Download the worksheet and work through it in this order.

  1. List the actors first, including people who are affected but not present, which is the row people most often forget.
  2. Then fill the three voice columns for each actor: yes, partly, no or unclear is enough, with three or four words of explanation.
  3. Then answer the two questions underneath, which is where most of the value is.

Spend about five minutes on the table and ten on the questions. Use the scenario you chose for the power lens task, so that the two pieces of work build on each other.

This worksheet is not submitted. Tick the activity as done when you have completed it, and keep it: you will need it for the annotation task that follows.

Worked example:

Situation: A second-year examination is scheduled on a Saturday morning. Four students who work weekend shifts ask for it to be moved.

Actor or group

Present?

Can they speak here?

Is what they say taken up?

Is their account treated as credible?

What does speaking cost them?

The four students

Yes, by email and in the course chat

Yes, but only by raising it as a request

Partly: it becomes a scheduling query

Partly: the need is accepted, the inference from it is not

Being known as the ones who objected, to a lecturer who will be asked for references

The lecturer

Yes

Yes, and sets the register of the reply

Yes

Yes, by default

Very little; some administrative work

The other eighty students

Named, not consulted

No

Their interests are represented without being ascertained

Not applicable, no account was taken

Nothing; they were not asked

Student representative

Yes, later

Yes, in committee

The item is minuted in narrowed form

Yes, procedurally

Little, but the delay makes the outcome moot

Students who did not enrol because of weekend teaching

No

No

No

No

Not applicable; they are not there to bear a cost

 

Question 1. The framing is set by the lecturer, and it is: the date was published in advance, so changing it now would be unfair to those who planned around it. As the students would frame it: the date was set without anyone asking who is able to be free on a Saturday morning, and publication is not the same as consultation. Set side by side, the two sentences are not in factual disagreement. They differ on what fairness refers to, and on whether a decision taken in advance is thereby legitimate.

Question 2. The eighty other students are absent in the sense that matters: they are invoked as a reason and never asked, which is the strongest use anyone can make of a group. The final row is structurally absent. People who did not enrol at all because the timetable made the course impossible cannot appear in any consultation about the timetable, which means the arrangement is permanently evaluated by the population it already selected for.