ABSTRACT
This chapter is both a personal narrative of my own student engagement journey and a commentary on how this idea has evolved and been adopted into policy and practice over the last fifteen years. Every student and staff perspective and experience is unique. My own is very much shaped by my role and identity as a lecturer working directly with students. I have sought to understand the nature of students engaging so that I could try to optimise engaging students in the most inclusive ways. My academic identity encourages me to always critically reflect and I discuss here some of the more valid critique of student engagement as a movement. Nonetheless, this idea and approach has delivered much improvement in Higher Education for all who participate in it. I suggest the most fruitful way forward is to empower the students as partners in a collective endeavour to move forward constructively.
