Exploring Student Participation Challenges in Student-Centred Learning Environments

This chapter discusses the challenges related to student participation in student-centred learning environments by examining the reasons for their hesitancy to participate and take on responsibilities as envisioned by the teacher. Explorative and knowledge-generating activities are seen as a means to enhance the quality of educational practices but also imply that students take a greater responsibility for their own work and learning processes. Research has proven how challenging it is to engage all students in productive ways through such approaches and that quite a few students are disengaged rather than engaged as anticipated. However, less is known about the students’ reasons for not engaging, as encouraged by the teachers or anticipated in the course designs, as well as about what constitutes their sources of hesitancy. Consequently, this chapter aims to explore how extended responsibility for learning activities are experienced by students and what forms of participation hesitancy occur. This exploration draws on comprehensive descriptive reports of eight higher education courses, studied within the Quality of Norwegian Higher Education project, in which activities and experiences were documented based on participant observations, interviews, and course materials. The chapter presents a secondary analysis of these reports, with a specific focus on the challenges the students experienced and how these generated a hesitancy to participate. Social, cognitive, affective, and organizational types of challenges are revealed and discussed in relation to features of the learning environments in which they arose. The chapter concludes with a discussion of implications for quality work in higher education practices.