Student engagement in higher education: theory, context, practice

Citation

Taylor, C. and Robinson, C. (2012), "Student engagement in higher education: theory, context, practice", Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, Vol. 4 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jarhe.2012.53304baa.001

Student engagement in higher education: theory, context, practice

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, Volume 4, Issue 2.

Over the past few years, student engagement has emerged as a key dimension of higher education policy and practice both within the UK and internationally. Alongside this a range of theoretical understandings of student engagement in higher education has been developed, some of which focus on explaining the impact of policy, others which seek to illuminate instances of good student engagement practice, while others focus on broader normative aims and purposes as a means to challenge what many in higher education see as the deleterious effects of neoliberal marketization. These confluences between theory-context-practice make student engagement a particularly fertile field for analysis and research endeavor in the current higher education climate and make this special issue of JARHE particularly timely.

The papers included in this special issue, Student engagement in higher education: theory, context, practice, originated from the Engaging Voices: Participation and the Student Experience symposium held at Sheffield Hallam University on October 25, 2011. This symposium gathered together student engagement theorists, researchers, practitioners, higher education institution (HEI) managers, educational developers and student representatives from within and beyond the UK. As organizers of the Engaging Voices symposium we wanted to add some distinctive threads to ongoing debates and discussions on student engagement taking place in other national forums, networks and initiatives. This special issue has enabled us to select some excellent papers from the symposium in order to pull these threads together around the theory, context and practice of student engagement. The eight papers included here take their place both as parts of a collection, in which different authors contribute a diversity of perspectives or individual “takes” on student engagement, and as a mapping of the field, in that resonances and correspondences, as well as differences and distinctions, are apparent among and between papers. Taken together, the papers in this special issue attest to the contested, dynamic and political nature of student engagement both as a field of practice and as an intellectual and research endeavor. The papers also remind us of the reasons why it is sometimes necessity to eschew generalizations in order to better understand what is salient in – and what we might learn from – “local” and specific institutional contexts in which student engagement actually happens, and that the local bears the marks of national policy agendas and the global economic forces currently reshaping higher education.

The first thread we highlight concerns the contested conceptual nature of student engagement. There are many different interpretations and articulations of student engagement and the definition one chooses, whether as a theorist, researcher, practitioner or manager, depends on one's values, allegiances and investments, intellectual history and institutional location. A few years ago Bryson et al. (2010) rightly drew attention to student engagement as a multiplicity. A number of authors in the special issue pick this point up. In particular, in the first paper in this special issue, Carol Robinson discusses a range of terms such as student voice, student participation and students as change agents, which are often entailed and/or collapsed within the broader notion of student engagement. Robinson goes on to helpfully situate these terms in relation to both a set of values to orient practice, and different articulations of student engagement practices within higher education. One of the key insights to emerge from Robinson's paper is its historical perspective. Student engagement may be relatively new in higher education but it has been alive and kicking in compulsory and further education for some considerable time; and, while sector to sector “borrowing” is never straightforward, Robinson reminds us that this already rich fund of student voice practice with its democratic and transformational impetus may possess insights from which the field of higher education student engagement may learn.

The special issue also includes papers more specifically devoted to developing and applying new theorizations of student engagement. In this second “theoretical” thread, Carol Taylor's paper ponders the contested nature of student engagement through an exploration of three discursive strands or paradigms of practice. These three strands, according to Taylor, articulate student engagement as one, a means to improve teaching and learning; two, a comparative, competitive and accountability framework linked to the promotion of “student choice” (as seen in the NSS, for example); and three, a critical-transformative praxis which is relational, contextual, embodied, dialogic and ethical. The varying degrees of (in)compatibility of these discourses mark student engagement as a diverse field of practice and as a inherently political endeavor. Ruth Lefever's paper continues the theoretical exploration with an innovative look at students understanding of belonging on campus. Through a focus on space and spatiality, Lefever considers how students understand, articulate and experience belonging at university, and how belonging is enacted through practices which may foster inclusion or, alternatively, lead to exclusion. Such wider perspective on student engagement will undoubtedly be crucial to universities as retention and participation pressures generated by new fee regimes begin to bite in the coming years.

A third thread tying these papers together is their attunement to the changing national UK policy context which posits higher education as a market and the student as a consumer. As the impact of the White Paper Higher education: students at the heart of the system begins to manifest itself, we are seeing the emergence of new theoretical and public discourses about the role, scope and purpose of universities in a neoliberal market economy. Some of the most important of these are from Stefan Collini who asks what universities are for, John Holmwood who is spearheading a campaign for the public university, Ron Barnett who advocates “lifewide learning” and the “life-informed curriculum” as a means to re-imagine what universities can do, and Jon Nixon who argues for the need to put the “polity” back into higher education policy through the constitution of students as “engaged citizens.” These broader concerns to contest what Paul Ashwin has criticized as the “monetized logic” of a student-as-consumer education market and reclaim a notion of learning as enchantment (in Barnett's words) are developed in a number of papers here. Frank Su and Margaret Wood's paper, for example, approaches these issues by asking “what makes a good university lecturer?” – an apparently straightforward question which enables them to explore some important philosophical dimensions of student engagement. For Su and Wood, the ineffability of teaching, and teaching and learning as moral engagement, is paramount and they set this against what they call the “deliverology” discourse which privileges the student as consumer.

The “macro” approach to student engagement (Robinson's paper), the application of a new theoretical framework for understanding student engagement as a field of practice (Taylor's paper) and a philosophical exploration of the dynamics of teaching and learning relations (Su and Wood paper), are supplemented by papers which form a fourth thread and which deal more explicitly with instances of student engagement practice at the meso- and micro-levels. Thus papers by Wright and Angelini, Wintrup, Alsford and Adams provide interesting and innovative examples of student engagement practice, while at the same time the authors bring a critical eye to practice in order to identity tensions, problems and constraints for students, lecturers and institutions in promoting student engagement in uncertain times.

Alison Wright and Marco Angelini's paper focusses on the impact of a peer-mentoring scheme on the mentors themselves. It is widely accepted that a diversity of learning experiences is beneficial in the development of learning and the data from their study shows that the act of preparing for and running the mentoring sessions helps the student mentors develop the ability to reflect and improve upon their own learning. However, it is possible that tensions around the adoption of such learning experiences may come to the fore in the near future as students are required to pay increasing fees for their HEI experience and may enter HEIs with an expectation that programs of study will comprise of only tutor-led structured learning components.

In Julie Wintrup's paper, the tensions and difficulties experienced by Foundation Degree students are explored. Wintrup raises an important question around student engagement which alludes to the tensions at play when developing student engagement practices. She asks: if student engagement is understood as a dynamic relationship between the student, the institution and the teaching and learning practices, how can HEIs promote such a dynamic? Sally Alsford's paper provides an illustration of how one HEI has answered this question, and explores the establishment and workings of an Educational Development Student Forum as an example of good practice in HEI-student partnerships. The tensions between different models of student voice and student engagement – and how these play out in the day-to-day of practice – are considered from different perspectives in both papers. The paper by Nessa Adams considers Afro-Caribbean societies as cultural and ethnic sites of belonging for their student members. Adams's paper provides important insights into how such societies can provide affirming identity spaces for ethnically diverse BME student populations. Adams also tackles difficult questions such as the extent to which such societies can promote student engagement via “integration” into the wider student body, and the role of student union activities in promoting student engagement.

There is no doubt that student engagement, with its complexity, variety and articulation to a range of policy, practice and theoretical initiatives is one of the most “magnetic” concepts in contemporary higher education. Our aim in this special issue has been to make a contribution to student engagement theory, context and practice. We hope the papers in this special issue engage readers with a sense of the liveliness of the debates around student engagement, and that this is the beginning of further debate with colleagues about the politics, values and investments we all bring to our student engagement practices, particularly as we move forward in uncertain times.

As co-editors of this volume, Carol Taylor and Carol Robinson wish to extend sincere thanks to Michael Connolly and Norah Jones at Glamorgan University for their advice on the “nuts and bolts” of putting the special issue together and to Thomas Dark and Sharon Parkinson and at Emerald publishing for taking this venture forward. We hope the special issue makes an intellectually engaging intervention in the field.

Dr Carol Taylor, Reader in Education, Department of Education, Childhood and Inclusion, Sheffield Hallam University. C.A.Taylor@shu.ac.uk

Dr Carol Robinson, Principal Research Fellow, Education Research Centre, University of Brighton.

Carol Taylor and Carol RobinsonGuest Editors

Reference

Bryson, C., Cooper, G. and Hardy, C. (2010), “Reaching a common understanding of the meaning of student engagement”, paper presented at The Society for Research in Higher Education Conference, Celtic Manor, Wales, 14-16 December