Harnessing Empty Institutional Priorities: Developing Radical Student Agency Through University Teaching and Learning for Revolutionary Transformation

Abstract

In a rapidly shifting global landscape marked by catastrophic change, instability and precarity, and misguided promises from the political apparatus, we have arrived at a dire time for higher education. It is in this moment that we dwell on the possibility and opportunity for the academic worker, student and community member to unite and challenge the systems and structures which perpetuate the status quo. Drawing on Gramsci’s stratified conception of civil society and political society, we advance a praxiological activism for higher education teaching and learning that draws on elements of partnership, decolonisation and epistemological pluralism. We advance that through harnessing institutional priorities which are often proposed in the name of meeting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), we may have the opportunity to deeply challenge and transform the status quo through higher education. Drawing on examples of Student Partnership and Student Voice, and considering justice for First Nations, decolonising efforts, LGBTQI+ rights and other structural transformations to education, we propose a way towards new radical praxis. Drawing on our lived experience, conversations with community, students and staff, and our own reflective capacity building, we argue for a new age of radical agency. We also challenge dominant narratives which divide and position students in negative relation to the higher education worker, even when these narratives are perpetuated by the institution itself, in order to create space for a unified, radical and transformative way forward in the higher education sector.

Keywords

• academic activism
• higher education
• teaching practice
• decolonisation
• epistemological pluralism
• radicalism
• marxism
• cultural studies