The Class of 2012: engaged students or consumers?

Christine Hardy, Nottingham Trent University

We are now entering uncharted territory and none of us can predict exactly how the new higher fees will affect student behaviour

(Sir Martin Harris, Director of Offa, 8.3.11, BBC News online, cited by Coughlan).

The most important aspect of this approach is that all participants, especially students, understand that they do have power - and that it can be exercised through their commitment and contribution to their community of practice, as opposed to the exercise of power simply through choice-making, complaint or by responding to consultation. We consider that this might be a better route to strengthening the relationships and fostering the attitudes which must underpin improvements in quality

(Wes Streeting and Graeme Wise 2009)

financial compensation for students if courses are below standard … with … well-organised students wanting value for money - including a US-style culture of litigation

(Aaron Porter, cited by Coughlan 2011).

1997 Tinto (p618) questioned whether the social, is, for many students, a developmental precondition for addressing the need for intellectual engagement?

Preconditions for engagement:1. A student perception that their expectations

are being met to a sufficient degree 2. Ensuring an appropriate level of challenge but

not excessive workload for the student3. A sufficient degree and balance of choice,

autonomy, risk and opportunities for growth, and that learning is enjoyable.

4. Appropriate trust relationships (staff with students, students with other students, and staff with staff).

5. Discourse, or at least communicating for understanding and dialogue

(Bryson and Hand 2007b).

contact hours, class sizes, module content, access to one-to-one support, feedback on assignments, attendance, library provision, assessment formats, lecture resources, seminar preparation and reading accessibility ... which will create new tensions and challenges … an escalation in student expectation ramped up to a magnitude that is almost impossible to imagine or comprehend, a magnitude far beyond that which might already have created challenges for us to resolve

(Beer 2011).

Benefits of communities of practice:

• Building supporting peer groups • Shared learning: bridging the academic-social divide• Gaining a voice in the construction of knowledge

Tinto 1997

Australian undergraduates who were engaged with peers, academics and the institution as a whole were most likely to: express satisfaction with their experience; report higher levels of achievement than their less engaged peers; and indicate clear plans to persist with their study at university.

Kerri-Lee Krause (2005, p7)

It requires the ability to take part in meaningful activities and interactions, in the production of sharable artefacts, in community-building conversations, and in the negotiations of new situations. It implies a sustained intensity and relations of mutuality. Engagement also requires the ability and legitimacy to make contributions to the pursuit of an enterprise, to the negotiation of meaning, and to the development of a shared practice

(Wenger 1998, p184).

1. Internally: organised educational experiences that ground learning in practice through participation in communities around subject matters.

2. Externally: how to connect the experience of students to actual practice through peripheral forms of participation in broader communities beyond the walls of the school.

3. Over the lifetime of students: how to serve the lifelong learning needs of students by organising communities of practices focused on topics of continuing interest to students beyond the initial schooling period

(Wenger 2006)

Activity:

In three groups to identify practices within Art and Design that can engender Communities of Practice:

- Internally- Externally, and- Over the lifetime of the student