Student engagement, ideological contest and elective affinity:the Zepke thesis reviewed

This paper takes up issues raised in two articles by Nick Zepke and portrayed here as ‘the Zepke thesis’. This thesis argues that the literature on, interest in and practices around student engagement in higher education have an elective affinity with neo-liberal ideology. At one level this paper counters many of the assertions that underpin the Zepke thesis, challenging them as being based on a selective and tendentious interpretation of that literature. It also points out the misuse of the concept of ‘elective affinity’ within the thesis. However, more significantly the paper argues that an understanding of how ideas are taken up and used requires a more sophisticated ontological understanding than the Zepke thesis exhibits. That thesis has strayed into the territory of the sociology of knowledge while ignoring the accounts and debates in that area developed over more than a century

Jansen, Jonathan D. (Ed.) (2019). Decolonisation in Universities: The Politics of Knowledge. Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Pressr

No Abstract

Change theory and changing practices::enhancing student engagement in universities.

This chapter argues that initiatives designed to enhance student engagement in universities need to be underpinned by an explicit and workable theory of change and change management. It sets out a social practice approach to conceptualising the operation of workgroups in higher education and goes on to elaborate the corollaries of this in terms of the management of change. The chapter concludes with a vignette designed to illustrate how these concepts might be elaborated in a departmental situation

Book review: Jansen, J. (2017). As By Fire: The End of the South African University. Pretoria, South Africa: Tafelberg.

Book reviewJansen, J. (2017). As By Fire: The End of the South AfricanUniversity. Pretoria, South Africa: Tafelberg.Reviewed by Vicki Trowler

Nomads in contested landscapes: reframing student engagement and nontraditionality in higher education

The findings of this study challenge essentialised conceptions of “the student” as a young national, entering higher education directly from school with appropriate school-leaving qualifications, to devote themselves entirely to their studies, undistracted by caring responsibilities or work commitments, unconstrained by disabilities, conforming to an unproblematised binary conception of gender which informs an appropriate choice of study programme, participating in stereotypical student extramural pursuits along the way. The study tracked 23 students from 7 universities who volunteered themselves as ‘non-traditional’ in their own study contexts over the course of a calendar year. Drawing on concepts of ‘diaspora space’, ‘nomadism’, dis/identification and mis/recognition, this study maps out these students’ perceptions of the different aspects of their engagement as these changed over time as well as their self-conceptions and their descriptions of their ‘imagined communities’. The importance of relationships of different kinds (with other people, with their studies, and with their universities and other structures) in their decisions about persistence is noted. Student Engagement (SE) has been widely accepted as contributing positively to the student experience, student success and outcomes, including persistence / retention. ‘Non-traditional’ students, while having the potential to benefit most from SE, are often reported as feeling unengaged or alienated, and constitute ‘at risk’ groups in terms of persistence / retention. This study has established that the construct ‘non-traditional student’ can be considered a ‘chaotic conception’, since students bearing that label may have nothing in common beyond not conforming to ‘traditional’ criteria. Students may consider themselves ‘non-traditional’ in their particular study contexts for many reasons, often presenting with more than one factor from a checklist of what is not traditional in that context. The study also found reported mismatches between resources and services offered by universities for defined groups of ‘non-traditional’ students, and the support sought by students in this study. These mismatches hinge on factors such as fear of stigma, disparities between how target groups are defined and how students self-identify, opacity of systems and processes and perceived differences in priority