Performativity and enjoyable learning

Abstract

This paper takes critical lenses to interpret what students find enjoyable in their learning in specific ‘subject’ environments within the prevailing socio-economic climate in higher education. It considers student dispositions that emerged from dialogues with two groups of students attending a non-traditional university and taking vocational degrees within England, UK. We argue that although each higher education institute can become its own destiny, it can only do so within the boundaries of state policy and its technologies. Higher education, when affected by cultures of ‘performativity’, is arguably focused less on knowledge for ‘emancipation’ and its own sake and more on the ‘use value’ of its products. This paper argues that what is valued by these particular students in their learning and what gives them positive feelings as they engage with this process of learning is not altogether independent of the current governances shaping higher education.

Keywords:

• performativity
• student dispositions
• entrepreneurialism
• sport, leisure and travel subject areas
• emotions and learning

Notes

1. A new university here refers to a post-1992 university. These are generally universities developed from vocational university colleges or polytechnics.

2. Commodification is the transformation of goods and services, or things that may not normally be regarded as goods or services, into a commodity. Bauman (2005, 41–42) refers to the commodification of knowledge, ‘Knowledge is today a commodity: at least it has been cast in the mould of commodity and prompted to shape itself after the pattern of commodity’ where, ‘education may be a “product” that is meant to be appropriated and kept… is off putting and no more speaks in the institutional education’s favour’.

3. We refer here to neo-liberalism as, ‘associated with the extension and enhancement of the market economy during the late 1990s and early twenty-first century’ (David 2005, 113). The principal characteristics of neo-liberal ideology might be identified as the rule of the market, deregulation, privatisation, cutting public expenditure for social services and so forth (Hardy 2005). These features have been central to government policies at the current time. Chapello and Fairclough (2002) critically analyse Neo-liberal Discourse and its hegemonic practices in management, providing a theoretical framework for the ‘new spirit of capitalism’. Capitalism is slippery, ‘it constantly transforms itself’. (See also Humberstone 2009; Sparkes 2007).

4. Ethical issues are central to our research. The British Educational Research Association (BERA) ethical guidelines for educational research underpinned the research.