How do students’ accounts of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees?

Abstract

A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. AbstractIn this article we examine how students' accounts of the discipline of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees. Based on a phenomenographic analysis of 86 interviews with 32 sociology and criminology students over the course of their undergraduate degrees, we constituted five different ways of accounting for sociology.These ranged from describing sociology as a form of personal development focused on developing the students' opinion to describing sociology as a partial way of studying the relations between people and society. The majority of students expressed more inclusive accounts of sociology over the course of their degrees. However, some students' accounts suggested they had become disengaged with sociology. We argue that the differences in the ways that students were disengaged were not captured by our phenomenographic categories. In conclusion, we argue that our analysis illustrates the crucial role that students' relations to knowledge play in understanding the transformative nature of higher education.

The Meanings of Student Engagement: Implications for Policies and Practices

“…This problem is caused by the multiple meanings that can be attributed to learning and teaching (see Ashwin 2009 for a discussion of the problems with these terms). For example, 'students' engagement with learning' could refer to their engagement in particular learning activities (which is what the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) survey attempts to measure); it could refer to students' engagement with their courses (which is what the National Student Survey (NSS) in the UK and the University Experience Survey (UES) in Australia measure) or it could refer to students' engagement with the knowledge that they are learning on their programme (see Ashwin et al 2014). Thus we argue that the focus of student engagement needs to be more clearly delineated in order to provide a useful sense of the meaning of engagement.…”

“…Examples of this kind of engagement include enquiry based learning (Healey and Jenkins 2009) and 'Student as Producers' (Neary and Winn 2009) in which students are engaged in authentic research projects in order to produce academic work. It is also reflected in Ashwin et al (2014) exploration of undergraduate sociology students' changing relations to knowledge over the course of their degrees. The key focus here is on the way in which knowledge transforms students as they engage with it, and the ways students also transform knowledge as they make sense of it.…”

How does completing a dissertation transform undergraduate students’ understandings of disciplinary knowledge?

“…First, in an earlier study (Ashwin et al 2014), we generated a phenomenographic outcome space which expressed students' accounts of 9 sociological knowledge. The variation in students' accounts of sociological knowledge were expressed using five categories of description:…”

Missionary zeal: some problems with the rhetoric, vision and approach of the AHELO project

“…Whilst it is argued that there is "wide acceptance in the academic global community that the development of generic skills and competencies should be an integral part of academic studies" (Tremblay et al 2012, p.63), this does not mean that the development of such generic skills should be the primary measure by which students' learning outcomes are judged. An alternative position is that what makes an undergraduate education a higher education is the personal relationships that students develop with particular bodies of knowledge (Ashwin 2014) and that it is these relationships to knowledge which provide the transformative aspects of higher education that is so highly valued by students, governments and societies (for example see Ashwin et al 2014). The key point here is that the claim that a key measure of higher education is the generic skills that students develop is highly contentious.…”