ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how student engagement is described in mainstream educational research and policy, presenting a challenge to notions of skills frameworks and typologies of students. It focuses on practices, by looking in more detail at agency, and challenging some of the 'common-sense' assumptions made about devices, material objects and embodiment. In assemblages, 'each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage'. The student research participants frequently described and represented practices in which a complex enmeshing of analogue and digital media was apparent. Texts were never purely digital for long, but instead moved between digital and analogue formats as they were read, interacted with and also as they were produced. This undermines the idea that students can be understood simply as users of tools. Instead, students are redefined by the tools that they use.