Active Learning and Student Engagement in Indian Teacher Education

Introduction

The primary focus of any education programme is to achieve its prescribed learning outcomes. That is possible only when the learners are ready to learn. Learning readiness refers to the traits that indicate that a learner is ready to receive the instruction. It is the capacity to fully engage in the learning process (Copple, 1993). Learning readiness measures the ability of the learner to effectively acquire new knowledge and skills, relate this knowledge and skills to the previous knowledge, integrate the gained knowledge to solve a problem and engage in information seeking behavior. Active learning is a way of learning that involves complete participation of student instead of being a passive listener. Active learning can be defined as the process that requires students to do meaningful learning activities and think about what they are doing (Prince, 2004). Jean Piaget’s Constructivist theory reports that an individual constructs his own knowledge through experiences. It emphasizes on building upon new knowledge by modifying the previously existing knowledge through newer experiences. Active-learning strategies promote building new knowledge and skills through the active participation of the students. According to Barnes (1989), learning should be purposive, reflective, situation driven and involve critical and creative thinking. Active learning helps us in achieving these goals. Active-learning strategies align with the principle of social constructivism by Vygotsky (1978), according to which learning happens through collaborative group work of questioning, clarifying the doubts, and summarizing the concepts effectively.

Active learning encourages students to develop good communication and social skills. Group activities encourage students to interact better with their peers and teachers. It can also help the students in learning the skills of self and peer assessment. Active-learning approaches also help us in making the classroom more inclusive. Differentiated instruction supports active involvement of all students in the class. Active-learning teaching strategies come in very handy in adult learning, as less scaffolding is required. Numerous teaching strategies like Jigsaw puzzles, Envoy, Think–Pair–Share, spider-web, KWL graphical organizer model, Socratic seminar, flipped class, are common active learning practices in higher education. The major challenge in implementing active learning via andragogic approach is the reluctance of adult learners to move away from passive engagement to active. This could be due to traditional teaching methods practiced since school time. Some adults also experience an inhibition to voice out their opinions and ideas in a classroom due to the fear of being wrong and rejection. Thus, it is necessary to understand trainee teachers’ readiness towards active learning and develop strategies to improve their readiness.

Earlier studies have found that, effective student engagement is always associated with positive learning outcome. Zepke (2011) found that the student engagement is a very dynamic and non-hierarchical phenomenon. Kahu (2011) proposed a framework on student engagement and further found student engagement in terms of behavioural, psychological, socio-cultural, and holistic perspectives (Kahu, 2013). Kahu’s study concludes that, student engagement is the responsibility of all stakeholders such as students, teachers, institutions, and the government. Callender et. al. (2014) in their study mentioned that, any appealing teaching and learning is an expression of student engagement. Higher education is flooded with 2490 articles on student engagement research since 1980 to 2018 (Tight, 2020). Yet, there is no consistent understanding of student engagement, no meta-theory explains it, nor does the literature identifies a clear process of what triggers engagement. There exist no concept map, which addresses student engagement (Zepke, 2021). Earlier studies discussed student engagement research at 3 levels micro, macro, and meso. Micro level discussed the students’ experiences of engagement, macro level discussed the policies, and meso level discussed the institutional policies to support macro and micro level engagement (Kahu et al., 2020). Student engagement research covered all levels of higher education’s ecosystem (Tomlinson, 2017) and in spite of all a common shared meaning missing on the student engagement (Fredricks et al., 2004; Kuhu et al., 2006; Ashwin & McVitty, 2015). Therefore, present study discusses in-depth on the student engagement as revealed by teacher educators during their interview sessions.