Student Voice in Higher Education: Opening the Loop

This qualitative research study draws on interviews with course representatives and on policy analysis to explore the discursive construction and enactment of student voice. ‘Student voice’ in universities is valued in policy and by course representatives as a ‘good thing’, based on rhetoric of both the empowered consumer, and of co construction and partnership. However, the data suggests that the National Student Survey questions and the practices of course boards tend to reduce student voice to a feedback loop. In this loop, students express feedback, the institution takes this on board then they tell the students how they have responded to their feedback. The feedback loop is a significant element of the managerialist imaginary of Higher Education globally. The stages of this loop are used as an analytical frame for understanding the ways in which student voice is constructed and enacted and the effects of this.