This paper builds on research about young adults in Portuguese relatively disadvantaged secondary schools, within the European transnational settings. It brings about young adult voices to debate social (in)justice and citizenship in school, a concern shared by several studies (i.e. Lister, 2007; Georgi, 2008; Araújo et al 2010).

To do so we make resource to the notions of school-quasi-citizenship, which mitigates citizenship due to the shift from learning to competitiveness; and straight-set-non-citizenship, which denies citizenship as it emphasises the regulatory hierarchies that frame some relations in school, while silencing and subordinating young adults (Macedo, 2012). We question: How young adults interpret competitiveness within school work and how they perceive the human relations in school life and the ways it affects their learning.

Theoretically the work is supported on Bernstein’s (1996) concept of pedagogic voice and its re-contextualizing by Arnot & Reay (2006a). Bernstein stresses the need to go beyond the analysis of what “is reproduced in and through, education” (Bernstein, 1996:166), as concern that drove the theories of cultural reproduction, in order to focus on the nature of the specialized discourse of education that guides its practices - pedagogic voice. The nature of this voice goes beyond the use as vehicular device of the other voices, which intersect in schooling, and the power relations inherent in it. This voice goes beyond the linear view of the transmission of knowledge in the classroom - that legitimizes some messages and des-legitimates others – and is informed by the broader texts that give meaning to pedagogy. When the process of transmission is highly regulated, there is a marked separation between the educational discourse (voice) and the non-educational discourse (voices). 

In a view in which the relationship “teacher/student” is clearly stratified, the dominant voice is that of education, the student is subject to distributive rules that govern the sub-voices. However, in Bernstein’s (1996) view students have either neutral or independent voices within the educational institutions in which their pedagogic identities are shaped. Their voices are constructed by the same values used to structure the transmission and acquisition of knowledge - principles which mobilise and demobilise particular social identities, which evoke some and ignore other student voices, which exclude and include certain social groups (Arnot & Reay, 2008)

Bernstein uses voice - to refer the pedagogic voice (the voice of pedagogic discourse) built inside school, and sub-voices - to refer to gender and class voices among others. This relationship between voice and sub-voices seems to assume a relationship of subordination between these identity voices (as sub/under voices) and the voice of pedagogy. The current study assumes that sub-voices and pedagogic voice are involved and interwoven in the framework of social locations and in the interstices of power relations inherent in their conjunctions. We try to emphasize that the attempt to build a common pedagogic voice is always permeated and interpreted by the distinctive injunction of several voices by each person in school. How do young adults perceive these relations in the light of social justice?

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