This paper examines what students can tell us about their strategic decision to engage or disengage from learning. A means of accessing student knowledge and experience about teaching and learning is explicated, along with a discussion of student reasoning for making an investment in learning. It is argued that disengagement is a reasoned decision…

The middle grades are a time of significant physical, social, emotional, and cognitive change. This article suggests a theoretical framework for engaging students at this critical stage through applied learning and community partnerships. Applied learning is defined as the immediate and purposeful connection between school-based and real-world…

This article examines the relevance of humor to student engagement in outdoor education. A sociocultural framework is applied to this examination, based on a view of learning as constructed, cognitive, embodied, and affective. A set of affordances of outdoor education as a contextually situated learning activity is identified along with related…

Personalised learning is now broadly endorsed as a key strategy to improve student curricular engagement and academic attainment, but there is also strong critique of this construct. We review claims made for this approach, as well as concerns about its conceptual coherence and effects on different learner cohorts. Drawing on literature around…

Various explanations and solutions have been proposed over the last decade in relation to the implications of students' apparent lack of engagement with middle years schooling in Australia. This article reports on responses to a questionnaire by 333 Year 8 students (aged about 13, in the second year of high school) on perceptions of factors…

The study reported here investigated whether Year 6 boys were engaged through the use of an online journaling tool. This journaling tool allowed the students to self reflect on their behaviour and affective reaction in an online environment. Case study methodology was used with twelve boys from a regional primary school in Victoria, during the one…