When I ask faculty who I work with what they most want for their teaching, hands-down, the most common answer is “student engagement.”
I always respond in the same with the same question: what does student engagement mean to you?
I’ve always suspected there was a lot wrapped up in that term, and I’ve written before about how new-traditional students (who some call non-traditional) demonstrate engagement in different ways, and we should remain open to a much broader definition of engagement.
My concerns about the concept of student engagement are flaring up once again this week, as higher ed is experiencing a wave of increased student activism on campus related to the genocide in Palestine.
For the past two years, I've been listening to and reading about folks concerned about what they call a “student disengagement crisis.” I’ve repeatedly pushed back on the use of that term. Students are NOT disengaged. They’re anything but. They’re incredibly engaged, but not necessarily in ways that higher education as a whole prefers.
I want to talk about that.
I was thinking this morning about the term “engagement.” Outside higher ed, getting engaged can certainly represent a romantic joining of lives for all eternity, but let’s also be honest, engagements also represent a contract, and within that contract, power dynamics of course come into play. Historically, engagements were a contract in which women were turned over to men for a price, and that contract came with a set of rules for both parties to abide by. In short, I think it’s fair to argue that the concept of engagement has deep roots not in stimulating learning, but rather, in controlling someone’s behavior and access to resources.
You all know I love the Online Etymology Dictionary, and one of the earliest uses of the term engagement was to mean “a formal promise.”
Over the past week, witnessing students (and faculty/staff) put their lives on the line for causes they believe in, the idea that our students are disengaged became even more preposterous. Which for me, really calls into question what folks mean when they say they want to increase student engagement.
What I think many of us mean when we say we want to engage our students is that we want to control them. We want them to behave the way we want. We want them to learn the way we want. We want them to pay attention the way that we want. We want them to make a promise to us to follow our rules of engagement.
I’m also thinking a lot about this topic because I’m deep into editing my second book, currently titled, Open Minds: Designing and Supporting ADHD Students’ Success. Many of the challenges that ADHDers face in the classroom result from a mismatch between educator expectations and ADHD learners’ wants and needs. For example, many of us with ADHD (and other neurodivergences) need to do something called “stimming” in order to help us direct our vast attention to a specific person or task. Stimming might look like fidgeting, doodling, or looking around the room.
Without an understanding of ADHD, without a strength-based, challenge aware mindset about ADHD, many educators would view those behaviors as disengagement, when in fact, they’re actual evidence of the opposite.
What do we really mean when we talk about student engagement?
I think it’s time for us to start naming that what we really mean is that student engagement has often been code for student control. And I use the collective pronoun here intentionally, to remind us all that this is not about bad people, but about bad systems.
Our students are deeply engaged in learning, in activism, in dreaming and enacting a better world for all life on this planet. Are we willing to pave that desire path with them? Are we willing to broaden our understanding of student engagement? Are we willing to release control over our students, and instead, to partner with our students in co-creating compelling, effective, and purposeful learning experiences?
The good news is that I suspect that many of us are.
Love this!
This is so, so good, Karen. Too often, "student engagement" is a performance & control expectation, one that assuages **our** anxieties (about being In Charge, etc. etc.) without considering our students' anxieties. It can impede learning in ways we rarely understand unless we've been the neurodivergent person in the room. Thanks for this to start my week!