A project coordinated by the University of Warwick, the University of Bristol and the University of Nottingham

About this Project

Covid-19 raised key concerns about the ways students engage with their degrees, but evidence suggests that engagement is a larger and more complicated issue than the pandemic alone (Darroch, 2023). We know relatively little about diverse student self-perceptions of engagement or comparative engagement within disciplines across the sector. Engagement (or the lack thereof) is fundamental to educational and student experiences and has the potential to affect retention, health and wellbeing, employability, and awarding gaps. Enhancement in this area is therefore significant to all disciplines.

By interrogating whether there is a disconnect between what staff and students mean by engagement/disengagement, establishing evidence-based understandings of how and why different students engage with their studies, and co-producing case studies and recommendations, we can begin to meaningfully enhance engagement across disciplines and an increasingly diverse student body. This includes consideration of engagement in relation to specific activities (e.g., seminars and lectures, accessing assessment support, speaking with staff, or participating in extra-curricular activities).

Project Aims

A focus on History enables us to examine subject-specific opportunities and challenges across institutions, with a view to determining principles for designing inclusive curricula for engagement. The QAA Subject Benchmark Statement notes that History empowers students through engagement with subject-specialists, but how does this work? In-depth qualitative research, co-produced with Student Collaborators, will identify the complex factors influencing engagement within the discipline. This will directly enhance practice and inform strategy (e.g., influencing departmental Inclusive Education Action Plans, assessment design, induction activities, etc.), and improve learning outcomes and optimise the student experience, both within partner institutions and across the sector. The outcomes will have methodological implications of relevance far beyond the humanities, as issues of (dis)engagement are a national and institutional-wide concern.

Three key elements underpin our approach:

• Existing expertise: Project leads are committed to better understanding student engagement and have experience leading projects at their institutions. They share a commitment to innovative and research-informed pedagogy, evidenced by pedagogical credentials and activities.
• Collaboration: The History UK (https://www.history-uk.ac.uk/) student engagement working group has demonstrated the value and potential of cross-institutional collaboration. Focussing on one discipline at multiple partner institutions enables comparison across diverse cohorts of students to produce a sector-wide response to key challenges.
• Co-production: Students are at the heart of this project. Student Collaborators from each institution will act as researchers working in partnership with Staff to co-design research approaches and co-produce outputs.

Our key methodological principles are collaboration through communities of practice and co-production through students-as-partners (Matthews, 2016). Our research activities include:

• Student survey: working with Student Collaborators will allow better access to otherwise hard-to-reach parts of the student population (i.e., students that don’t engage with their studies/traditionally respond to surveys). Research will focus on inviting insights from a diverse cohort of students with varied experiences/perspectives about engagement. The survey will target all students across all years within History departments at the 3 partner institutions.
• Staff and student focus groups.
• Student profiles, highlighting why engagement matters and providing narratives articulating the benefits of different types of engagement.
• Co-produced case studies of effective engagement drawn from partner institutions.

Project Team

Project Lead: Simon Peplow, History

Project co-lead: Sarah Jones, University of Bristol

Project co-lead: Sarah Holland, University of Nottingham

Student collaborators: TBC