'What matters in the end is to act well': Student engagement and ethics

Abstract

This chapter focuses on ethics and student engagement practices in higher education. Many understandings of student engagement recognise that ethics are deeply embedded within student engagement practice and theory (Bryson, 2011; Nixon, 2012) and yet ethical issues are rarely discussed explicitly, specifically or in any detail. In this chapter we aim to address this neglected area. The chapter considers various ways of conceptualising ethics, it proposes ‘practical wisdom’ as an ethical means to ‘act well’ in student engagement practices, and then explores some ethical practices, problems and dilemmas in detail through three empirical case studies of student engagement in higher education. The first case study focuses on a study of students and healthy eating; the second concerns ethical issues within a project on student transitions; while the third case explores the ethical challenges involved in student-to-student peer reviewing processes on an undergraduate module. The first and second cases deal with ethics in research projects, while the third considers ethics within teaching and learning.