“Student engagement in time of transformation"

August 12, 2013

Abstract for 2013 Conference of SRHE

In principle, students have always been ‘at the heart of the [higher education] system’, but their experience and the way they engage with their own learning and with other actors within higher education have changed profoundly since the emergence of the first medieval universities. There was a time when sovereign power resided in the student body and students effectively controlled the university. And there has been a much longer history of students joining the guild of professors in deciding on university matters through a student rector - a young master – and later through student representatives. Students have also historically engaged in social and ideological movements such as nationalism, liberalism and radicalism. In brief, given their particular social status and intellectual habitus, students have often been a vibrant social and political force within and outside their higher education communities.

My presentation will focus on contemporary developments in higher education, and their ideological underpinnings, insofar as they have important implications for student experience and engagement: massification, globalisation, technological innovations, and the rise of neo-liberal conceptions of higher education. These developments can be traced in policy documents and discourses accompanying recent higher education reforms. The concrete questions I seek to answer is how students are conceived within contemporary policy discourses. What do policy discourses about giving ‘students more choice’ and ‘a stronger voice’ tell us about current conceptions of students and student engagement? And how do these conceptions vary if we take into account the different national and regional contexts? How do they vary if we come to recognize that ‘a student’ is far from being a single-faceted agent?