Research Article Discourses of ‘equivalence ’ in HE and notions of student engagement: resisting the neoliberal university.

the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. There is no shortage of analysis of marketization and the theorizing of the student as consumer/customer and how this impacts on notions of student engagement. This compelling analysis forms the starting point for any investigation into the possibilities for resistance to the current hegemonic view of education and learning as commodities and the purpose of the university as developing ‘employability’. In this article, we discuss the impact of the discourse of employability on student engagement and argue that it positions students as engaged in an individual process of CV building rather than a collective process of learning and knowledge development. We focus on the growing role of academic credit awarded for work and other experience via which experience is commodified and valued in terms of employability and legitimated through the notion of ‘equivalence’. The notion of 'equivalence ' in education is problemati