Besides the policy driven, marketised and standardised approaches to students’
participation, it is necessary to analyse whether students themselves prefer to participate more in policy driven, representative participatory activities or activities that are more pedagogical and dialogic in nature. Bartley, et al., (2010) describes three elements of students’ participation work. The first element is students’ participation for institutions’
quality enhancement; second, individual student’s learning and personal development; and third, education and implementation of democratic values. It is the third element that enables educational institutions to be regarded as “players in a democratic society”
(Bartley, et al., 2010: 151) and this became a main influence in the design of my study.
To understand the institutional role in educating and implementing democratic values amongst students, it is first important to understand different constructs of democracy. The concept is driven primarily from politics where it is associated with the practice of public democratic decision making methods (Bartley, et al., 2010), for example, through voting.
When applied in pedagogical institutions, the construct becomes more academic, signifying open knowledge-construction methods that facilitate the phenomenon of learning together (Bartley, et al., 2010). The learning and experiences of academic democracy, when applied at a broader level, equips people to make decisions about political democracy. The learning together is not limited to student-tutor relationships, but extends beyond that and includes students-students groups, as well as other stakeholders within educational institutions.
Academic democracy, therefore, can be seen as one of the prerequisites for political democracy (Molander, 2002), which builds upon informal participation methods, thereby preparing people for more formal methods of political democracy (Bartley, et al., 2010).
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HEIs, therefore, can be seen as pedagogical spaces where the essence of participation can be cultivated using the notions of academic democracy.
There are examples from national and local contexts that show how students implicitly prefer participating in institutional or course matters using more open approaches of academic democracy. Bartley, et al., (2010), for example, refers to students’ participation work done by the Council of Europe, covering most of the European countries. The findings show that students’ participation in educational issues is generally weak at national level but becomes stronger at institutional level. The findings are similar for both formal and informal students’ participation. The main reason attributed to the lack of students’
participation is the less regulated nature of student representation, affecting students’
willingness to act as student representatives, a trend evident in my university as well. The strong areas identified for students’ participation at institutional level are the areas affecting social, pedagogical, environmental and curriculum related issues, and the weakest being budget and employment related issues (NSF, 2010).
The findings from a NSF annual report (2010) also showed that students are willing and interested to participate in matters affecting their education, especially when the issues are related to curriculum and pedagogy. Capitalising on students’ general willingness to get involved in academic democratic practices, the current study explored the use of different dialogic ways of engaging students in hearing their views about the use of an Early Childhood Resource and Research Room (ECRR Room). A study of this nature takes the baton of participatory work from national policy to local practice level, a gap, as proposed by the NSF at its closure in 2010 (NSF, 2010).
When situating my study within the sector and institutional context (as outlined in section 2.3, above) the students, who were participants in my study, were enrolled onto ECS programmes. They were not necessarily all immediate graduates from secondary schools.
A majority came from local communities who continued to live in family homes or were in part-time employment. Partly due to Labour’s widening participation initiative, the group constituted of a mixture of young and mature students, some of whom had been in practice or other forms of employment for some time. There was, therefore, a mixture of experienced
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and non-experienced practitioners who had joined the university with a certain skills and knowledge, which could be further honed, extended and shared to construct knowledge within the academic discipline and practice.
The ECS courses we offer in university are both professional and semi-professional in nature, meeting the QAA benchmarks (QAA, 2014). The content focuses upon professionally relevant study of play, development and learning of children from birth to eight years. The implications for learning and teaching are therefore high for developing students’ understandings of practice in early childhood settings. Due to the emphasis being placed on practice and pedagogy, a majority of the courses offer a blend of theory and practice where students engage not only with the academic debates but also choose to spend time in placements, which are mainly early childhood settings and primary schools in the local communities. Some of them, as stated earlier, might already be employed in the sector and therefore come equipped with appropriate skills and knowledge needed in the profession.
Involving students’ views and participation in the development of an ECRR Room, therefore, seemed appropriate as they would work from an already established knowledge base. Their involvement in this wider and extended pedagogical process, through participation in my study, would also help in the achievement of Goal 3 of The Corporate Plan (2015-17: 6) that clearly states university’s priority to “increase student engagement within and outside the curriculum to enrich students’ time at the university, support their academic success, give them a distinctive ‘edge’ in the job market and enrich their lives after university”.
The students, however, due to being educated in a certain political environment of education (in HEIs and schools) were used to a distinct way of being consulted and invited to participate in institutional decision making. These more familiar measures and design of student consultation and participation, as discussed earlier, are mostly driven by the institutional economic and market driven consumerist agenda, for example, in the form of large surveys and evaluation forms; shared as league tables, both internally and externally, to showcase institutional quality of teaching (and research). With the Coalition’s raised fee
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policy, all participating students were registered within the newly raised fees structure, expecting to get a good value for their money through the university course. The group of students I worked with, therefore, had been experiencing education within this changing wider political environment which must have influenced their participation in the project.
The nuances of these influences are discussed later in Chapter Nine.
Even after moving from their school or college based education to university, the students were still used to being consulted in similar institutionally structured ways, for example, through formal representational methods. There is, however, a general reluctance from students in such participation where they often hesitate to put their names forward as student representatives and lack enthusiasm to complete surveys unless constantly encouraged. This resonates with what Bartley, et al., (2010) and the NSF (2010) suggest, that students lack willingness to participate in representational democracy measures but show more eagerness to work in matters concerning democracy, curriculum and pedagogy that offer more prospects for collaboration and joint knowledge construction.
My project, therefore, offered an opportunity to students where the institution performed the role of a democratic player (Molander, 2002) by encouraging its members to work together in discussing the creation of a pedagogical space, relevant for the development of skills and knowledge needed for early childhood research and practice. The participatory approaches used in the project were also anticipated to model good practice for prospective and current practitioners, to help them experience ‘academic democracy’, which they often study in theory through the formal ECS curriculum. The study helped to bridge the gap that the NSF (2010) identified, in terms of implementing students’ participation policy at local practice level, through HEIs.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I reviewed policy within English HE, especially changes within a network of post 1992 universities, in England. The influence of policy changes on the HE environment, in particular, the use and application of students’ participation and engagement in institutional processes, was highlighted and critiqued. There is growing
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evidence that suggests a perception of education as a consumer driven phenomenon, with an increasing use of structured and more formal processes of students’ participation, mainly representational in nature. The chapter argued for consideration of an alternative conceptual understanding of students’ participation by looking more deeply into its pedagogical and democratic understanding that may have potential for developing more egalitarian and collegial ways of working with each other. The knowledge thus produced would, arguably, enable the building of capacity amongst graduates who would then be able to offer more sustainable solutions to long term challenges faced by society. The chapter also emphasised a need to continue with a culture of continuous questioning and reasoning through students’ participation, despite a growing consumerist culture, and a recognition of the importance of students’ involvement in institutional matters due to their previous knowledge and professional experiences.
33 Chapter 3
Students’ participation in education has been a contested area due to competing discourses of learning and knowledge construction, which impact upon the role that students can take in any educational institution (Manefield, et al., 2007). Their role may range from being passive recipients of knowledge to active participants, who co-construct knowledge with other stakeholders in education. Different forms of contributions that students make in HEIs, through their participation, are discussed in this chapter.
Embedded with students’ participation work remains the issue of power, especially the power differential between tutors and students. The chapter, therefore, considers issues with regards to uncontested compliance towards power differential structures in a pedagogic environment, and offers alternative views on the relationship between power and responsibility. The chapter, overall, reviews various benefits of adopting a student voice approach, but also brings to the foreground some of the challenges that come implicitly with the application of such principles into practice.