I have worked in higher education for over a decade and what always stands out for me is the level of student engagement with peers. In my experience, programs or services that include students in the design and delivery are almost always successful because students know how to engage with their peers. Most students have informal support groups that play different roles. They usually are a mix of freshmen and upper year students who are happy to share information on courses, name good/bad instructors, provide old exam papers, sell/give away used textbooks and even tutor in courses they excel in. These groups are also there to share and validate cultural and religious experiences, share food, music and dance. These students are engaged and responsive and pass their knowledge of navigating higher education but many hardly participate in official programs or services offered by institutions.

Informal spaces created by such groups provide support service, counselling, academic and financial information and advice (majority of the times it’s correct!), community resources AND have flexible delivery modes whether drop in, scheduled, over the phone, online, individual/group, etc. Spaces like these not only validate and empower students but give students agency by acknowledging that everyone has something to contribute to the group. These informal spaces support various identities in ways that official spaces curated for that very purpose fail to do. When we talk about lack of engagement or disengagement, perhaps we should see it as a protest. People quietly protesting spaces that aren’t welcoming, that don’t reflect and value the diversity of culture, language, religion and lived experience that come into those spaces. So, what can we do? Perhaps we can start by reframing the engagement challenge and start conversations around how institutions can improve their engagement strategies.

• Ask whether we as educators, administrators, institutions are engaging meaningfully with students and the people we serve. How do we engage with them and in what spaces? What narratives do we have in our head when engaging with student groups and designing programs and services? Interrogate how institutional spaces are designed and what’s not being reflected, intentionally and/or unintentionally.
• Most students are engaged in spaces that are supportive, validating, and value diverse knowledge and ways of learning. Can we locate these spaces on our campuses and partner with students in order to learn from them?
• Who should we be engaging with?  Parents. Many institutions are slowly realizing that the exclusion of parents doesn’t help anyone. Reflecting on my experience and that of many in my community, first gen and immigrant, we have extremely engaged parents who advocated for higher education since we were in diapers! Our parents were the first ones to plant the seed of education and its importance to achieving the ‘Dream’. We can also go further and engage fully with students’ diverse communities so that these communities can inform our student policies.

When we keep going on about students lack of engagement without critically reflecting on institutions depth and level of engagement it’s disingenuous and students pick up on that quickly. Therefore, let’s all do our students a huge favour and not complain about their lack of engagement before doing some critical reflection and honest work.

These are my top three tips to reframe student engagement, what do you think? I’m sure there are many more – please let me know what has worked for you.

Author: Feven Haddish