Re-considering the epistemology of student engagement in higher education

We want to reconsider and explore the epistemology of student engagement in higher education as part of a democratic and sustainable education, going beyond neo-liberal groundings. In our exploration, we mainly draw on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his co-writers Felix Guattari and Claire Parnet. In contemporary educational systems, teachers are often urged to work with student engagement in various forms due to the connection between academic success and student engagement. Student engagement is being perceived as an important factor in quality measurements – a trend which can be connected to the neoliberal marketization focusing on performance, individualization, competition, goal-rationality and linear progression. This neo-liberal agenda produces new demands on education, changing students’ and teachers’ possibilities to act and become within higher education. In addition, some theories are prioritized which lead to narrowed and limited epistemologies for higher education and accordingly student engagement. Deleuze’s way of thinking challenge linearity and dualistic views of subject/object and process/product when emphasizing becoming, appreciating multiplicities and the unpredictable; what has not yet come into being. When ”doing” Deleuze in teacher education, we have considered ‘pedagogical relations’ to involve both human and non-human relations - assemblages that are both intercorporeal and entangled. Such assemblages open, according to Deleuze, for a rhizomatic thinking about learning where events are created that bear possibilities for all actors involved to become-multiple-others for a while. These processes of becoming runs through on-going affective, entangled and moving relationships and modes of existence. Although our exploration is mainly philosophical, we will connect our exploration to an ongoing project at our university. This attempt to reconsider the epistemology of student engagement, challenges structures, power-relations and epistemological pre-assumptions in higher education by creating disruptions, openings and lines of flight