Reconceptualising Widening Participation

1
Reconceptualising Widening Participation

• Professor Penny Jane Burke
• NALN 09
• School of Education
• Roehampton University

2
Aims

• interrogate the underpinning values, perspectives
  and meanings that shape current policy discourses
  and practices of widening participation (WP)
• explore the complex politics of identity at play
  in HE and the ways these shape struggles over
  access and participation
• Draw on interview data to illuminate my analysis
• offer a reconceptualisation of WP that seeks to
  shift and disrupt deeply embedded relations of
  inequality and misrecognition at play in higher
  education.

3
Competing discourses

• WP is a highly contested field
• Competing meanings and understandings at play
  globally, nationally and locally
• it is important not to oversimplify the complex
  ways that policy gets enacted and produced within
  localized sites, which are always shaped by
  micro-politics
• Yet there are specific meanings (discourses) that
  have hegemony in contemporary policy

4
3 contrasting approaches

• Jones and Thomas (2005) outline three contrasting
  approaches to WP
• 1. academic emphasizes attitudinal factors such
  as low aspirations - activities to raise
  aspirations are prioritized and these are located
  on the peripheries of universities with little
  or no impact on institutional structure and
  culture (Jones and Thomas 2005 617).
• 2. utilitarian focuses on attitudinal factors
  as well as lack of academic qualifications - the
  double deficit model -emphases the relationship
  between higher education and the economy
• 3. transformative focuses on the needs of
  under-represented groups in higher education
• (Jones and Thomas 2005 627).

5
neoliberalism

• the neo-liberal discourse frames competing
  understandings of WP
• economy and marketplace -- centre of the project
  to widen participation as a key policy imperative

6
Erasure of social inequalities

• position individuals as 'consumers' of, and equal
  players in, the free market of HE
• Inequalities rendered invisible
  -non-participation in HE is understood at the
  individual level, often in terms of deficit and
  lack

7
Contradictory claims

• WP tends to operate around contradictory claims
• On one hand, the classless society or the
  death of class on the other, the powerful ways
  that class is invoked in moves to draw young
  people from deprived areas into HE (Lawler,
  2005 798).
• Issues of gender equality are often seen as
  irrelevant in WP policy debates but reappear as a
  national concern in relation to the perceived
  crisis of masculinity and the claim that women
  are taking over the university (Quinn, 2003).

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Derogatory discourses

• assumptions are made about lack of aspiration,
  ability and/or potential
• non-participation is often explained in relation
  to individual choice and attitude rather than
  social structures, power relations and
  inequalities.
• Yet research exposes that constructions of
  ability and talent could arguably be tied to
  middle-class, white-racialized judgments and
  perspectives (e.g. Archer, 2003, Gillborn
  Youdell, 2000, Halsey et al., 1980).

9
WP Identity

• Who is recognised as a student? Who is seen to
  have the potential to benefit from HE
  participation?
• Student identity is constructed through social
  differences inequalities across age, class,
  disability, ethnicity, gender, race and
  sexualityand others
• Identity is about dis/identification processes
  of othering not/belonging not fitting in
  silencing in/visibility voice
• Processes of subjective construction

10
Identity formation

• Power is enacted in discursive fields that
  position different individuals in different ways
  across social differences as well as
  institutional status and authority.
• Identity formation is continually being made and
  remade through everyday practices and in relation
  to difference and recognition.

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Identities and difference

• Precisely because identities are constructed
  within, not outside, discourse, we need to
  understand them as produced in specific
  historical and institutional sites within
  specific discursive formations and practices, by
  specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they
  emerge within the play of specific modulations of
  power, and thus are more the product of the
  marking of difference and exclusion . Above all
  identities are constructed through, not
  outside, difference (Hall, 2000, 17).

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Student identities WP

• Student identities are constructed through
  difference and polarizing discourses
• tied to the notion of an ideal-student subject
  the traditional, standard, 18 year old student
• Those students associated with WP struggle to
  avoid the denigrating subject position of the
  Other.

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The worthy student

• The normal, the worthy student and the acceptable
  processes of admission are legitimized by
  references to the abnormal, the unworthy the
  unacceptable (Williams, 1997, 25).

14
Identities and power

• not only are student identities constituted in
  complex and multiple ways that are always
  intimately interconnected with wider social and
  power relations across a range of social
  differences inequalities
• but so too are professional identities.

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New professional identities

• little attention has been paid to the production
  of new professional identities in higher
  education as part of the WP market.
• There are a range of new professional roles
  within and outside of higher education
• no statistical data -to understand the size and
  constitution of this new professional body - the
  ways that these workers themselves might be
  constructed as non-traditional and even
  marginal in academic spaces
• WP staff themselves tend to work on the periphery
  of universities, in separate centres and outside
  of academic faculties and departments

16
Implications for professional status

• So being connected to WP activities has
  implications for non-academic staff with
  specific WP roles but also for academic staff
  who work on those courses and institutions seen
  as relating directly to the WP agenda.
• This has serious career consequences for those
  who devote time and energy to issues of access
  and participation in universities.

17
Implications for professional status

• The divide between teaching and research - it has
  been widely argued that research remains more
  valued in higher education than teaching (Coate,
  Barnett et al. 2001 Watson, 2008).
• English universities with the highest esteem are
  those recognized as research-intensive
  universities and those rating highly in the RAE.
  
• Those who dedicate their time and energy to
  teaching and tutoring and pastoral care are less
  likely to be recognized as serious academics and
  to be promoted
• Generally, HE world-classness is associated
  with research not teaching (see Watson, 2008)

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Men accessing HE

• qualitative research of 39 men taking alternative
  entry courses to HE in 5 different colleges and
  universities in London
• The men were all home students - the mens
  countries of origin spanned over 20 different
  countries
• Generationally and ethnically diverse

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Methods

• Qualitative in-depth interviews (life history
  accounts mapping significant memories of
  schooling, exploring key relationships with
  peers, family and teachers, considering key
  transitions through educational stages and work
  experiences and focusing on their
  autobiographical accounts )
• Followed up with small group interviews later in
  their courses

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WP to men

• recent quantitative data suggests that widening
  participation to men from non-traditional
  backgrounds poses a serious policy challenge
• The increasing numbers of women participating in
  HE in comparison to men has been foregrounded in
  many of the policy debates.

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Complex picture

• subjects modes of study continue to be
  gendered
• SET 62 - male
• subjects allied to medicine and education mainly
  female
• 35.9 of all female undergraduates study part
  time, compared with 28.7 of male undergraduates.
  
• The gendered constitution of academic staff
  exposes further complexities in relation to the
  men in crisis narrative
• women make up 42.3 of academic staff, but only
  17.5 of head of department and professors are
  women.
• 41.8 of women work part time, compared with
  26.9 of men
• of academics earning over 50,000, 21.6 are
  women and 78.4 are men (ECU, 2008, 2-4).

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Feminist interrogations

• feminist scholars have developed critiques to
  interrogate the assumptions underpinning the
  crisis of masculinity discourse
• Epstein et al. (1998) need to understand the
  production of masculinities within educational
  sites and the effect of this on boys schooling.
  
• Archer (2003) need to examine the ways that
  racialized and gendered identities profoundly
  shape boys experiences of secondary education
  (Archer, 2003).
• Reay is concerned to make links between
  childrens and young peoples inner emotional
  worlds and external social and structural
  processes, raising questions about the
  possibilities of bringing together white
  working-class masculinities with educational
  success in inner-city working-class schooling
  (Reay, 2002, 221-222).

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Key question

• How do men construct and make sense of their
  masculine identities in relation to their
  aspirations to become HE students?

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Understanding masculinity

• both a racialized and a classed identity
• tied to social context, positioning and cultural
  practices
• Helps shed light on the ways individual men
  construct their identities as situated subjects
  within complex social and cultural networks and
  sites, such as schools and colleges.

25
Laziness

• a key theme - largely seen by the men as an
  innate characteristic of their individual
  personality.
• Willis (1977) classic ethnography of
  working-class boys highlights the ways particular
  working-class masculine resistances to schooling
  may reproduce class inequalities in the labour
  market.
• Epstein et al (1998) - notions that boys are
  naturally lazy - based on flawed biological
  assumptions
• The men draw on such discourses and use laziness
  as an excuse to explain any past educational
  underachievement as well as for any anticipated
  future problems.

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Lazy at heart

• Because essentially I think Im lazy at heart.
  (Bob, aged 28, white European, working class,
  SEFP).

27
Natural laziness

• The men construct their academic struggles, both
  past and present, in relation to natural
  laziness.
• This is a familiar theme, both in relation to
  common-sense discourses about men and laziness
  and in the body of literature on boys,
  masculinities and schooling (Francis, 1999 Mac
  and Ghaill, 1994).

28
Self-worth protection strategy

• Archers research of Muslim boys and
  schoolingboys often talk of slacking (2003,
  70-71).
• defended their comparatively lower levels of
  academic achievement as being due to a conscious
  lack of effort and slacking, rather than being
  the result of lower ability or intelligence
  (Archer, 2003, 70).
• Jacksons work on boys and laddishness argues
  that constructions of natural male laziness
  operate as a self-worth protection strategy -
  enables boys to explain failure not in terms of
  lack of ability or intelligence but simply of
  lack of effort (Jackson, 2002, 585).

29
Individualising discourse

• the men construct an identity that will be
  recognized as having the potential to benefit
  from HE (a common phrase used in WP policy), by
  explaining underachievement as largely about
  innate laziness, inability to manage time
  effectively or lack of effort.
• Such discourses tend to individualize educational
  underachievement, so that wider social
  inequalities and gendered identities are left
  unspoken and hidden.

30
Being lazy the only thing

• Interviewer Can you think of any problems that
  might get in the way of you finishing the course?
• Bruce Me being lazy. That is the only thing.
  (Aged 20, white English, working class,
  Foundation Degree)

31
Individual self-regulation

• connected to neoliberal discourses that demand a
  self-regulating, self-determining subject who
  takes the individual responsibility to acquire
  the skills (such as time-management, for example)
  to overcome his or her natural flaws.
• The subject of WP discourse is expected to
  control or overcome what might be perceived as
  natural male flaws such as inability to organise
  or a tendency towards laziness.

32
Assumptions about masculinity

• They present their struggle to regulate, control
  and correct the male characteristics that are
  widely constructed as natural ways of being a man
• this is a key issue in understanding the ways
  that taken-for-granted assumptions about
  masculinity might undermine mens aspirations to
  participate in HE
• The men seem to take up the very essentialist
  notions that men are naturally lazy that Epstein
  et al.(1998) have critiqued as problematic and
  flawed within the crisis of masculinity discourse

33
Hidden inequalities

• Such constructions work to hide the complex
  production of social inequalities
• imagine an ideal WP subject
• regardless of social positioning is able to
  overcome their individual flaws to
  self-determine themselves in an ongoing reflexive
  project of improvement, progress and success.

34
Individualises exclusion

• Those individuals who fail to overcome their
  flaws are seen as undeserving of HE access
• the problem of exclusion is relocated at the
  individual level rather than looking beyond to
  unequal classed, gendered and racialized social
  relations and cultural misrecognitions
• taken-for-granted constructions of masculinity
  are left unexamined and are detached from
  considerations about patterns of mens access to
  HE and strategies for WP

35
Reconceptualising WP

• Emphasis on the politics of identity and
  processes of (mis) recognition in struggles over
  access participation
• Attention to the ways that structures, practices
  and organisations are classed, gendered and
  racialised
• Consideration of the implications of an
  increasingly hierarchical and differentiated HE
  terrain for WP access to what for whom?

36
Reconceptualising WP

• Attention to the construction of student and
  staff identities and the production of
  (mis)recognitions and inequalities within
  educational sites through taken-for granted
  assumptions and practices
• Consideration of issues beyond entry to HE
  curriculum, pedagogy and assessment

37
Shifting attention

• Shift focus from individual teachers and learners
  to the wider institutional structures, practices,
  relations and cultures
• Prioritising the development of inclusive
  practices and cultures across institutional
  spaces
• Embedded approach to WP that requires full
  commitment by all members of staff across the
  university to a policy of inclusion, access and
  participation