Elizabeth O’Brien (Dublin City University)     
“Are you our teacher?”: the voice of the school student during initial teacher education

This paper opens an exploration into how student voice might be recognised and described in an everyday sense as initiative, and as ordinarily significant to the student teacher during initial teacher education. Drawing on the writing of Stanley Cavell on the figure of the friend, it suggests that the voice of the school student is a neglected factor in the education of educators. It holds that programmes of initial teacher education should support student teachers in becoming capable of engaging with student voice in a non-extractive, non-consultative, everyday, interested sense as a facet of the complexity of life in school.

Elizabeth O’Brien is Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Maynooth University in Ireland. Her research interests lie in the philosophy and theory of education, educational policy analysis and curriculum studies, and teacher education. Elizabeth is passionate about living well in educational worlds, and explores the roles reading and the arts can play through her research and teaching. She is co-author of Dancing in the Dark: A Survivor’s Guide to the University and co-founder of the Philosophy of Education Reading Network www.philofed.com. Her monograph The Educator and The Ordinary: A Philosophical Approach to Initial Teacher Education will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023.