Engagement, ethnography and the student voice: a review and recommendation for research

Whilst the academic literature and HEIs alike recognise engagement as key to both student achievement and satisfaction, currently applied research methods restrict our ability to generate and test associated theory. To measure and understand fully student engagement we need to invoke the 'student voice', which means encouraging students to express themselves completely. However, practical efforts are constrained both by issues of respondent selection and by student's reluctance, and/or inability, to wholly 'open up'. Current research preferences conceptual reviews, questionnaires, focus groups and interviews, each of which fail to fully capture the longitudinal, dynamic and experiential nature of student life. This paper discusses the use of ethnography as an immersive alternative to surfacing the student voice. We suggest that by using the framework presented here, innovative researcher engagement can be deployed effectively to materialise student engagement and, in so doing, to derive rich representations of constituency experience in its widest sense