectifying students as consumers (Thiel, 2019; Mendes and Hammet, 2020). Moreover, imbricated within a managerial discourse, student voices – often constrained to operate within ‘feedback loops’ (Young and Jerome, 2020) – become instrument enacting and enforcing a logic of competition among HE institutions, Departments, Degrees and teachers themselves (Ball, 2003, 2012).
This contribution is based on an ongoing research involving students representatives and students unions in the attempt to provide knowledge useful for student voice work to promote inclusion, democracy and truthful participation in their learning experience (Fielding, 2004; Cook-Sather, 2006). By focusing in particular on an in-depth qualitative analysis on how Joint Teacher-Student Commissions operate across different contexts and fields of study we use Callon’s sociology of translation (Callon, 1984) and the policy enactment approach (Ball, Magruire and Braun, 2012) to provide an understanding of: a) how student voice work has being problematised at institutional level through an analysis of policy documents, regulations and policy instruments (Lascoumes and Le Gales, 2007) aimed at making it operational; b) how different interpretations and translations emerges based on contextual and networks dynamics; and c) we will particularly point out controversies to show which are the enabling condition for the emergence of problematisation of students voice practices opposing the managerial approach described above and, more specifically, to account for students’ capacity to leverage existing structures and policy instrument to express their priorities and catalyse change.
