Hearing student voice within the context of Iran: Building schools for the future

Abstract

Schools adopt student voice as a means of identifying educational problems and weaknesses for improvement. In recent decades, student voice work has gained momentum, and, more importantly, dwelling on hearing students has been noticed as a way of facilitating educational decisions for school reforms. To this end, the study, drawing upon a qualitative research method, investigated the student voice in schools within the context of Iran in an effort to determine what obstacles they face in education. Data was collected through an open-ended questionnaire. Employing thematic content analysis, the major themes and patterns were extracted for codifications. The findings illustrated that students specified four major problems, including resources (books), processes (rules), relationships (teachers, parents, staff) and environment (school). To conclude, student voice needs to be embedded in the educational system of Iran if stakeholders seek improvement and reform in schools in the near future.