“How I know that they're engaged”: Distance education teachers’ understandings of student engagement and their strategies to support it

While the term student engagement is frequently used within policy and practice, understandings of the meaning of this term are diverse and, at times, contentious. Multiple typologies of engagement have been devised, with factors such as extra-curricular activity involvement, attendance, on-task behaviour, student interest, feelings of belonging, opportunity for cognitive challenge, and evidence of agency, amongst others, listed as indicators of engagement in varying studies. Obviously, recommended strategies to support such engagement are equally diverse. Clearly, how teachers define and attempt to support engagement will greatly impact upon the learning environment where students are expected to ‘engage’. This study examined how teachers defined and supported engagement within a unique context: Prep-12 distance education in Queensland, Australia. Students at the participating school had access to lessons within a virtual classroom, in addition to online resources housed in a learning management system and physical materials mailed out to their homes. Focus groups were conducted (n=2 groups, n=16 teachers in total), each lasting approximately 1 hour in length. These data were transcribed verbatim. Categorical analysis was used to identify themes around understandings of engagement and teacher strategies to support this engagement. Within these data, there were varying ways of understanding engagement, ranging from engagement being conceived of as work return or class participation, to more agentic and transformative notions where students took on the role of the teacher or evidenced engagement by applying knowledge in different ways in new contexts. Teachers reported drawing on technology heavily when trying to support engagement, using it to help build student-teacher and student-student relationships and to make lessons fun, interactive, and interesting. While teachers did speak of more cognitive aspects of engagement, many strategies seemed to focus primarily on fostering and monitoring observable participation and the completion of set tasks likely because of the challenges teachers in this context experience when teaching students who they are not physically supervising. While many notions of engagement and broad strategies did appear to be similar to mainstream contexts, this study highlights the differences caused by the specific challenges distance educators face, particularly in evidencing engagement.