More on the tyranny of participation (Macfarlane & Tomlinson, 2017; Mendes & Hammett, 2023; Dyment et al., 2020)

After reading about the “tyranny of participation” the other day, I looked into some more literature citing Gourlay (2015) to possibly get some ideas of how to encourage cognitive engagement without assuming what that would look like from the outside.

First up: Macfarlane & Tomlinson (2017) on “Critiques of student engagement“. They have six main ones:

• Engagement-as-Performativity: If there are targets set for anything, people tend to optimize for those targets. In the case of engagement, if airtime is rewarded, students will take up airtime rather than make sure that they have something substantial to contribute (which is actually my main criticism). But also the same with attendance, contribution to online discussions, etc.. All of these could support engagement, but definitely don’t have to, but since they are more easily observable than thinking or listening, they are focused on.
• Engagement-as-Marketing: Engaged students, if interpreted and presented as evidence for an institution’s high teaching quality, lets that institution charge high fees: “The key market information disseminated by institutions connects to both process and outcomes. In the former case, institutions seek to present a narrative of what prospective students’ experiences will be like, including the quality of their learning and level of resources they can expect. Formal student engagement measures are increasingly part of this information landscape in so far as they depict one particular notion of students’ satisfaction with the quality of their learning experience. In the latter case, market information can signal the post-experience benefits and outcomes, the most immediate and measurable being the future rate of return on studying at a specific institution.” Macfarlane & Tomlinson (2017) link this to student partnership: “Related to the reported rise in student consumerism is the role of students as ‘regulators’ of their institutions: students are encouraged to make stronger inputs in steering and monitoring institutional provision often under the remit of ‘student voice’ or sometimes more couched in terms of ‘student partnerships’. In UK institutions, it is now common for student services to adopt a customer service approach in responding to students’ demands (for instance, ‘you said, we did’). If the latter does not directly indicate a student consumer ethic, it is nonetheless symbolically loaded with a discourse of student rights.“
• Engagement-as-Infantilisation: Making attendance mandatory, requiring reflections on learning, having measures in place to identify and support at-risk students can be seen as treating adult learners like children
• Engagement-as-Surveillance: Monitoring student behavior (like attendance or time spent on learning management systems) is surveillance, and there are studies that show that students know and alter their behaviour and studies show “the effects of student awareness of surveillance in terms of their online browsing behaviour, the topics perceived as appropriate to discuss and writing style“
• Engagement-as-Gamification: Gamifying education can lead to instant gratification behaviour rather than deep learning, or that students try to play the game by optimising for it and also by bending the rules to, for example, reflect on fictitious events rather than real ones to protect someone’s privacy
• Engagement-as-Opposition: “Instead of attending lectures, they can decide to disrupt them through a boycott or a strike, reject expectations that they need to demonstrate interest or enthusiasm for learning, or redefine the parameters of assignments they are set.” (see also the transition between non-participation to direct action I discuss here).

It is really interesting to consider these aspects when thinking about engagement to make sure we don’t fall into any of those traps!

Next: Mendes & Hammett (2023) on “the new tyranny of student participation? Student voice and the paradox of strategic-active student-citizens.” 

Mendes & Hammett (2023) write that “students are expected to be both strategic, instrumental consumers and active citizens of their university. This results in the paradox of the strategic active student-citizen.” What does that mean?

The idea that students act as strategic, instrumental consumers has somehow become widely accepted and is reflected in, for example, claims that since students pay for their studies, they should get their money’s worth out of the education, and therefore need a say in what and how they are taught. It is also reflected in providing vouchers as incentives for students to complete surveys, in assumptions in what and how they study for exams, etc..

The active-citizen idea, on the other hand, is based in an “understanding of citizenship as comprising status, feeling and practice, we understand student-citizenship (at the University scale) as identified by registration as a student at a university (status), as sense of identity, belonging and affinity which is encouraged in connection to degree, academic Department, Student Union, etc. (feeling), and as conduct allied to codes of conduct and engagement with learning and teaching and student voice activities (practices).” It is reflected in efforts to make students feel belonging to the organization, and in the assumption that they will want to contribute to the organization by serving on committees etc..

Originally, the active-citizen / student voice idea is based on Arnstein (1969)’s ladder of citizen participation, where it is fairly clear that all steps leading up to partnership are just attempts to make it look like people were actually involved in decision-making (e.g., “placating”). This got lost in adaptations of the latter in a teaching context (including in how I have used it), where all steps are presented with the positive spin of “at least it’s better than just a lecture”. And of course it depends on the goal and context, but if the goal is partnership, then everything else is not actually taking students seriously, and that’s just not good enough. Asking students to participate to the organization as citizens can even become a burden, especially when the “as citizens” is not about partnership. For example, when every module students take is evaluated once in the middle and once at the end, a typical student needs to give feedback to the teacher approximately once per week over the year. Mendes & Hammett (2023) write “For some students, involvement as representatives reflects an underlying political or moral belief. For others, it may be a strategic, CV-boosting activity to undertake. More generally the assumption seems to be that students will want to be ‘partners’ and thus participate in student voice activities because they feel an affiliation with and identify as a member of the University community – a student-citizen who will then actively undertake actions/practices associated with this status and which contribute to the future health of the institution. However, the realities differ markedly as students are increasingly positioned (and position themselves) as strategic/investor student-citizens seeking to ensure maximised individual benefit.”

I, too, would not be happy to give feedback on teaching every week unless I saw that this actually resulted in something happening, and even then it would probably feel excessive. Mendes & Hammett (2023) also write: “as student voice activities are increasingly routinised, they become not only increasingly depoliticised and mechanical but also led to resentment and disengagement“. When student voice is reduced from partnership to consultations, and students mostly respond to surveys and evaluations of teaching for quality assurance purposes, these become not too dissimilar from customer satisfaction surveys (happy or sad smiley?), which is clearly not aligned with their active role as citizens/partners: “on the one hand students are explicitly encouraged to be strategic student-citizens (who strategically invest in ways to get the best degree possible at the minimal individual cost/effort) while simultaneously being asked to be active student-citizens (participating in decision-making activities for no direct, individual benefit)“.

Mendes & Hammett (2023) write that “Thus the risk exists of the practice of engaging with routinised student voice activities simply being a ritualised performance to be completed, but one which is rendered meaningless without a sense of belonging that fosters the collective identity and commitment to the shared future of the programme/Department. In other words, routinised forms of voice may contribute to students’ disengaging from the university community, further reducing a student’s interest in the (self)governance of the institution and its membership“. And I definitely recognize that routinised student voice activities can start to feel hollow and tick-box exercises rather than dialogue, both for teachers and students. And this is where the authors come to the tyranny aspect: “The received wisdom that student voice must be sought and students actively want to participate is experienced– at times– as a tyranny by staff who seek (in vain) to engage students with these activities, but also by students who feel bombarded by such requests.”

For me, the most interesting thought in this article is how we cannot treat students on the one hand as if they act purely selfishly, optimizing their studies; and on the other hand expect them to contribute to the community. I think that the treating-students-as-if-they-are-purely-selfish approach is not a good one, anyway, but especially in combination with then still expecting students to want to contribute to make teaching better for people that come after them it becomes clear that we need to really think about what behaviours, what identity we ascribe to students, and what it might do to them that we do it.

Last one (for today): Dyment et al. (2020) on “Beyond busy work: rethinking the measurement of online student engagement.” (Note: this article was written before the pandemic despite being on online learning AND coming out in 202o!) And it is a lot more practical than the two previous ones, really investigating students’ perceptions of engagement.

Dyment et al. (2020) interviewed 9 highly engaged online students and found that students see the types of tasks that easily measure student engagement (like a certain number of discussion posts or quizzes) as “busy work”. The ones interviewed do engage in them because they realize that they are supposed to measure enagement, but they don’t feel like they are learning from them or that doing them was even contributing to their final grade. This is especially frustrating if the tasks are difficult due to the format of the product to be delivered (texts) and not to the process of the actual thinking and learning taking place (but this could be dealt with by allowing for voice or video recordings instead); and when there is no follow-up, no feedback, no “good job!”, no questions. They also mention how discussion threads are difficult to navigate (probably especially when people just write because they have to, not because they have something they want to contribute, and just write some random stuff in random places). Peer feedback can be very stressful when time isn’t managed well by everybody, and can feel meaningless when it seems that you are the only one taking it seriously. Also some students describe no interest at all in getting to know their peers (writing introductions in a discussion thread etc), they just want to get the education done (fair enough if they feel that engaging with their peers doesn’t contribute to their learning).

On the other hand, Dyment et al. (2020) describe what students do when they feel engaged in the course: Discussing in self-organized groups on social media, or actually meeting up in person to discuss. Listening to podcasts, watching TED talks, visiting a museum, as suggested by the instructor. In a nutshell: “The students in this study reported their engagement was increased by working on learning activities that were deemed to be relevant, authentic, prompted their creativity and that ultimately contributed to their final assessment task. They noted that time spent on these activities (as a measure of engagement) may not be easily measured by traditional tools. They also welcomed a diversity of approaches to learning in the online space and were appreciative of lecturers who used a variety of online pedagogies to facilitate learning opportunities for students. These findings point to the role that well-designed assessment tasks can play in promoting engaging across an entire semester.”

They end their discussion with three questions: “Does engagement in higher education need to be measured? How might these alternative forms of engagement be measured? How might a well-designed assessment task require sustained engagement?” Here it’s again interesting to note that this is a pre-pandemic and pre-GenAI paper, and that these questions are probably even more pressing today, where a focus is shifting from the product to the process of learning. Even with a focus on the process: Do we need to measure engagement? And what really is the process that we are focussing on now?

Dyment, J., Stone, C., & Milthorpe, N. (2020). Beyond busy work: rethinking the measurement of online student engagement. Higher Education Research & Development, 39(7), 1440-1453.

Macfarlane, B., & Tomlinson, M. (2017). Critiques of student engagement. Higher Education Policy, 30(1), 5-21.

Mendes, A. B., & Hammett, D. (2023). The new tyranny of student participation? Student voice and the paradox of strategic-active student-citizens. Teaching in higher education, 28(1), 164-179.

Featured image back from when we were in Cyprus last year. Those were the days…