Engaging students as partners in enhancing the student experience

This event takes place in the Bill Brown Suite, in the Queens Building.

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Tom Lowe, University of Portsmouth (UK)

In an ever-developing Higher Education (HE) context, taking time to research, discuss, and develop student engagement is crucial to ensure our institutions remain student centred. When focusing on developing student success and improving learning and teaching in HE, there is an increasing focus on student engagement both within and alongside the curriculum (Tight, 2020; Quaye, Harper and Pendakur, 2019; Lygo-Baker, Kinchin, and Winstone, 2019).

As a best practice means for enhancement, engaging students in educational development has created international movement towards new practices of co-design (Bovill, 2020), techniques to gain student feedback (Lowe and Bols, 2020), research projects about students’ experiences (Buckley et al. 2021; Kahu, Picton, and Nelson, 2020 as recent examples) and students taking on roles such as partners and reviewers (Bryson, 2016; Owen, 2013), which together work towards developing education for the betterment of all stakeholders (See Snijders et al. 2020; Lowe and El Hakim, 2020; Dunne, 2017) for summaries on Student Engagement in Educational Development Practice).

There continues to be great momentum around areas of focus within student engagement such as Student Voice, Student-Staff Partnership, Extra-Curricular Activities and Learner Analytics, all of which provide great potential for developing student outcomes such as satisfaction, retention, and employability (Adams, 2022; Abbott, 2022; Corr, 2022 and Beig, 2022). Working with our students to develop education has become the norm in many institutions at both a policy and a curriculum level. However, it is now even more important to be critically reflective on the student engagement practices we are implementing at our institutions as the rhetoric continues to shift at a sector level around notions of value for money. An international community of scholarship has emerged advocating exploring and developing student engagement in higher education. This session is timely to provide reflections, critique, and challenge to student engagement agendas in order to advance practice, to be more inclusive to a diverse student body, whilst remaining committed to the values of student engagement, in what are otherwise a set of challenging circumstances of an increasingly marketised sector. This session will reflect on themes for development within the student engagement discourse, and end with recommendations for best practice from the field.

Tom Lowe Biography:

Tom Lowe is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education, where his research includes student engagement in development of education, embedding employability into the curriculum and belonging. Prior to Portsmouth, Tom was the Head of Student Engagement and Employability where he led the University’s student development, internationalisation and extra-curricular opportunities, staffing and strategies relating to fostering student success at Winchester.

Tom was also the programme leader for the MA in Student Engagement in Higher Education at Winchester and has served on the RAISE Committee in various roles for eight years. Tom is experienced in the practicalities surrounding student engagement in quality assurance, learning and teaching, University governance and Students’ Unions, as well as student involvement in extra-curricular activities and overcoming barriers to student success through inclusive practice.