Students’ Perceptions of the Classroom and Teacher
One of the arguments for inclusion of student voice relates not to the role of student voice within the lesson itself, but rather to student voice about the learning experience after the fact. Until relatively recently, most efforts to improve education have been based on adults’ notions of how education should be conceptualised and practised and the views and opinions of young people have been traditionally discounted as having less legitimacy than the views of adults.Research seeking students’ perceptions began with the premise that for teachers and researchers to be able to understand and improve learning and teaching, we need to canvas students’ needs and viewpoints. Brown (2002) argued that student views of learning reflect their experiences with the activities that teachers provide and the values teachers convey as being important. That is, students construe learning in ways that they have been socialised to do, through their perceptions of what their teachers’ value. These student voices can be particularly useful for informing local contexts. For example, examining the messages within the narratives of young Maori students in New Zealand, Bishop (2003) identified conditions necessary for supporting the engagement of Maori youth in schoolbased learning. Central to the findings was that young Maori students valued teachers who would enable them to bring their cultural experiences to the learning conversation.

Students’ Participatory Practices within the Classroom
Within our classrooms, students must learn to engage in classroom discourse and practices that serve both social and cognitive functions. A research focus on the social nature of learning activity must include the co-construction of classroom norms, participation structures, and collaboration (Nasir & de Royston, 2012).

Learning environments are never identical. Research findings from the Learner’s Perspective Study (LPS) affirm just how “culturally-situated are the practices of classrooms around the world and the extent to which students are collaborators with the teacher, complicit in the development and enactment of patterns of participation that reflect individual, societal and cultural priorities and associated value systems” (Clarke, Emanuelsson, Jablonka, & Mok, 2006, p. 1). In this book we attend closely to this collaboration with our focus on the voice of the student.Collectively the authors consider how the deliberate inclusion of student voice within the LPS project can be used to enhance our understandings of mathematics
classrooms, of mathematics learning, and of mathematics outcomes for students in classrooms around the world.