Approaches to student engagement: Does ideology matter?

• Published in: McGill journal of education Vol. 38; no. 2; p. 221
• Main Authors: Vibert, Ann B, Shields, Carolyn
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Montreal McGill Journal of Education 01.04.2003
• Subjects: Education; Education policy; Educational Change; Educational Facilities Improvement; Ideology; Learner Engagement; Learning; Literary criticism; Research Methodology; School Effectiveness; Student centred curriculum; Student school relationship; Teachers; Canada
• ISSN: 0024-9033

RESUME. Cet article analyse la notion d'" engagement des eleves " comme terme ineluctablement ideologique. Les auteurs commencent par etablir la problematique des iterations politiquement neutres de l'engagement des eleves dans la documentation consacree a l'amelioration et a l'efficacite; scolaire. S'inspirant ensuite des donnees recueillies dans le cadre d'une etude nationale de beaucoup plus grande envergure sur l'engagement des eleves, elles proposent une analyse des sens differentiels de l'engagement des eleves dans trois optiques ideologiques : technonationale, interpretative/axee sur les eleves et critique/transformationnelle. Des exemples des politiques et des pratiques a l'oeuvre dans les ecoles et les salles de cours illustrent les diverses optiques ideologiques et les auteurs etudient les consquences educatives et politiques de ces points de vue. Elles terminent leur article en affirmant que I'ideologie compte effectivement en arguant pour une pedagogique critique/ transformationnelle qui offre des possibilites d'education juste et humaine. To some extent, both the body of literature on student engagement and the initial McConnell study exhibit these difficulties. Each often presents naive notions of student engagement, as though students' various engagements in learning and schooling differ only by degree, and prior questions about what it means to engage in schooling and how we might recognize such engagements are already settled. Within such conceptions, students may engage more or less or not at all, but the possible meanings of engagement itself remain largely uncontested. The literature emanating from the school improvement and school effectiveness movements, in particular, tends to reify student engagement, rushing to identify and measure those conditions which may encourage or impede it without pausing to consider thornier questions such as what do we mean by engagement? engagement in what? for what purposes? to what ends? In the process of the student engagement study we learned that the pursuit of such questions sometimes unsettles people, revealing fundamental disagreements about educational purposes which, in turn, inform educators' (and researchers') conceptions of what engagement might mean and how it might look in practice. The national study of student engagement upon which the arguments in this paper are based raised for us a number of issues about notions of engagement as they appear both in the literature and in practice. One of the conclusions to which the study came was that "student engagement" itself might well be a misnomer, suggesting that engagement is somehow located in students, when in fact analyses of the data we collected argued that students, like teachers and community members, are engaged in schools when schools are engaging places to be (Smith et al, 1998). This analysis argues against a reified notion of student engagement as a phenomenon dislocated from time, place, and intention and "reproduceable" through the introduction of various programs and packages meant to engage students regardless of contexts or ideologies.