‘Student engagement’ and the tyranny of participation

Student engagement in higher education has tended to be discussed in mainstream discourses by invoking typologies, seeking to place students into categories and focusing on the importance of ‘participation’. I will give a critique of these ideologically loaded and normative constructs and their inherent contradictions, proposing an alternative framing drawing on sociomateriality. This framing, I will argue, allows us to explore the complexities of day-to-day practices, acknowledging the centrality of texts and meaning-making in ‘being a student’. Referring to a longitudinal multimodal journaling study, I will argue that contemporary student engagement and sites of learning are constantly emergent, contingent and restless – not only transgressing the mainstream constructs mentioned above but also raising fundamental questions about apparently ‘common-sense’ binaries such as digital/material, public/private and device/author. I will suggest implications in terms of research and understanding of the day-to-day unfolding of higher education as situated social practice.