Even more reading on student engagement (Vallee, 2017; Dangeni, 2025; Padilla-Petry et al., 2022)

Ok, now I am hooked on student engagement and what it really means, or, more importantly, should mean! So here are quick summaries of three more articles that I read to make sense of the “tyranny“.

First, Vallee (2017) on “Student engagement and inclusive education: reframing student engagement”

According to this article, engagement clasically describes a type of relationship between a student and the school, but as an individual quality in the student, which cannot be possessed by all students in a cohort since all the statistical analyses are based on a normal curve, where there are always the two “abnormal” tails. According to Vallee (2017), this means “[p]ut bluntly, engagement, as it is currently understood, is rather exclusionary.”

There is a lot of theory in that article that I did not understand, but (from what I understand) mostly around how one can possibly reframe engagement to make it inclusive. Vallee (2017) suggests to move away from student engagement and instead asks “[w]hat if [student/teacher] engagement was adopted as a theoretical construct? The implications would be thus: students/teachers exist in a locked dyad, that is, inextricable from their binary relationship. No longer would we scrutinise either entity in isolation; rather, the two might be understood to be in relationship and studied as such. This requires the subject of inquiry to then become the quality and content of such relationships“. He later elaborates “If participation in relationship is posited as a fundamental principle of education, then we are forced to scrutinise what ecological conditions (Bronfenbrenner 1979) facilitate robust relationships. We would need to regard not just the classroom, but the school and its macrosocial context. Increasingly difficult would be the ability to pathologise the individual by saying s/he is not engaged; rather, we would have to ask what can we do to affect [student/teacher] engagement; in other words, how can we facilitate [teaching/learning] relationships?”

I like the idea of making it about a shared engagement, a shared responsibility, and investigating what helps or hinders. A lot about that is about what we think is “normal” in terms of ability, behavior, background. Focus on facilitating the relationship might also explore the (online) spaces in which students and teachers meet, and other outside influences on the relationship. I don’t know what that would mean in practice, but I like the direction!

Next, Dangeni (2025) on “Invisible student engagement among Chinese international students in the UK”. There is a deficit narrative around international students, often around language problems and missing academic skills. Dangeni (2025) now investigates, using classroom observations, interviews and document & diary analysis, how 22 Chinese students in the UK feel, how they think, and what they do, to understand how they actually engage. In that, they consider structural (culture, curriculum, assessment, but also student background like family support and other responsibilities) and psychosocial (relationships at and with the university, support and workload, student identity, motivation) influences.

They find three main themes:

1. managing expectations when confronted with a Chinese-dominated cohort after thinking they would be more embedded in UK life; students proactively sought out other input and chose to communicate with Chinese peers in English to still practice English skills and be inclusive of non-Chinese peers
2. developing skills to succeed in learning, students found strategies like conversations with mentors/tutors and scaffolded reading
3. engaging in ongoing reflection: “As most of the participants introduced their backgrounds and motivations to become a future English teacher in their first diary entry, and also their intentions to equip themselves with theories and skills through their international master’s learning, they are strongly driven to engage with the programme. But rather than learning as passive recipients, the participants are seen to be able to employ deep learning strategies (e.g. summarising, elaborating) to remember and organise their everyday learning, to make mental efforts to monitor and evaluate their learning, and to hold beliefs and hopes about their future.” A lot of effort also went into making the transfer of what was learnt in a UK context back into their prior and future, Chinese context, especially visiting local schools: “Not only did such opportunities motivate participants to invest time and effort in preparing for these activities but their ongoing reflections show the interplay between their affect (i.e. their strong interest and enthusiasm to observe and learn more about a new teaching context), behaviour (i.e. interaction with peers and local teachers) and cognition (i.e. deep learning and reflection on the applicability of what they observed). While participants valued such opportunities to immerse themselves in an authentic environment, they were also found to be agentic in introducing and reflecting on their own contextual factors.“

Dangeni (2025) reports that “international student engagement was found to be multifaceted, contextual and dynamic, and influenced by institutional and individual factors, indicating an interplay between affect, cognition, and behaviour.” The students were “mak[ing] the most of the characteristics of their cultural backgrounds that
they bring to their learning (e.g. being hard-working and goal-oriented: Wu 2014)” and proactive in their learning:
“Institutional stakeholders need to recognise this engagement as the findings of this study show that it is already happening, even if on an invisible level.”

Dangeni (2025) therefore states that “Exposing this invisible student engagement is essential, including how students engage emotionally and cognitively and recognising and acknowledging the engagement will support a more accurate and updated understanding towards international students“. My personal reaction to reading this paper is that my heart goes out to those students who work so incredibly hard in a foreign country, and whose hard work so often goes completely unseen. It is great that it is made visible here at least to some extent, that might give teachers other things to look out for when trying to gauge international students’ engagement!

Last one for today: Padilla-Petry et al. (2022) on “Comparing Teachers’ and Students’ Perspectives of Student Engagement in Higher Education: Between Performativity and Invisibility.”

Padilla-Petry et al. (2022) start from the premise that student engagement is typically only looking into what teachers or institutions see, not what students themselves see. So they did a study of 118 students and also of 45 teachers (“Since student engagement is thought to depend on teachers’ pedagogy, their understanding of the subject and their perception of their students’ engagement is relevant“). What they find is quite interesting:

• Learning: Almost half the students describe applying what they have learned in their normal life, for example explaining it to others or solving a problem, as evidence of learning. Only 14% relate learning to remembering information, and only 9% relate learning to understanding new concepts. Half the teachers, on the other hand, make learning about passing tests or other evaluations, 19% make it about attendance and active participation in class.
• Student engagement: For students, the three most important behaviours indicating student engagement were “aim to get the most out of the course“, “participate in the group dynamics“, and “maintain a collaborative attitude” (the three least important being “be a student representative“, “turn on the webcam in online classes“, and “participate in extracurricular activities“). For teachers, the three most important behaviours were “ask questions or make contributions in class“, “participate in group dynamics“, and “maintain a collaborative attitude” (the least important “be a student representative“, “participate in extracurricular activities“, and “aim to achieve the highest possible grade“). This means that “a) both groups understand student engagement as more class-oriented than university-oriented and b) both students and teachers see student engagement mainly as participation and a collaborative attitude“. In response to open-ended questions, 90% of teachers describe participation and assessment results as signs of student engagement, whereas students focus more on showing interest and participation.
• Visibility of Student Engagement: 69% of teachers and 76% of students agree that some engagement might be invisible to teachers, and invisibility is explained by anonymity in large classes and online courses by teachers, and additionally by teachers ignoring the amount of work students do, teachers’ focus on qualification and lack of involvement.

Interestingly, both teachers and students seem to understand student engagement mostly in relation to the classroom, not engagement with the wider university community.

What I find most relevant for my own work is how students see engagement: “However, students defended their right to engage through silent listening and keeping the webcam off in online classes and valued their efforts to get the most out of the course as a sign of engagement. In these cases, the invisibility of student engagement is at stake since teachers may have trouble assessing these efforts and literally do not see the student with the webcam off, but students may feel that they are sufficiently engaged.” … “More than the teachers, [the students] attached importance to attentive and silent listening as an indicator of student engagement, which may reveal more tolerance of a less performative engagement. Also, the students’ perspective does not indicate an association between a consumerist attitude and silent listening since what may be interpreted by teachers as a passive consumer attitude may be a less performative form of student engagement.”

I think having a conversation about when they know they have learned something, and when they feel that they are engaging is so important — both for students to have a reflection on their learning, but also for teachers to better understand their students’ perception and to (as I also mention in the case of the Chinese students above) appreciate that there might be a lot going on that they are just not aware of…

Dangeni. (2025). Invisible student engagement among Chinese international students in the UK. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 49(9), 1220-1239.

Padilla-Petry, P., Pérez-Hernando, S., Rodríguez-Rodríguez, J., & Vidal-Martí, C. (2022). Comparing Teachers’ and Students’ Perspectives of Student Engagement in Higher Education: Between Performativity and Invisibility. International Education Studies, 15(6), 84-93.

Vallee, D. (2017). Student engagement and inclusive education: reframing student engagement. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 21(9), 920-937.

Featured image: Sad as it is, but I don’t have any other exciting water pictures right now! But this is a view of my desk, and the Kvikk Lunsj that a colleague brought me from Norway recently because she remembered Kjersti & my “co-create your own adventure” poster… And a dive club mug. And waves as lock screens on my computer. Better than nothing! :)