European higher education students: contested constructions
As part of her academic visitation hosted by the Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Strategic Research Centre, Deakin University we are pleased welcome Prof Rachel Brooks, Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of Research and Innovation, University of Surrey who will unpack the questions and contentions surrounding the differing construction of role of students across Europe despite policy initatives to ensure more comparable, compatible and coherent higher education systems in Europe.
There are currently over 35 million students within Europe and yet, to date, we have no clear understanding of the extent to which understandings of ‘the student’ are shared across the continent. Thus, a central aim of the talk is to investigate how the contemporary higher education student understands their own role, and the extent to which this differs both within nation-states and across them. This is significant in terms of implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumptions that are made about common understandings of ‘the student’ across Europe – underpinning, for example, initiatives to increase cross-border educational mobility and the wider development of a European Higher Education Area.
Drawing on data from students across Europe – and particularly plasticine models participants made to represent their understanding of themselves as students – there is an important disconnect between the ways in which students are constructed within policy, and how they understand themselves. The models produced by participants typically foregrounded learning and hard work rather than more instrumental concerns commonly emphasised within policy. This brings into question assertions made in the academic literature that recent reforms have had a direct effect on the subjectivities of students, encouraging them to be more consumerist in their outlook.
Nevertheless, this position argues that student conceptualisations differ, to some extent, by nation state, evident particularly in Spain and Poland, and by institution – most notably in England and Spain, which have the most vertically differentiated higher education systems. These differences suggest that, despite the ‘policy convergence’ manifest in the creation of a European Higher Education Area, understandings of what it means to be a student in Europe today remain contested.
Background reading links are below.
