Higher education has broader and more important purposes than what a neoliberal human capital approach would suggest. The narrow definitions in the latest decades have reduced higher education students to consumers, income maximisers, or passive information receivers. How students exercise their agency and realise holistic self-formation in higher education is mostly left behind.

These issues are addressed in a new book, Student Agency and Self-Formation in Higher Education, edited by Yusuf Oldac, Lili Yang and Soyoung Lee. This book argues for positioning students at the centre of higher education, drawing from the concepts of student agency and self-formation. The book brings together disciplinary, cultural, and contextual diversity and provides international perspectives to readers interested in higher education theories, policies, and practices.

In this CGHE webinar, Yusuf Oldac will introduce the book and its sections and chapters. Afterwards, Soyoung Lee and Kelsey Inouye will discuss their chapters. A Q&A session will follow that will be chaired by the host, Simon Marginson, who also contributed a chapter to this book, ‘Antecedents of Student Self-Formation in Social Theory and Educational Philosophy: What Do They Tell Us About Structure and Agency?’

Soyoung Lee’s chapter ‘The Mechanism of Student Agency in Self-Formation Through Knowledge Engagement in Higher Education’ explores how students’ active engagement with disciplinary knowledge contributes to their self-formation. Integrating the call to ‘bring knowledge back in,’ the study reveals the reflexive mechanisms underlying academic self-formation.

Kelsey Inouye will introduce her collaborative chapter with Søren Bengtsen titled ‘New Spaces for Agency in Doctoral Education: An Ecological Approach’. In her part, Kelsey Inouye will introduce how their chapter explores how the ecological university (Barnett, 2018) creates spaces for agency in which doctoral researchers may shape their academic, social, and personal lives.