Student engagement and inclusive education: reframing student engagement

ABSTRACT

Engagement, or student engagement, is widely used in educational research and public discourse to refer to the problem of public education. The underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions buoying engagement are rarely, if ever, addressed by educational researchers. The ‘silent omission’ (Sidorkin 2014. “On the Theoretical Limits of Education.” In Making a Difference in Theory: The Theory Question in Education and the Education Question in Theory, edited by Julie Allan Gert Biesta and Richard Edwards, 121–137. New York: Routledge) of engagement’s metaphysics has implications for inclusive education. This paper finds that despite being employed with good intent, engagement operates in a paradigm of normativity. In a gesture of bifocality (Weis and Fine 2012. “Critical Bifocality and Circuits of Privilege: Expanding Critical Ethnographic Theory and Design.” Harvard Educational Review 82 (2): 173–201), I critique engagement discourse and its historical context to find that it reproduces a longstanding tradition of psychologising public problems (Fine and Cross 2015. “Critical Race, Psychology and Social Policy: Refusing Damage, Cataloguing Oppression, and Documenting Desire.” In Contextualizing the Costs of Racism, edited by A. Alvarez and H. Neville. Washington, DC: APA Publications), thereby displacing conversations about what may be the most influential issue of public education: social and economic inequality. A reframing of engagement as [student/teacher] engagement is proposed. Highlighted in the reframing is the educational relationship and the context in which it is nested. Mitigated is the pathologising and exclusionary effect of engagement discourse which operates within a dialectic of normal/engaged // ab/normal/disengaged.

KEYWORDS:

• Engagement
• disengagement
• inclusive education
• exclusion
• Biesta
• disability

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to the editor and journal reviewers for their insightful feedback, and to Drs. David Connor, Michelle Fine, Nicholas Michelli, Jessica Ruglis, and Anna Stetsenko for reading earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniel Vallee is a doctoral candidate in the Leadership and Policy stream of the Urban Education Program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research lies in the domains of educational inequality, the public/private distinction, and student dis/engagement.