Student engagement in higher education: theory, context, practice

Over the past few years, student engagement has emerged as a key dimension of higher education policy and practice both within the UK and internationally. Alongside this a range of theoretical understandings of student engagement in higher education has been developed, some of which focus on explaining the impact of policy, others which seek to illuminate instances of good student engagement practice, while others focus on broader normative aims and purposes as a means to challenge what many in higher education see as the deleterious effects of neoliberal marketization. These confluences between theory-context-practice make student engagement a particularly fertile field for analysis and research endeavor in the current higher education climate and make this special issue of JARHE particularly timely.