Introduction
7
a number of points in our argument. When educators volunteered their perceptions of Ontario’s standardized testing system, this also yielded significant data on the existence and manifestations of student disengagement, too. We ourselves are also unavoidably part of what we study. We have experienced engagement and disengagement as students, as teachers earlier in our careers, and as university professors now. Andy has encountered them while being an occasional stand-in teacher for three of his grandchildren during the coronavirus pandemic, and Dennis manages them while teaching online courses for students from all over the world. It’s a common practice for social science authors to make an opening statement about their own positionality of identity, privilege, or marginalization in their work and their lives, and then to show how this might affect their analyses of other people’s experiences. We take up this idea and then go further with it in this book, by explicitly weaving in how different aspects of engagement and disengagement have been experienced by and impacted each of us in positive and negative respects. We hope that this will encourage you to reflect on your own experiences as we take up the challenge of improving engagement for all students, whatever their backgrounds or identities.
The Narrative of This Book This book is a kind of quest in which Engagement is engagement is both a journey and a destinaboth a journey and tion. We’re not advocating student engagea destination. ment just for its own sake. It should lead to the improved learning and well-being of students, their educators, and the broader community. A single path will not get us to full engagement, either. There are many ways to get engaged. We can and will need to take more than one path. Of course, it’s much better to be engaged than not engaged. But getting engaged is a big step on the way to learning and success within and beyond school.
