Conceptualizing student voice in teacher-student curriculum partnerships within Iran’s higher education

Student voice has gained momentum in improving educational landscapes recently. With the aim of creating opportunities for empowering educational systems, student voice rests upon the premise that curricula are co-created, mediated dialogically, and co-designed by teachers and students. Yet, student voice expression might be restricted by power relations embedded within institutions. In fact, the current study aims to investigate how student–teacher curriculum partnerships can be interpreted in Iran’s TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) higher education institutions through student voice. By means of semi-structured interviews and open-ended questionnaires, 41 M.A. TEFL students at Iranian state universities were requested to participate. The results—employing abductive analysis—indicated that teachers treat student voice in higher education teaching practices as tokenistic. The study delineates student voice in terms of student feedback and criticism, student decision-making, and student autonomy in co-creating teaching approaches and also highlights that teachers should provide spaces for students to construct dialogic approaches in education within a particular culture.