University as a Site to Learn Citizenship from the Perspectives of Students in the UK

Abstract

The role of universities in preparing students to be active citizens within civil society has gained increasing attention. However, only limited research has been conducted on students’ views of universities as sites to learn representative democracy. To address the research gap, this article conducts eight semi-structured interviews with staff, student leaders and students without any positions in a case university. The students are undergraduate and post-graduate from different academic majors. Community of practice theory is employed to help understand students’ views of their experiences of representative democracy at the university. After analysing the interview data, the article finds that student leaders regard their role as mainly representing students and that all students in the study realise the importance of such democratic representation through participation. Importantly, through participation in representative democracy, students, especially student leaders, gain knowledge and skills on voting and elections. Interestingly, students’ sense of belonging is a result of participation in student union, society and club activities, which very likely includes voting and engagement with elections. Learning and belongingness are likely to make students participate more in future democratic representation activities. Although students give credit to the university’s role in promoting representative democracy, there are challenges. Specifically, the university is supposed to promote more participation in voting and elections for first-year students, and there is also concern that the short-term nature of positions in the student union may not allow real changes to be made. The findings shed some light on how students learn representative democracy in universities in neoliberal countries.