Academic Engagement: Engaging who and to what end?

Emerging student-centred approaches in Higher Education (HE) emphasize students as ‘partners’, as ‘producers’, as well as independent enquirers, creative thinkers, team workers, self-managers and reflective learners. In order to achieve these goals, students are expected to be presented with learning experiences that allow them to work with increasing independence, applying their competence and creativity to different types of learning activity. Such developments have been driven by a rhetoric of ‘openness’ and change, sectorally, regarding the idea of pedagogy and what it means for student engagement, repositioning students and staff to situate both within the dynamic context of the learning encounter, and what is referred to hereafter as ‘academic engagement’.