Paper short abstract:

Combining Anthropology and Student Voice can help us overcome the often too-dark adult self-referentiality of research in Education. The commitment to listen and include non-adult perspectives yields the power to make us rethink school dynamics in ways that leave more room for hope and possibility.

Paper long abstract:

Despite anthropologists’ efforts to avoid self-referentiality, when it comes to studying education a certain self-referentiality is often swept under the rug: that of the adult investigating and interpreting young people’s experience.

As an Anthropologist and a PhD student in a School of Education, I argue that the transdisciplinary encounter between Anthropology and Inclusive Research in Education, specifically Student Voice, can open unprecedented possibilities for tackling this uncomfortable truth.

Through examples from my MAs fieldwork among Italian high-school students from three different curricula to understand their relationship with the schooling institution, I will show how this approach can help conceive a new and less “dark” vocabulary of school dynamics as we reimagine well-established theories by including non-adult perspectives. Here, trans-disciplinarity means combining the ethnographic methodologies of Anthropology with the genuine commitment to engage with younger people of Student Voice: a true epistemological shift to not overlap adult-created conflict and resistance interpretative frameworks and make way for more hope-filled theories.

The effort of encountering students by participating in their lives yields the power to make us realise how some of the well-established understanding of school dynamics do not collide with students’ perspectives on the same matter, picturing a too-dark picture of their actions: sometimes resistance and conflict efforts are simply not there.

Not least, the comparative and reflexive push of Anthropology can favour the triangulations of students’ voices with the researchers’ observations and teachers’ perspectives, allowing researchers to see the strains and contentions that fuel the dark conflictual picture of school dynamics.