Voice Is Something You Practice
It began with a single email, written in the summer before my second year. I wanted to ask whether someone might supervise a mathematics education project. I rewrote the message several times, trying to sound confident, trying to get across that I knew what I was talking about and that I had potential for research. In the end, the question was simple: “Would you be willing to supervise a project on mathematics education?”
Eventually, I pressed send anyway.
The project became an exploration of how students learn abstraction in mathematics, and a co-development of research-informed teaching activities for lecturers. A large part of the work involved interviews (or, more accurately, conversations) with lecturers about how concepts are taught, where students struggle, and what misconceptions repeatedly appear. But somewhere during the interviews, I realised something else was happening. I stopped only asking questions, and I started translating. I was translating what I had been noticing about where students struggle. Translating the confusion that appears in groupchats and the discussion forums, and the idea that silence in classrooms doesn’t always mean disengagement. Translating the feeling of almost understanding.
Many students struggle to explain what confuses them. Often, people do not know what they do not know. Students hesitate to speak, afraid of revealing misunderstandings and afraid of asking “wrong” questions. Lecturers may observe that “students struggle with abstraction,” but the reality is more nuanced: students are often missing the bigger picture, and they don’t see the connections between different structures. Giving language to these experiences became part of my work. Only later did I realise this, in itself, was an act of student voice.
Students are often reduced to metrics: SEAtS attendance figures, data dashboards and the ubiquitous surveys. Useful, maybe, but incomplete. Students are not data points. They are thinkers, doubters, and complex individuals whose experiences cannot fit into a “max. 200 words” survey box. Their voice shouldn’t be only feedback collected after teaching has already happened. Maybe student voice lives in the ongoing process of learning, in the experience of being a student itself.
Student voice is often imagined as surveys and forms. Of course, these matter. But there’s something more. Usually, student voice is about feeling permitted to speak. It is when a student raises their hand despite uncertainty and fear. The moment someone asks a question that feels obvious, or risky, or unfinished. The moment they move from observer to participant. Or, well, when someone sends an email. Sometimes, collecting student voices isn’t enough, sometimes it’s about helping the students use their own. When students speak, you’ll find that others recognise themselves in those words. And just like that, a shared sense of belonging is created: the same struggles, confusion and questions. And usually, this echo of voices is what institutions begin to hear.
This is the idea that my project centred on. Some of the activities I’ve developed are based on learning how to generate and check for your own understanding independently, instead of waiting for it to be delivered to you. It’s about taking ownership of your learning and your place within the university. As the project progressed, I found myself representing students. I had to articulate how abstraction feels from within, from the perspective of someone encountering a concept for the first time, and how motivation for learning plays a big role in further understanding. I began to see mathematics completely differently. It is not just tedious proofs and seemingly random definitions. It is also voices. It’s a symphony of all the voices that came before, a layered melody that will always leave space for a new choir to join.
Later, I wrote another email. This time I didn’t ask for a project, but I wrote to suggest something: a space where student voices could exist more openly, heard in their own language; a place where students could express themselves in their own voice.
This page began with that idea.
Looking back, nothing about that first email felt extraordinary. It was hesitant and quite naive. Yet it made me realise that I had to stop waiting to be invited. I needed to step forward, to ask and to speak. I needed to stop wondering whether I have permission to belong or to raise my hand.
Student voice is not something we are given. It is something we have to practice through small acts, like sending one email when silence would be more comfortable.
This piece is one such act. Perhaps the next one is yours.
Submitted by: Sonia Balan
Picture Credits: Tom Jackson
