‘Student engagement’ is a pervasive keyword in contemporary educational discourse. While conceptually ambiguous, and technically contested in the scholarly domain (Reschly & Christenson, 2012), the term is widely and often uncritically deployed in the public and practitioner space as a measure of educational success and as a rallying call for a variety of educational innovations. It also embodies key dispositions of today’s successful students and tomorrow’s desire citizens: the engaged student is an active participant in learning and life, one who exhibits the desire to learn and succeed, and demonstrates the willingness and aptitude to do so (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2012).

However, as ‘common sense’ as the idea seems to be, the term has only a relatively recent history. It first appeared in educational literature in the 1960s and 1970s as a temporal construct (Carroll, 1963; Rosenshine, 1978) before also taking shape as a solution to concerns about young peoples’ alienation from schooling in the 1990s (Newmann and Associates, 1996). The idea that schools are failing to engage their students, particularly those in the middle years, remains a widely accepted and anxiety provoking ‘truth’ (Ecclestone & Brunila, 2015). Re-imaginings of pedagogy, curricula and learning environments are regularly called for and operationalized as crucial solutions, both historically and today (Beane, 1993; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2015).

Using Australia as a case study, this critically-oriented project explores how this present has come to be. Understanding engagement as an invention, and informed by historical-sociological approaches to understanding contemporary phenomena, it seeks to trace the history of the concept since its emergence as a scientific object, illuminating both its transformative promise and its regulatory effects on ideas of good teaching and learning in policy, public and practitioner imaginaries.

While the project places its focus on the Australian context, engagement is an internationally shared concern (Christenson, Reschly, & Wylie, 2012; Lam et al., 2016) with ideas, debates, and solutions flowing across national borders. For example, the idea that engaged learning time is a crucial element of an effective classroom, optimised through a structured teaching approach and careful time management  practices, is currently a ‘common sense’ shared by researcher and educators in multiple nations (e.g., Hattie, 2009; Kyriakides, Christoforou, & Charalambous, 2013). In deconstructing often taken-for-granted assumptions in the Australian context, this project offers educational researchers a lens through which to reconsider similar assumptions—and their effects—extant in their own fields.

 It is difficult to argue against engagement, nor is this my intention. But, because its truth claims are so widely accepted and its effects on teacher/learner subjectivity and educational practice have been so profound, I argue that a close examination of the concept is warranted to better understand its ‘grip’ in education today and why we as educators hold on to certain truths and practices, and reject others.

The key research question driving this study is therefore:

When and why and how did we arrive at the idea that the student engagement is necessary in education, and to what effect?

This study takes the shape of a genealogical history of the present, an historical approach that works to trace how contemporary practices and institutions exist in their present form, to reveal their ‘concrete, practical, and historical conditions of existence’ (Mahon, 1992, p. 8). This critical form of discourse analysis can be undertaken in multiple ways. I am choosing Foucault’s (1996) strategy of problematization—the notion that current problems are ‘not the effect or consequence of a historical context or situation, but an answer given by definite individuals’ (p.172)—to examine how the concept of engagement has been able to emerge and become a means of categorising and evaluating educational practice, teachers, and students. Using documentary analysis as my method, I draw on the complementary methodological frameworks offered by neo-Foucauldian scholars Hacking (2007) and Somers (2008), both historical approaches oriented to concept analysis. Using Somers’ (2008) evaluation of concepts as relational, historical, and cultural objects—existing in a network with other concepts and contexts that both constrain and enable them—I examine the discursive conditions of possibility for engagement. For example, I trace how in Australia in the early 2000s, ‘traditional’ pedagogies became considered problematic for the demands of the ‘21st century’, and explore how engagement became employed as a tool to increase the ‘intellectual quality’ in classrooms. I use Hacking’s (2007) five-element analytic framework (concepts involve classifications, people, institutions, knowledge, experts) to support this examination, to explore the institutions and material practices that actualise the abstract conceptual work and produce effects, intended or otherwise, in the real world.

This study is designed to help educators and policy-makers ‘understand how we think and why we seem obliged to think in certain ways’ (Hacking, 1990, p. 362) about engagement. By defamiliarizing engagement’s epistemic authority, it seeks to provide an opening for educators and other stakeholders to think critically about the concept and consider how it shapes their own perceptions and practices. Such an examination may then create space for new ways of thinking and other practices.

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