Ordinary Engagements: The Everyday Creation of a High-Impact Practice

Abstract

Student engagement in higher education is theorized as a significant link between classroom behaviors and measurable student success outcomes such as grade point average, year-to-year retention, and (on-time) graduation. There are a wide variety of definitions of student engagement, some more dominant than others, in the higher education literature. In this poststructural ethnography, we instead explore student engagement through its everyday flows as affect within learning communities (LCs) at a university in the southeastern United States. Data for this study come from semester-long classroom observations of four LCs, as well as formal and informal interviews and one focus group of LC participants. The results of the study present student engagement as a fractured flow of quotidian life. In our focus on everyday practices, we attend to the worldings they make possible, and in so doing hone our abilities to attend to these everyday capacities for change.