This article argues for attending to the perspectives of those most directly affected by, but least often consulted about, educational policy and practice: students. The argument for authorizing student perspectives runs counter to U.S. reform efforts, which have been based on adults’ ideas about the conceptualization and practice of education. This article outlines and critiques a variety of recent attempts to listen to students, including constructivist and critical pedagogies, postmodern and poststructural feminisms, educational researchers’ and social critics’ work, and recent developments in the medical and legal realms, almost all of which continue to unfold within and reinforce adults’ frames of reference. This discussion contextualizes what the author argues are the twin challenges of authorizing student perspectives: a change in mindset and changes in the structures in educational relationships and institutions.

Within higher education, students' voices are frequently overlooked in the design of teaching approaches, courses and curricula. In this paper we outline the theoretical background to arguments for including students as partners in pedagogical planning processes. We present examples where students have worked collaboratively in design processes along with the beneficial outcomes of these examples. Finally, we focus on some of the implications and opportunities for academic developers of proposing collaborative approaches to pedagogical planning.

Against a backdrop of rising interest in students becoming partners in learning and teaching in higher education, this paper begins by exploring the relationships among student engagement, cocreation and student-staff partnership before providing a typology of the roles students can assume in working collaboratively with staff. Acknowledging that co-creating learning and teaching is not straightforward, a set of examples from higher education institutions in Europe and North America illustrates some important challenges that can arise during co-creation. These examples also provide the basis for suggestions regarding how such challenges might be resolved or re-envisaged as opportunities for more meaningful collaboration. The challenges are presented under three headings: resistance to co-creation; navigating institutional structures, practices and norms; and establishing an inclusive co-creation approach. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of transparency within co-creation approaches and of changing mindsets about the potential opportunities and institutional benefits of staff and students co-creating learning and teaching.

Every way of thinking is both premised on and generative of a way of naming that reflects particular underlying convictions. Over the last fifteen years, a way of thinking has reemerged that strives to reposition school students in educational research and reform.i Best documented in Australia, Canada, England, and the United States, this way of thinking is premised on the following convictions: that young people have unique perspectives on learning, teaching, and schooling; that their insights warrant not only the attention but also the responses of adults; and that they should be afforded opportunities to actively shape their education.ii As will become apparent as this discussion unfolds, one of the challenges of analyzing this reemergent way of thinking is that words and phrases such as "attention," "response," and "actively shape" mean different things to different people. And yet a single term has emerged to signal a range of efforts that strive to redefine the role of students in educational research and reform: "student voice.""Student voice" has accumulated what Hill (2003) describes as "a new vocabulary-a set of terms that are necessary to encode the meaning of our collective project." These terms strive to name the values that underlie "student voice" as well as the approaches signaled by the term.Like any attempt at such encoding, however, an effort to identify a new vocabulary that captures the attitudes and practices associated with student voice work raises questions, especially because it makes use of already common terms, albeit in new contexts and in new ways. These questions prompt us to re-examine the terms we think capture our commitments as well as those commitments themselves. Such a re-examination is critical, particularly in regard to terms we think we understand. Indeed, the word "term" itself is defined as a word or phrase referring to a clear and definite conception, and yet despite its increasing and emphatic use, none such clear and definite conception exists for "student voice."In an attempt both to clarify and to complicate current understandings of "student voice,"I organize this discussion as follows: I trace the emergence of the term; I explore positive and Curriculum Inquiry 36, 4 (Winter 2006), 359-390"Student Voice" -p. 2 negative aspects of the term, some of which are identified in the research literature and some of which I offer from my own perspective; I identify two underlying premises of student voice work signaled by two particular words-"rights" and "respect"-that surface repeatedly in publications on student voice efforts; and I focus on a word that also appears regularly in the research literature but that refers to a wide range of practices: "listening." The first two subsections are intended to offer an overview of how the term "student voice" came to enter our discourse and to bring together in a single discussion some of the positive and negative associations with the term. The subsequent sections, in which I take a close look at three associated terms, are not...

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Free your mind." This exhortation becomes a refrain in the Wachowski brothers' film, The Matrix (Silver, 1999), a visual study of movements of mind. Set sometime around the year 2199, the movie follows Morpheus, the leader of an underground resistance movement, as he guides the young hero, Neo, to a startling recognition: that what he believes to be reality at the end of the 20 th century is in fact a computer-generated dream-world called the Matrix. This "prison for [the] mind," as Morpheus describes it, was created not only to contain and control human beings but also to turn them into a source of energy to power the very construct that contains and controls them. Conceptualized and built by a singular artificial intelligence, the Matrix renders a particular version of reality both indiscernible as a construct and ineluctable as an experience for those who "live" unconsciously within it. The majority never learn that, although they believe they are living in the modern world, they in fact exist only in fields of pods, their minds engaged in a neural-interactive simulation, their bodies used as batteries to power the machines that masterminded the construct. Through its use of two interrelated metaphors-reality is a computer program, and this specific computer program, the Matrix, is a system of social control-the film The Matrix paints a particularly nightmarish picture of human existence. The people who live within the Matrix are deluded, exploited, kept under control by an oppressive system, used as fuel to support someone else's notion of life. Critics of the dominant models of formal education in the United States have characterized schools and schooling in similar terms-as forms of social control that keep students captive to dominant interests, notions, and practices (see Berman, 1984; Burbules, 1986;

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