Refusal and disowning knowledge: re-thinking disengagement in higher education

Abstract

This paper addresses both ‘student engagement’ in contemporary universities, and student ‘disengagement’ – where the latter is often seen as a failure of performance, or absence of will. In a bold move, the paper asks whether students should be engaged in their university education, and whether there is value in forms of disengagement. It finds an original way in which student disengagement can be understood by drawing on the writings of Stanley Cavell – on the philosophical appeal to what we say, our search for criteria, and on ideas of acknowledgement and avoidance in his work on Shakespearian tragedy. It shows what is at stake in our attunement with, and dissent from, criteria, and how such dissent can be educative. The paper considers the film ‘Stella Dallas’, in which Stella’s aversion to, her disengagement from, her culture’s criteria, is not a passive withdrawal, but rather the finding of voice, her education as a grownup. The paper concludes that disengagement, understood as aversion, dissent and refusal of voice, is not to be seen always as a lack of action or of care, but as the opposite: the active voicing of what we will, or will not, consent to in our education.

Keywords:

• Engagement
• disengagement
• voice
• Cavell
• criteria
• consent
• dissent

Notes

1. Glossary of Educational Reform, [online], Available at: http://edglossary.org/student-engagement/, Accessed 19 October 2015. The Glossary supports media organisations, parents and the community in understanding specialist educational terminology.

2. QAA, ‘Student Engagement at QAA’, [online], Available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/partners/students/student-engagement-at-qaa, Accessed October 19, 2015.

3. See http://nsse.indiana.edu/html/about.cfm, Accessed October 19, 2015.

4. Slee (2014) provides a useful historical overview from a sociological point of view.

5. Paul Standish uses this example. See ‘Skepticism, Acknowledgement, and the Ownership of Learning.’ In Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups, edited by Naoko Saito and Paul Standish, 73–87. New York: Fordham University Press.

6. Judith Suissa (2007) uses this example from one of her student’s research projects.

7. Cavell (1996a: 3) identifies the following films as representative of the genre: Stella Dallas.

(1937), Now Voyager (1942), and Gaslight (1944).

8. In the 1937 production directed by King Vidor, Barbara Stanwyck plays the lead character of Stella Dallas.

9. Standish draws attention to one sense of the term ‘disown’, in that ‘disown’ functions as a negation of ‘own’. However, he also finds in Cavell that the opposite of ‘disown’ is also ‘acknowledgement’ (see Saito 2012, 83).