Where Do We Start with Student Engagement?

By Claire Saunders and Holly Capocchiano

ISSOTL’s Grand Challenge #2 (GC2) asks us to grapple with the thorny issue of “How to encourage students to be engaged in learning.” This is no mean feat—our landscape is ever-changing, reshaped by technologies, cultural shifts, and political instabilities. We could be forgiven for resisting change and retreating to the familiar, but we know this isn’t really an option.

Our GC2 group has begun exploring what’s needed to address this challenge. First, we reviewed the past three years of Teaching and Learning Inquiry (TLI) for contributions that tackle questions of student engagement. This collaborative effort across the team identified 39 relevant papers. At least two group members reviewed each paper, populating a shared spreadsheet with keywords and short statements of relevance. Our key conclusion? We have a wide-ranging and complex challenge!

We harnessed the power of GenAI to help us move to the next stage. GC2 leaders completed four tasks to synthesize the findings and propose a series of themes for further investigation:

1. The URL for each article was entered into ChatGPT with the prompt: What are the common themes related to “student engagement in learning” across all these articles? ChatGPT also provided a synthesis of its findings.
2. ChatGPT was given an additional prompt: Can you create a word cloud that visualises these findings?
3. A final review of article abstracts identified some additional themes, which were added to those generated by ChatGPT.
4. The themes were merged, and a set of new core themes was identified, each with related subthemes.

Here’s where we’ve landed so far:

Main theme	Sub-theme	Sub-theme	Sub-theme	Sub-theme	Sub-theme
Engaging pedagogies	authentic tasks	creative pedagogies	active pedagogies
Student-centred	student agency	student autonomy	student partnership
Role of feedback	formative feedback	communication
Community and belonging	visibility and representation	trust and safety	cultural inclusivity	power & positionality	identity
Cognitive considerations	metacognition
Learning environments	inclusive	flexible

This is not an exhaustive list of everything we might need to know about student engagement! Instead, it’s a set of themes that allows us to get started on some serious SoTL inquiry that will help us tackle our Grand Challenge. We currently have a Padlet where GC2 members can share the work we’re already doing related to these themes and propose questions for further collaborative inquiry. We very much hope that you’ll be hearing more from us via the pages of TLI and at ISSOLT26!

In the meantime, if you’d like to join this international collaboration of SoTL scholars, we’d love to hear from you. You can join us by heading to the ISSOTL Current Interest Groups page and clicking on “The Grand Challenges of SoTL.” We’d love to have you on board.

Claire Saunders
claire.saunders@open.ac.uk
The Open University, UK

Holly Capocchiano
hollyc@uow.edu.au
The University of Wollongong, Australia

Grand Challenge 2 Leaders