Student Engagement, Higher Education, and Social Justice Beyond Neoliberalism and the Market

Student engagement is a catch-all term, irresistible to educators and policy makers, and serving many agendas and purposes. This ground-breaking book provides a powerful theory of student engagement, rooted in critical theory and social justice. It sets out a compelling argument for student engagement to promote social justice and to repel neoliberalism in, and through, higher education, addressing three key questions: Student engagement in what? Student engagement for what? Student engagement for whom? The answers draw on Habermas, Honneth, Gramsci, Foucault, and Giroux in examining ideology, power, recognition, resistance, and student engagement, with examples drawn from across the world. It sets out key features, limitations, and failures of neoliberalism in higher education, and indicates how student engagement can resist it. Student engagement calls for higher education institutions to be sites for challenge, debate on values and power, action for social justice, and for students to engage in the struggle to resist neoliberalism, taking action to promote social justice, democracy, and the public good. This book is essential reading for educators, researchers, managers and students in higher education, social scientists, and social theorists. It is a call to reawaken higher education for social justice, human rights, democracy, and freedoms.

1. Setting the scene: overview and argument 2. What does ‘engagement’ actually mean? 3. Habermas, knowledge-constitutive interests, and ideology critique for student engagement 4. The ideal speech situation, communicative action, recognition, and student engagement 5. Student engagement in a neoliberal world 6. Foucault, neoliberalism, and higher education 7. Student engagement in the cracks in neoliberalism 8. Student engagement, social justice, and outflanking neoliberalism 9. Retrospect and prospect

Corinna Bramley has been an English for Specific Purposes teacher and trainer in South East Asia for over 15 years. Before that she worked in high pressure international industry-specific publishing. Her educational research has mainly focused on university entrance examinations and student engagement. Keith Morrison is Professor of Education and Vice-rector at the University of Saint Joseph, Macao, China. He has published on critical theory, sociology of education, curriculum theory, and research methods, and is the co-author of Research Methods in Education (with Louis Cohen and Lawrence Manion).