Abstract:

Both quantitative and qualitative findings from our ongoing research on the concepts of time, identity, and university-as-occupation in an Irish university point to interesting tensions in students’ concepts of the value of the lecture. During the 2024-25 academic year, we analysed insights gathered through a 36-item survey with both quantitative and qualitative items to which 390 responses were submitted and through a series of 18 semi-structured learner interviews. While student participants tend in the main to believe that scheduled learning events such as lectures are important and offer crucial opportunities for interaction with other students and with academics, a contrasting vision of spatial and temporal atomisation in the lecture theatre is also suggested.

The atomised experience is portrayed as a response to an ‘unengaging’ lecture experience. This is characterised by excessive speed of delivery, topics which are uninteresting or unrelatable to students, insufficient lecturer-student interaction, and monologic delivery. Notably, there is a considerable degree of overlap between these reasons for disengagement and reasons given for non-attendance at lectures. Under conditions of perceived disengagement during lectures, students report (witnessing classmates) undertaking a range of (primarily screen-based) displacement activities. In a minority of responses, these displacement activities are pragmatic or strategic in nature (e.g. working on assessment for other modules), but mainly involve distraction.

These contrasting visions of the lecture theatre (engaged, social space vs. communal space populated by individuals doing a range of unconnected tasks to no shared end) raise compelling questions about the place of technology in Higher Education space, time and pedagogy. As well as urging a reconsideration of the ubiquity of digital devices and the non-places they mediate in the lecture space / time, it also gives us pause to consider in what engagement might consist. We ask if the atomised lecture experience may impede students from cultivating a strong sense of self-identification with ‘being a student.’ We also question the logics of increasing integration of technologies in the lecture theatre in light of students’ stated preferences for an engaged, social education experience.

Keywords:

Higher Education, engagement, learning environment.