Teacher and Student Perspectives on Student Engagement: Lessons for the Asian Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Varied understandings of student engagement (hereafter SE) include definitions of SE as evidence of learning outcomes, such as “skills development” and “transfer” and, additionally, related to issues of “identity” such as students’ psychosocial development, social group identity formation, and self-image in educational contexts (see Harper & Quay, 2009). As editor Colin Bryson notes in his introduction to Understanding and Developing Student Engagement, one of the issues that emerge when examining SE is the difficulty of “measuring” a phenomenon that is so deeply complex. The overall aim of understanding and developing is to shift dominant research perspectives in SE from quantitative approaches, such as university level surveys and feedback that have emerged from a predominantly North American and Australasian context and dominates the literature (Trowler, 2010), to qualitative approaches which centralise the role of the individual student and the tutor in understanding SE, allowing for a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of what constitutes student engagement in higher education with a focus on emerging student identity over the course of their degrees. (Abstract taken from first paragraph of document)