‘Putting something of yourself in’: developing the theory and practice of engaging students as curriculum partners in higher education
With Dr Carol Taylor (Sheffield Hallam University)
Wednesday, 29 May 2013
5.00pm to 6.30pm
Room 113, Westlain House, Falmer Campus
Bourdieu (2003: 287) states that “nothing is more false … than the maxim almost universally accepted in the social sciences according to which the researcher must put nothing of himself into his research”. This presentation uses Bourdieu’s comment as a springboard to explore what happens to knowledge-making practices, staff-student relations, and the understanding of subjects and disciplines when we encourage and enable students to ‘put something of themselves’ into the development and enactment of the higher education curriculum. Drawing on various conceptualizations of the co-created curriculum (Bovill et al., 2011), on ideas of the student as producer (Neary, 2013) and arguments for the potentially transformative role of knowledge in undergraduate education (Ashwin et al, 2012), the presentation addresses:
- How to engage students as curriculum partners
- Theoretical understandings of students as producers of knowledge
- The risks and advantages of staff/ student collaborative curriculum partnerships
These understandings are then used alongside data from a number of empirical projects, and a range of curriculum instances, to offer a critical appraisal of dominant discourses of student engagement (Coates, 2007; Kuh, 2009). In this, concerns are raised about the increasingly insistent framing of students as instrumental consumers; of student engagement as a response to (and requirement of) the increasing marketization of higher education in the UK (BIS, 2011); and of staff disengagement as a result of increasingly disciplinary and regulatory pressures and practices.