STUDENT ENGAGEMENT, HIGHER EDUCATION, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Beyond neoliberalism and the market A theory-driven review of student engagement literature in higher education

This integrative review examines student engagement in higher education through the lens of critical theory and ideology critique. An integrative review, with its claimed ability to work with general and ambiguous terms, drawing on diverse literatures, is subjected to a quasi-Popperian ‘severe test’ of this claim, demonstrating also how student engagement can promote social justice. Here, this double ‘severe test’ is of the extent to which student engagement can fulfil its emancipatory potential in a situation in which it could easily falter and fail, viz. the neoliberal agenda of higher education. The review traces a sequence of interconnected ideas that shed light on the complexities and contested, multiply defined, general, widely-embracing nature of student engagement as a concept deeply entwined with power dynamics and ideologies. Drawing upon the works of Habermas, Honneth, Gramsci, and Foucault, the review explores many dimensions of student engagement and its emancipatory potential, all reported in a narrative style and an emergent, cumulative argument. Habermas’s work on ‘knowledge-constitutive interests’ provides a typology of student engagement, and his theory of communicative action addresses the hermeneutic and emancipatory potential of student engagement in overcoming the pathology of distorted communication in society. This is complemented by Honneth’s work on misrecognition and disrespect as a pathology of society, and student engagement in rectifying this. The integrative review, continuing its ideology critique, draws from Gramsci on hegemony and Foucault on discourse, power, resistance, and surveillance, to analyse the pervasiveness of neoliberalism in higher education, uncovering weaknesses, contradictions, and limitations within neoliberalism’s influence on student engagement. Resisting neoliberalism in higher education, and promoting and emancipatory student engagement, adopts a comprehensive approach that combines ideology critique, ‘communicative action’, critical pedagogy (from Giroux, Zepke, and Freire), with student engagement for social justice emerging as a transformative force, through actions and activism. Embracing resistance to neoliberalism calls students actively engaging in higher-order, creative, and critical thinking, addressing societal issues and promoting values, ethics, and the common good. The success of the ‘severe test’ of the integrative review is evaluated, both per se and with regard to student engagement in neoliberal times, and implications are drawn for integrative reviews and emancipatory student engagement for social justice.