Learner Voices, Perspectives, and Positioning: Providing agency to empower learning. Edited by Simon Taylor and Seán Bracken (2025)

Learner Voices, Perspectives, and Positioning: Providing agency to empower learning. Edited by Simon Taylor and Seán Bracken (2025) 162 pp. (pbk). Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-032-523705-5

The term ‘learner voice’ is often used as a shorthand to describe activities supporting the quality management of education such as student representation at committees and evaluation of learning surveys. This book rewrites these limited notions of learning voice by opening up a more expansive and exploratory meaning. In doing so, learning voice is lifted out of policy and process rhetoric, and used to help understand the more agential nature of what it is to be a student in different contexts across time and space.

The first indication that this book seeks to shake up how we understand learner voice is through the pluralisation of the word voice to voices. This semantic shift implies a focus on multiplicity, diversity and difference. Its tagline – ‘providing agency to empower learning’ – further cements the sentiment. As an edited volume, the book is formed of contributions from a range of authors connected variously to the Education team at Worcester University, including students and alumni. The talent and expertise of the writers provide a rich understanding of learner voices in all its guises in ways that are amplified by the collective writing approaches that are found in many of the chapters.

The volume begins by addressing philosophical questions around the purpose of education and its notable absence as a subject within the school curriculum. The probing then takes a more historical approach by looking at the role of learner voices in the past – a focus that is often overlooked despite the logical and obvious contribution it offers. Following these chapters is a move to discussions around the limitations of metrics and how narratives that capture experience and educational journeys provide a more complex but enhanced picture of what education is like from the student point of view. From here, the book segues into matters that address more squarely issues to do with social justice and equity. This is probed from multiple angles, including advocacy, neurodiversity, mental health, representation, disability, race and racism. The crescendo of which is a theoretically driven chapter on ‘epistemic injustice’ that is also singled out by the editors of the book in the blurb at the start. The final few chapters turn the attention to other themes such as prison education and placement experiences, global voices, learner involvement in shaping curricula and sustainable change. Subsequently, the book closes by addressing questions to do with the role of learner voices in bringing about change through providing agency in educational contexts.

Personal highlights for me include the overarching problematisation of learner voice that elsewhere almost always singularises student perspectives and bypasses the nuances of the student body. The refreshing unravelling and reassembling of ‘learner voice’ is driven through discussion, examples and via theorisation and novel insights. The critical power that this book delivers allows the reader to develop a more complex understanding of voice through various lenses.

Another gem that this book offers that I found particularly enticing was the recommended reading signposted at the end of each chapter by individual authors. The descriptors of the suggested readings adds clear value for someone who wants to read more and build their understanding. However, it was the fragmentation of the collective authorship as a closing function that I found specifically appealing. The reader benefits at once from the collective efforts of the writing team and the unique insights of the individual contributors. 

Finding fault in the book feels rather unfair because what I want to suggest as a weakness is also highly defensible given the thrust of the book’s contribution around learner voices. While held together by a common theme, the foci+ are multidirectional and as a reader it is sometimes difficult to keep up with such a varied range of ideas and perspectives. There is also a strange mix of uniformity and non-uniformity across the chapters in terms of their structure that makes the volume a sometimes unpredictable read. This mixed terrain would matter less if I was reading in a more targeted way for learning or research purposes, and therefore others may want to take this observation with a pinch of salt.

There is no doubt that this book is an important addition to the discipline of Education Studies. With a specific focus on the views and position of the learner, the book achieves in delivering a volume that provides comprehensive coverage of learner agency. The book is philosophical, theoretical, empirical and pedagogical. It could be used as a single text to support modules concerned with learner agency, or it could be used to support the experiences of certain learners in modules with related content. Personally, I will be adding this book to the reading list for a new module that I have just started teaching called ‘What is Education?’. I will use the book to underpin discussions on the purpose of education, its changing nature over time, and the way in which education is experienced and perceived by different people, and how it might be convened differently moving forward. On that note, I also think that this book is a valuable text for colleagues involved in learning and teaching research, professional development and academic innovation roles because of its guidance on empowering learning experiences. 

In conclusion, for anyone wanting to make a difference, this volume contains valuable and unique insights that can be used to help inform change. The book takes its rightful place as a conceptualising piece that provides a much needed way of conceiving of learner voices, but also as a pragmatic text that can support practitioner work in enhancing the learning experiences of education’s most valuable assets: its learners.