Currently reading Gourlay (2015) on “‘Student engagement’ and the tyranny of participation”
Very intrigued by that title, especially since I just wrote about student engagement as something positive, that all universities claim to want! Gourlay (2015) describes that traditionally, student engagement is described as behavioural, emotional, and cognitive engagement with a learning situation (and possibly beyond), other people in the context, and the content — often set in contrast to only engaging with content. Student engagement is then often measured by observable activity in the process, and when there is no publicly observable activity (by whatever measure), someone is labled as passive and not engaged, which has a negative connotation: “Silent listening and thinking are assumed to be markers of passivity and therefore not indicative of engagement.” Phew!
Gourlay (2015) looks at the underlying ideology — student-centeredness, and with that non-autoriatrian teachers — and the problems it might create. “Although complete disengagement from study and educational activities is clearly problematic, there is a risk that the orthodoxy of student engagement may lead to practices which are quiet, private, non-verbal and non-observable becoming bracketed as essentially deviant and in need of remediation– which may relate to the moral panic discourses surrounding student practices which are seen as problematic, such as the pathologisation of ‘passive’ East Asian classroom behaviour“. This is a very interesting point! I see a lot of such discussions where taking up airtime in a group setting is not equated, but seen as at least correlated with being engaged, being motivated, contributing to own and others’ learning. And this is based on the cultural context we are in: “Throughout the literature of student engagement, emphasis is placed on taking responsibility, which arguably serves to reify a set of culturally specific Western post-enlightenment ‘virtues’, such as individual self-reliance. Engagement is positioned as primarily a cognitive activity, arising out of a mindset of high motivation and determination“, with the implicit assumption that non-observed engagement means low motivation and determination. This is something that I personally have a long history with — going back to primary school and later highschool, I have had discussions with teachers who told me that they know that I knew how to answer their questions, and that I should raise my hand all the time anyway, not just when nobody else was raising theirs. Which, to my mind, was (and still is) a waste of energy — I knew I wasn’t going to get to say something if other people also knew the answer (and that the teacher knew I knew the answer anyway), so the only point in indicating that I wanted to speak was when nobody else had anything to say, or when I really really disagreed with what was being said. And that to some extent lives on until today, where I am being told that I need to speak more in group meetings at work to “show engagement”. Anyway, the point is that I can relate to this critique of only valuing the loud and observable engagement very much!
Gourlay (2015) writes that “It also raises questions about the status and perceived value of silent listening, private study, individual reading and writing, engaging with other forms of representation and solitary thinking– all of which form the basis of much study practice and still underpin the production of the majority of mainstream pieces of academic work, such as essays. These are arguably regarded in the foregoing ideology as inferior to activities which are observable and public displays of‘participation’ – such as group work, extra-curricular activity and public interaction with staff“, which, again, hits a nerve. So reading, thinking, blogging are not worth as much as just being loud? Gourlay (2015) argues that most of (higher) education is engagement with texts. And in a way, people do seem to remember that judging by the number of complaints we hear that students don’t read enough (or at all) these days. Why would that be problematic if the observable engagement is really all that counts? Gourlay (2015) writes “Reading, writing and textual practices in general are acts of communication across time and space, and as such they are inherently communicative and dialogic– however, the mainstream conceptions of desired ‘student engagement’ arguably threatens to occlude or even pathologise these practices as either‘passive’ or insufficiently‘active’ and participatory“.
Gourlay (2015) then discusses that student engagement, and agency, is not just within an individual student or a student group, but those in relation to their non-human environment, the spaces they meet in, the devices, softwares, search engines they use; agency is distributed in this vast network of human and non-human players. And we need to get a much better understanding of student engagement, including all these unobserved day-to-day practices like reading on a phone on a bus, or collecting references in a data base or a file, or annotating a pdf or a print-out, and many more, to actually support student learning. Especially in contrast with the article I just read an hour ago where student engagement is seen as students meeting in a space (that is hopefully conductive to collaboration) which I completely uncritically acccepted, this article really gave me a lot to think about!
Gourlay, L. (2015). ‘Student engagement’ and the tyranny of participation. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), 402–411. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020784
Still snowy around here…
