Students at the Heart of Higher Education: An Introduction

This chapter introduces the main argument of this edited volume, which is to position students at the heart of higher education. The chapter highlights the concepts of agency and self-formation to do so. The chapter includes a historical overview of higher learning, starting from the medieval university, which constitutes the roots of higher education today. The historical overview highlights that students in higher learning have never been as narrowly defined as they tend to be in the last decades. The narrow definitions of the last decades include reducing students to consumers, income maximizers, or passive information receivers. The chapter also includes an overview of the relevant literature. The review of research on student experiences discusses how agency and self-formation are implied in the extensive theories and concepts of student development in higher education. Then, the emerging line of literature that engages with the agency and self-formation concepts more explicitly is introduced. The chapter concludes by introducing the chapters in the edited volume, which include diverse perspectives on agency and self-formation in higher education.