Choosing for Oneself: Teachers’ Perspectives on Writing and Voice in a Formative Rhetorical Framework

As the only country in Scandinavia, Denmark has implemented an explicit focus on students’ ‘personal voice’ in upper secondary schools. In this article, I revisit a focus group study with teachers, centred around their perceptions of the voice metaphor (Glædesdahl, in review). Working with reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke Citation2022) has drawn my attention to one particular theme from the focus group study; the teachers’ mentioning of student choices when discussing what voice is or could mean gives rise to an exploration of choice as a marker for voice at local as well as global levels of working with text. Drawing on focus group excerpts, the topic of choice translates as ‘dialogue with oneself’, ‘selection’ and ‘stance’, all of which are tried out as different modes of working with voice, straddling inwards (autotelic, introspective) and outwards (democratic, participative) perspectives of writing (Krogh 2020). I explore the dimension of choice against a backdrop of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, in which choice [prohairesis] is a virtue steered toward Aristotle’s concept of ‘happiness’ through the fulfilment of self. Understanding student voice through students’ choices thus contributes to the scholarly conversation on voice in writing and adds a practical-didactic dimension to life writing practices in the classroom.