Becoming agents of social changes: students' academic self-formation in higher education

• In Event: Mapping students' pathways through and the outcomes of higher education

Proposal

1. Introduction

The study proposes a potential theoretical framework to understand protest by drawing on the concept of student agency. Agency can be generally defined as human capacity to act, while student agency has its unique shape due to the mediating impact of education. The discussions around structure and agency are highly relevant to the idea of protest. Researchers have recently emphasised the active agency of students (e.g. Klemencic, 2015; Marginson, 2023). Student agents have been found to actively engage in social construction (e.g. student activism; Klemencic, 2015), knowledge production (e.g. Manathunga et al., 2012) and individual self-formation (e.g. Marginson, 2023). The role of universities in these processes is commonly implied as enhancing student agency, which enables students to recognise and realise alternative future.

By applying the concept of student agency as a theoretical framework to understand protest, the current study aims to explore how higher education can be a catalyst of change by developing student agency. To explain the distinctive power of higher education, this study draws on the transformative power of academic knowledge that students engage with in university-level education. A possible approach to address this question is pointed out by a recent study (Ashwin et al., 2022); it showed that students become more relational to the world and the self as they become more immersed in academic knowledge. Thus, I will remit my exploration on students' engagement with knowledge in researching their developing agency for leading personal and social changes.

2. Theoretical framework

This study builds on an emerging discourse that highlights student agency in defining higher education (Marginson, 2018). The framework of higher education as student self-formation proposes that students are strong agents who can reflexively navigate their own higher education experiences as they strive to achieve their ideal self throughout their time at universities. Highlighting students’ self-forming agency, this study also adopts Archer’s (1995) Realist Social Theory and borrow its conceptualisation of human agency: one’s reflexive capacity to consciously deliberate on the self in relation to the social structure, and on the structure in light of the self. Drawing on these views, I argue that the impact of higher education on shaping students’ capacities to protest at the social level is indispensable from their agentic self-formation at the individual level.

3. Methodology

The methodological decision of the current study focuses on investigating how students’ self-formation involves positioning themselves in society as changing agents. This paper is part of a doctoral project that conducted an ethnography to explore first-hand experiences of student self-formation in higher education. The first-year experience of fourteen South Korean students, either as domestic students in South Korea or as international students in the UK, has been traced throughout the 15-month fieldwork. Having two research sites intended to compare the local and international students’ self-formation, but the findings introduced in this manuscript were applicable to both groups of participants. South Korean students were selected because of their potential to provide particularly insightful and informative data given their cultural background that attaches high value to higher education and their well-known educational zeal. Various methods including class observation, end-of-term interviews, and photo elicitation were used during the multiple data collection points. The gathered ethnographic data were processed through categorising, narrative, and longitudinal analyses.

4. Findings

Students in this study were found to develop specific disciplinary agency. As Ashwin et al. (2022) showed, students in this study were found to build closer links between the self, knowledge, and society as they become more immersed in knowledge. This study additionally revealed how students in different fields develop distinctive self-knowledge-society relations. First, students in Humanities were found to emphasise the self as the main product of their engagement with disciplinary knowledge. For instance, research in History seems to afford more students’ agency in interpreting texts and adopting one’s own perspective to the knowledge. Second, students in the STEM field showed a contrasting self-knowledge-society relationship; they tend to highlight knowledge more, while the self tends to be obscured behind the knowledge. More students developed highly intrinsic interest in the research activities itself with gradually disappearing accounts of the self or societal outcomes out of knowledge engagement. Third, students in social science rather tended to become more attentive to social impacts of the knowledge through the self’s actions. Students in Education or Feminism studies frequently mentioned their changing imaginaries and alternative possibilities in society. This finding indicates how students’ self-formation through knowledge engagement can lead to their contribution to social formation. To elaborate, students’ capacities to work on the self and society seemed to be mediated by the disciplinary knowledge.

By the virtue of the ethnographic data, the study could also provide a cultural understanding of student agency for social changes. Korean students in this study tended to account themselves ‘human resource’ needed for national, social, or disciplinary projects, which transcends personal gains. Aligning one’s personal projects for self-formation with the broader social projects can be interpreted as submission, conformity, or socialisation that is often opposed to protest, resistance, or subjectification (Biesta, 2009). However, findings about the participants’ self-formation to support certain social formation can also be understood as strong agency when considering the Confucian culture that values harmonious relationship between the self, others, and bigger society (see Yang, 2023). Thus, this study suggests that the protest and agency manifest in various forms across different cultures.

5. Implications and originality

The originality of this paper can be found in its theoretical framework, findings, and context of research. The study employed a novel framework of ‘higher education as student self-formation’ to understand how education enhances students’ capacities to protest. Its findings demonstrated the usefulness of the framework for research on protest. The findings can also contribute to revealing a mechanism of how student agency for social changes can develop in higher education through students’ engagement with disciplinary knowledge. Also, the potential cultural differences in the understanding of protest have been suggested by analyisng the ethnographic data.

Author

• Soyoung Lee, University of Oxford