The unifying thread among these challenges is “engagement,” but exactly what “student engagement” means is not entirely clear. In an appropriately titled article “Engaged Learning: Are We All on the Same Page?,” Bowen (2005) observes that despite the emerging emphasis on engagement, as evidenced by the number of vision statements, strategic plans, learning outcomes, and agendas of national reform movements that strive to create engaged learning and engaged learners, “an explicit consensus about what we actually mean by engagement or why it is important is lacking” (p. 3). As his statement suggests, the concept of engagement simply means different things to different people. Swaner (2007) expands on this idea, stating that “Rather than being concretely defined in the literature, the concept of engaged learning emerges from multiple frameworks and educational practices” (para. 2). Indeed, there are many different lenses through which one can view the concept of engagement, from cognitive to social psychology, to sociology, to education, and beyond.
What is clear is that it is exceedingly difficult to be against student engagement. Who doesn't want a course full of bright, energetic, and engaged students? That we all hope and strive for student engagement is testament to the concept. So, while some have criticized the term for vagueness, we instead argue that we should celebrate its useful ambiguity: it is a multifaceted, multidimensional metaconcept that gets at something deep and central to teaching and learning in higher education. We argue that we can and should view and study the concept through many different lenses so that we can ultimately understand its core features and elements and in turn use this knowledge to enhance student learning.
While we celebrate the breadth of the concept, we also acknowledge that educators need to agree on a common vocabulary surrounding the concept of student engagement so that we can have meaningful conversations and advance the field of knowledge. Our purpose in Part One of this book, then, is to provide context for how the term is commonly used, share our own definition, and offer a conceptual framework for understanding and promoting student engagement.
About the Term
One of the earliest pairings of the term engagement with learning, at least at the college level, occurs in Pascarella and Terenzini's (1991) treatise on the impact of college on students:
Perhaps the strongest conclusion that can be made is the least surprising. Simply put, the greater the student's involvement or engagement in academic work or in the academic experience of college, the greater his or her level of knowledge acquisition and general cognitive development. (p. 848)
A decade later, in his influential Higher Education White Paper, Russ Edgerton (2001), former director of the education program of the Pew Charitable Trusts, pointed to the need for students to “engage in the tasks” that specialists perform in order to really understand the concepts of the discipline (p. 32). In this same paper, Edgerton coined the phrase “pedagogies of engagement” to mean instructional approaches designed to help students learn the knowledge and skills they need to be engaged citizens and workers (p. 38). Building on Edgerton's and others' work, educational psychologist and former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Lee Shulman (2002), placed engagement at the foundation of his learning taxonomy, stating simply and clearly: “Learning begins with student engagement …” (p. 2).
Most of these early uses of the term focused on student engagement in course-level learning activities. In the late 2000s, however, researchers began to think of engagement across students' college careers, taking an overarching perspective that considers student engagement in course-level learning activities as well as extracurricular ones. Kuh (2001) defined engagement as “student involvement in educationally purposeful activities” (p. 12). From this conception, the National Survey on Student Engagement (NSSE) and associated efforts such as the Community College Survey on Student Engagement (CCSSE) aim to measure student engagement. They define engagement as the frequency with which students participate in activities that represent effective educational practices and conceive of it as a pattern of involvement in a variety of activities and interactions both in and out of the classroom and throughout a student's college career. “Student engagement has two key components,” explain Kuh et al. (2005/2010):
The first is the amount of time and effort students put into their studies and other activities that lead to the experiences and outcomes that constitute student success. The second is the ways the institution allocates resources and organizes learning opportunities and services to induce students to participate in and benefit from such activities. (p. 9)
The NSSE work has spurred much interest and important research around student engagement at the institutional level, focusing on time involved in specific educational activities across a student's college experience.
Simultaneously, many educators have continued in their efforts to study student engagement in course-level learning. Many of these researchers have come to their investigations through the lens of cognitive psychology, focusing on student investment in and intellectual effort toward learning. As Velden (2013) suggests:
Within the community of academic practitioners, engagement by students is most commonly interpreted in relation to the psychology of individual learning: the degree at which students engage with their studies in terms of motivation, the depth of their intellectual perception or simply studiousness. Engaged students are viewed as taking ownership for their own learning, working together with [faculty] on ensuring academic success and accepting the role of engaged and willing apprentice to an academic master. (p. 78)
Like the definition above, we find that when many of today's college teachers describe student engagement, they tend to underscore the importance of both the feeling and the thinking aspects of engagement. Feeling and thinking are central to our own understanding of engagement as well. Within the context of a college classroom, we propose this definition of student engagement:
Student engagement is the mental state students are in while learning, representing the intersection of feeling and thinking.
We will explore these two factors in more depth in the following sections.
The Feeling Aspect of Engagement
When asked, we often hear teachers describe engagement in phrases like “engaged students really care about what they're learning; they want to learn,” or “engagement to me is passion and excitement.” Interestingly, when we ask college students how they define engagement, many of their descriptions echo those of faculty, as they say things like: “student engagement means feeling motivated, being challenged, excited about the new.” Both teachers and students affirm the feeling aspect of engagement.
The etymological roots of the word engagement offer clues to this feeling aspect of student engagement. “Engage” is an Old French word for pledging one's life and honor as well as for charming or fascinating someone sufficiently that they become an ally. Both meanings resonate with teachers' emotion-based view of student engagement: we want students to share our enthusiasm for our academic discipline and find our courses so compelling that they willingly, in fact enthusiastically, devote their hearts and minds to the learning process.
The Glossary of Education Reform's (2016) definition supports the feeling or affective component of student engagement, as follows:
In education, student engagement refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education. Generally speaking, the concept of “student engagement” is predicated on the belief that learning improves when students are inquisitive, interested, or inspired, and that learning tends to suffer when students are bored, dispassionate, disaffected, or otherwise “disengaged.” (para. 1)
A similar definition also suggests the feeling aspect of student engagement, describing such engagement as “students' willingness, need, desire, and compulsion to participate in, and be successful