The role of students' social identities in fostering high-quality learning in higher education

To respond more effectively to the challenges of a world that is becoming increasingly ‘supercomplex’ on many levels, contemporary higher education needs to reconsider its position in relation to student learning. Efforts to ensure that students are well equipped only in their knowledge and skills leave them vulnerable in other respects; simply focusing on how students learn seems not to be sufficient anymore. The idea that being a university student entails more than learning while, at the same time, learning can be seen as a product of the whole experience of being a student builds into the argument that genuine higher education must go beyond student learning to accommodate a view centred on the student as a whole (Barnett, 2007, 2009). This view of higher education distinguishes between ontological learning (i.e., understanding being) and epistemological learning (i.e., understanding knowledge), suggesting that the focus should shift towards the former by valuing the process of being and becoming the student.