EBOOK: Study, Power and the University

Book excerpt: This book highlights the effects of power within the higher educational process, and argues that in order to understand the student experience we have to take seriously the institution as a context for learning. It considers key questions such as: Why is the student experience of higher education sometimes negative or restricted? How does power operate within the institution? What are the forces that limit or enable student agency? How can institutions of higher education create conditions which best support more enabling forces? Higher Education has its own particular culture, social relations and practices, governed by social and discursive norms. It is always implicated in relations of power through its function in society and its effects on individuals. This book considers how, for the student, these effects can be enabling and engaging, or limiting and diminishing. In exploring the effects of the institutionalization of learning and the workings of power implicated within this, it sets out to add to more cognitive and pedagogic ways of understanding student experience in higher education. Study, Power and the University provides key reading for educational researchers and developers, academics and higher education managers.