This paper builds on research about young adults as citizenship construction actors, in Portuguese relatively disadvantaged secondary schools who struggle to fulfil their educational role within an educational system informed by European requests and guidelines. Young voices are brought into debate in what concerns their claims for stimulating and innovative learning environments that take their cultures into account.
Concerns addressed are: i) What young adults have to say about the ways they learn and construct learning?; and ii) How does the way they learn affect the construction of citizenship?
The paper makes resource to the theoretical framework provided by voice research. Moving from a disembodied notion of discourse towards an embodied notion of voice, Young (1997, 2002) locates heterogeneous voices inside historical and social practices that shape what the voices express and the meanings they attach to the world but also their particular forms of expression and their potential to be understood.
In turn, the symbolic dimension introduced by the notion of subject in the bernsteinian concept of voice (Bernstein, 1996), allows questioning the unity, boundaries and locations of the subject’s experiences within specific fields of meanings and practices (Arnot & Reay, 2006). The bernsteinian analysis provides deep conceptualization of the notions of voice, pedagogy, schooling and the institutions where these processes occur. In Bernstein’s framework, the concept of voice is useful to describe the identities of gender, class, ethnicity, age ..., designated as sub-voices, and to refer to the notion of a pedagogic voice, built through the retrace of power and control within schooling, where that common voice is put into action (Arnot & Reay, 2006).
As this is voice as a right has provided the framework for recent academic discussion on young adults’ citizenship in which issues of power are necessarily present. It becomes pertinent to understand the nature and possibilities of voice in citizenship, within and through schooling.
In confirmation with Madeleine Arnot & Diane Reay (2004, 2006, 2008) who capture student interpretations of the social conditions for learning and learning in itself, and identify areas for improvement through consultation which tend to increase citizenship and voice, this paper brings about and reflects on young adult claims for learning conditions which allow them to construct citizenship through voice. This includes their views on student-teacher relations, the learning environment, the relational dynamics among peers within and outside classroom, and so forth (Arnot, 2006, 2008). Interesting learning situations and experiences that students value as their own are reported in this paper through and with young adult voices. Hence, voice is seen as legitimacy, expression and action – both as symbol of the social struggle for recognition and as a tool for participation and transformative action.
