Social identity theories and educational engagement

Abstract

There is a large body of research in studies of schooling, particularly ethnographic case studies, which posits that collective action among students undermines engagement in school and contributes to educational inequality. In this paper I review studies of engagement from a social identity theory perspective. To what extent can collective action explain why some student groups are less engaged than others? I discuss four approaches to identifying social identity‐related problems of engagement frequently used in prior research. While researchers often find problems of engagement among low‐academic‐status students, research on educational engagement has had difficulty locating the underlying causes of inequality in student engagement. Social identity theories of educational engagement are inherently theories of collective action. I conclude that a fifth approach, large‐scale observational studies of monitoring and sanctioning, provides the best framework for identifying both the prevalence of, and solutions to, this particular source of disengagement.

Keywords:

• student engagement
• social identity theory
• social class
• tracking
• race/ethnicity

Acknowledgements

Funding for this research was provided by The Spencer Foundation and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison.

Notes

1. These three approaches are listed using Tajfel and Turner’s exact phrasing except for ‘social creativity,’ which is my own over‐arching term for this category of responses to low status.

2. These studies did not address whether particular student groups had negative school outcomes because of the influence of their friends, although that would seem to follow logically from their results. Roscigno (1998) reports that black students are less likely to have peers who are adverse towards educational success than whites.