A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education

Theory into Practice

Tom Lowe, Yassein El Hakim, Tom Lowe, Yassein El Hakim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367085438
• eBook ISBN: 9780429663079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on scholarship as well as established practice, A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education is a sector-leading volume that unpacks the concept of student engagement. It provides ideas and examples alongside compelling theory- and research-based evidence to offer a thorough and innovative exploration of how students and staff can work together to genuinely transform the higher education learning experience.

Providing readers with evidence from successfully embedded schemes, the book uses case studies and practical, workable examples from a variety of international institutions. With the insight of world-leading contributors, it showcases what good practice looks like in higher education institutions across the globe. Simultaneously collating a wealth of contemporary research, this book creates vivid connections between theories and student engagement in higher education, with chapter topics including:

• Creating relationships between students, staff and universities
• Offering non-traditional students extracurricular opportunities
• Taking a students-as-partners approach
• Critically reflecting on identities, particularities and relationships
• The future of student engagement.

In a fast-developing and significantly shifting area, this book is essential reading for higher education managers and those working directly in the field of student engagement.

Part I

Introduction to student engagement in higher education

Chapter 1

An introduction to student engagement in higher education

Tom Lowe and Yassein El Hakim

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in the twenty-first century are hurtling towards a full marketisation of the sector, with growing pressure from numerous governments globally to produce measurable student outcomes, enhance learning and evidence an investment worthy of the taxpayer and tuition fees from students. HEIs, facing such imminent marketisation, competition and accountability, find themselves with two possible options in how to approach their relationship with their students (see Figure 1.1):

(1)A ‘Students as Customers’ approach. With this, for students to engage with the development of their education, they are limited to complaints, end-of-course feedback forms, campus demonstrations and outbursts on social media.

(2)A ‘Student Engagement’ approach. With this, universities/colleges involve students actively in decision-making and students work with staff in partnership in order to enhance education, sharing responsibility for mutual support as a community of members.

Figure 1.1Choice in higher education direction when approaching students

This edited collection will showcase practice in HEIs from across the globe, offering theory-influenced and truly transformative educational-development projects, schemes and research activity – commonly termed ‘student engagement’ and carried out by students and staff in partnership – to enhance students’ experiences at their institutions. Because universities, colleges and students’ unions have opened up their organisations and processes to involve students in decision-making, both students and staff have stepped into new spaces to enhance their higher education (HE) experience; students are empowered as partners and peers to participate in educational development. Currently, such student engagement initiatives are proliferating in HEIs throughout the world, extending well beyond a few HEI ‘champions’ and establishing a sector-wide core of practice. Student engagement and/or partnership discussions, projects and approaches are steadily breaking down traditional hierarchical power structures between staff and students, since both parties are meeting halfway in critically appraising HE delivery and amending it for the benefit of all stakeholders. From the very one-sided ‘this is the way we have always run education’, HEIs have moved to collaborative conversations about ‘how we can develop education together’. This chapter offers an introduction to these contemporary ways of working, drawing out the major areas of activity and research and identifying the challenges student engagement practices face. In the context of worldwide sector change, this handbook recognises how varied perspectives – of students, academics, educational developers, strategic leaders, policy makers and student service-providers – are influencing student success and learning through engagement. The book offers an up-to-date and comprehensive collection of sector-leading, theory-influenced best practice by colleagues and students with years of reflection upon and experience in student engagement. We hope that colleagues will find the publication thought-provoking and that it will enable them to grasp the implications of the enhancement practices outlined here and empower them to take back to their own institutions both the practices and the lessons already learned by others in implementing them.

Student engagement

It is important to mention that studies and ideas relating to contemporary student engagement do not constitute a solely modern phenomenon. As early as 1906, Dewey outlined his theory of a ‘Democratic Education’, in which all parties – and, notably, the students – have the right to have a say in how they are educated (Dewey, 1916). Often, these discussions about educational development emanated from sociological educational theorists who viewed democratising, emancipatory and widened access to education as integral to reformed education systems. Taking a student-centred approach has been seen as one possible means of breaking down the barriers that exist globally and prevent social mobility, identified by thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu (Zanten, 2005, p.671) and Paolo Freire as structures that continue to oppress those not in power (Freire, 1973). Involving students in the process of developing education brings learners into the conversation, enabling them to contribute to the process of making education more accessible, its practices more inclusive and the learning more engaging. Studies relating to pupil and student voice have been extensively researched in primary and secondary education: they outline the benefits to learning and engagement (Czerniawski and Kidd, 2011; Fielding, 2004) and inspire wider studies in HE as part of exploring ‘good undergraduate education’, as discerned by Chickering and Gamson, with their core principle of encouraging ‘student–faculty contact‘ (Chickering and Gamson, 1987). Students having a say in their education was even emphasised in 2011 by the United Nations, which declared that all students (pre-18) have a right to have a say in their education (Lansdown, 2011).

The term ‘student engagement’ (and also disengagement) in the HE sense was conceptualised in the 1980s as a means of understanding and reducing student boredom, alienation and dropping out (Finn and Zimmer, 2012). At a time in the United States when there was low student progression into the second year of HE and shifts in funding allowed HEIs to profit from students’ staying on into Sophomore and Senior years, scholars such as Astin, Pascarella and Terenzini began to use the term in relation to the prevention of college drop-out. They argued that students who are engaged in education-related activities are more likely to progress through HE (Tchibozo, 2008; Tinto, 2006; Astin, 1984). Soon, beyond the US, there were parallels to be seen in HE across the world, where governments began to change how they focused on universities, putting a greater emphasis on learning and student development. This also led to the growth, internationally, of ‘educational development’ networks to enhance post-secondary teaching and research in the scholarship of teaching and learning (See SEDA est. 1993; ISSOTL est. 2004; RAISE est. 2009). Further parallels could also be seen in the UK, with the publication of the 2011 HE White Paper Students at the heart of the system (BIS, 2011), in Australia, with the publication of the Higher Education Reform Package (Australian Government, 2017), and in Europe, with movements towards engaging students as partners in quality assurance (ENQA, 2005). New activities were beginning to be formed in HE, leading to the creation of learning and teaching teams and the appointment of educational developers. Students’ union priorities were also beginning to emerge within new spaces where colleagues and students alike would begin to consider how HE could be enhanced. This catalysed development from didactic knowledge exchanges to student production of knowledge, journeys and experiences (Neary and Winn, 2009).

Further research into the field of student engagement has led to the posing of critical questions about HE more broadly, such as reviewing students’ transition (Gale and Parker, 2014), investigating students’ sense of belonging (Thomas, 2012) and exploring the alienation of students from non-traditional backgrounds and of first-generation students in HE (Shaw, Humphrey, Atvars and Sims, 2017; Mann, 2001). As HEIs in certain nations – such as Australia, the USA, Canada and UK – increase their capacity (and, with it, their student numbers), the proportion of young people attending university has grown exponentially (e.g., in the UK, 12 per cent participation in the 1950s to almost 50 per cent in 2017). Alongside this increase, positive steps towards increasing the diversity of the student body entering HE have been taken. The motivations of students attending HE have shifted and there is now more emphasis on the outcomes of learning, often noted as a key component of student choice and often linked by government, students and parents to notions of the employability gain from HE (Department for Education, 2017; Moore and Morton, 2017; UUK, 2017; Unite 2017). The drive towards inclusivity in HE pushes universities to evolve their practice and review their accessibility and this is why student engagement research and practices have often been adopted as a means of exploring development. Mann comments that engagement is the opposite of alienation and allows students to become full members of the HE community (Mann, 2001). Ensuring that students not only remain in HE, but are also able to access the support services they require, engage within and beyond the curriculum and succeed, has been, and continues to be, a priority for HEIs and educational development (ENQA, 2005; Office for Students, 2019a; Office for Students, 2019b; Hunter, Tobolowsky, and Gardner, 2010).

Since the 1990s, there has been a dramatic growth of research in the development area of student engagement in the scholarship in teaching and learning. A significant development for HE globally was Professor George Kuh’s definition of student engagement as representing both the time and energy students invest in educationally purposeful activities and the effort institutions devote to using effective educational practices (Kuh and Hu, 2001). Following Kuh’s and other colleagues’ work, the creation and inception of one of the most notable surveys of student engagement in contemporary HE, the National Student Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which provided a tool for institutional measures of student engagement and, further, the means of gauging areas in need of focused enhancement (NSSE, 2019). This survey introduced a comparative measure for students’ collective engagement in their studies, at both course and institution levels, inspiring countless institutional surveys and several national surveys worldwide, such as the UK Engagement Survey (UKES), the Australian Survey of Student Engagement (ASSE) and the Irish Survey of Student Engagement (ISSE). Section 5 of the NSSE, in particular, engages the wider campus/HEI community by asking specific questions about ‘the Supportive Campus Environment’, which was drawing in new stakeholders of interest to conversations about student engagement such as professional student service providers, careers coaches and counsellors. As these surveys began to feed into unique selling points (USPs) and, latterly, league tables for universities and colleges worldwide, university managers/administrators inevitably followed suit, though with differing motivations for enhancing student engagement and thus placing emphasis on producing ‘satisfied students’ to ensure a competitive and reputational standing in an ever-marketised sector. Certainly a measurable account of students’ engagements with their university experience holds value, but this book is not about student engagement in the HE curriculum directly, or HE surveys, although these are certainly types of student engagement in their own right and have stimulated large research studies in related areas (Bunce, Baird and Jones, 2017; Senior, Moores and Burgess, 2017; Kandiko and Mawer, 2013).

The contextual factors mentioned earlier – predominantly focused in Western HE – catalysed the emphasis on student engagement, which included what we shall refer to as ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Foreword: Student engagement is hard work, but quality takes time
• Part I Introduction to student engagement in higher education
• Part II International perspectives of theory into practice
• Part III Models of student engagement in practice
• Part IV The future of student engagement
• Index