Student performativity in higher education: converting learning as a private space into a public performance

Abstract

The paper sets out a conceptual analysis of student performativity in higher education as a mirror image of teacher performativity. The latter is well known and refers to targets, evaluations and performance indicators connected with the measurement of the teaching and research quality of university academics. The former is defined as the way that students are evaluated on the basis of how they perform at university in bodily, dispositional and emotional terms. Specifically, this includes rules on class attendance and assessment ('presenteeism'), an increasing emphasis on participation in class and in groups as part of learning and assessment regimes ('learnerism') and the surveillance of students' emotional development and values ('soulcraft'). Student performativity is symbolic of the 'performing self' in wider society and is transforming learning at university from a private space into a public performance. This negatively impacts student rights to be free to learn as autonomous adults.

The performative turn in the assessment of student learning: a rights perspective

“…Thus, this study is designed to fulfil both of these objectives. In the process, it builds on the author's previous policy-based and conceptual work in the area of student academic freedom and performativity (Macfarlane 2013(Macfarlane , 2015.…”

Critical and Alternative Perspectives on Student Engagement

“…However, the behavioural effects of policies which promote student engagement, particularly compulsory attendance and class participation, are beginning to be questioned by a number of researchers (e.g. Zepke, 2014;Gourlay, 2015;Macfarlane, 2015) raising concerns about the effects of neo-liberalism, and the implications for the freedom of students to learn in the face of a growing surveillance culture at university.…”

What can dental education gain by understanding student experience of the curriculum?

“…Students responded to these unsettling relations with some of their educators mostly by complying with the performative demands made by the situations they found themselves in. In such situations, students suppressed their personal views and “played the game.” Macfarlane writes about student performativity in higher education—and describes performative environments as places that “encourage inauthentic behaviour as individuals endeavour to conform.” Another way of representing the student response to surviving the system is as a strategic approach to learning. The strategic type of response is well documented in the higher education literature about deep and surface approaches to learning .…”