Paper presentation at PaTHES Conference: Higher Education Brought To Life

The paper takes a diagnostic and discourse-analytic approach to the prevalent concern for students’ mental well-being at universities around the globe. We explore whether we are witnessing a discursive continuation or, indeed, a discontinuation with wide implications for what is understood as the educational core task.

We start from the observation that the manifold initiatives and resources to enhance students’ well-being, currently developed by or for the universities, bring new student figures to life that warrant critical attention. For the last three decades John Biggs' (1999) version of outcomes-based education has dominated mainstream thinking about ‘good teaching’ in Higher Education (HE). His pervasive delineation of the student-centred regime posits two archetypal student figures: the problematic Robert, motivated solely by the pursuit of a diploma, and the self-motivated Susan, embodying the ideal student. Biggs advocates for educators to shape all students into self-directed learners akin to Susan, achieved through student-centred designs fostering independent activities. Robert, as the necessary problematic figure, legitimised a host of new terms and teaching practices in HE.

The current well-being agenda, as witnessed in said resources, introduces new figures of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘problematic’ student: The ‘ideal’ student is now the one performing self-efficacy, a growth mindset, and contributing to fostering a positive classroom atmosphere, contrasting the ‘problematic’ student with mental health challenges. The resources imply a shift in core educational tasks and responsibilities from revolving around educational designs that would encourage students to ‘deep learning’ to revolving around the formation of particular (positive) mental states, mindsets, and attitudes (Petersen & Sarauw, 2023; Sarauw et al., 2023). An example of this shift is found in the attached, and on the conference, the example will be analysed in further detail.

From a discourse-analytic perspective, the question of continuity and discontinuity of discourse is ultimately a question of power and transitions from one configuration of power to another. On the one hand, the current development towards conflation of the subject and object of education, where students' mindsets become both the subject and object of educational processes, appears to diverge from previous student-centred regimes, hinting at a more profound 'governing of the soul' (Rose, 1999). On the other hand, this development seems to have been anticipated and possibly facilitated by Biggs and the student-centred approach, viewing students through a psychologically individualistic lens, and focusing on fostering specific learning styles.

This suggests that under the new agenda we are grappling with both continuities and discontinuities, which raises the question, if we witnessing a new power configuration in HE teaching and learning, and if so, how? To explore this question, we propose an analysis that further explores the intersection between particular constructions of HE’s purpose and the projection of particular student figures as ‘ideal’ or ‘problematic’. The analysis will focus on the present and recent developments, which means that we are not exploring whether the well-being agenda is a continuation or discontinuation of what preceded Biggs (1999). First, building on the German-Nordic Didaktik tradition, and its core question about why education - for whom and how (Westbury, 1999) – as an analytic framework we inquire further into ongoing transformations of the purposes and practices of the university as a complex and multi-determined movement in which these three questions continuously interweave. Second, we centre on the role that the ‘problematised’ student figures, or ‘necessary’ antagonist, play and have played in legitimising particular answers from Biggs (1999) to the present. Drawing on Laclau & Mouffe (1983) and Bacchi (2012), we examine how today’s antagonists, the students with mental health issues, may function to neutralise normative discussions about universities' purposes, practices and responsibilities, which, in turns, stands out as the self-evident, rational and politically neutral way forward.