Previously Engaged: A Foucauldian Genealogy of Student Engagement in College-Level Writing

• In Event: 34.076 - Genealogical Tours and Control Societies: Threads of Truth and Power in Educational Research

Abstract

This project describes findings from a Foucauldian inspired genealogy of “student engagement.” Recognizing that student engagement has become naturalized as a modern pedagogical virtue, this genealogy attempts to problematize the term asking how, historically, student engagement was able to take its place at the educational fore. Using an archive of literature from early composition studies (a site of subjectified knowledge), this project turns attention to the decade of the 1940s and explores how 1) various disciplines, including education, psychology, and medicine, 2) political aims, such as a changing educational landscape and World War II, and 3) changing teacher perspectives came together to prescribe “student interest” in college writing courses, which has emerged into what we now term student engagement.

Author

• Joshua M Cruz, Texas Tech University