Transcript Document

The Role of Imagined Social
Capital in the Access and
Retention of Non-traditional
Students
Professor Jocey Quinn
University of Plymouth, UK
Outline of talk
What is imagined social capital?
What is its role in access and retention?
Exploring via 4 research studies with:
• Young people with no chance to get to HE
• First generation students who got to HE then
dropped out
• Mature women students who accessed HE and
completed their studies
• Student volunteers as potential agents of access
What is social capital?
• ‘Social capital’ is the benefit that accrues
from belonging to networks-eg bonding,
bridging, linking social capital
• Problematic concept -for example ignores
power relations within networks and the
hidden work of women who enable these
networks to function
• Has been used instrumentally and
judgementally by policy makers
What is ‘imagined social capital’?
‘Imagined social capital’ is the benefit accrued from
symbolic and imagined networks
See: Quinn (2010) Learning Communities and Imagined
Social Capital London: Continuum
Differs from Bourdieu because he emphasises
“ durable networks of more or less institutionalised
relationships” (1997,47-51)
While I focus on
Networks with real others that are created to perform a
symbolic function
Imagined networks created with unknown others who may
even be mythical or fictional
Study 1:Young people in Jobs
without Training
The young people all around us working in shops,
cafes, farms, building sites…jobs that are seen
as low-skilled and are usually low-paideverywhere but also invisible
JWT a UK policy construct-over 16, working over
16 hours, no level 2 qualifications, no accredited
training
• Identified as a ‘problem’ and defined only in
terms of lack-no qualifications, no training, no
prospects, no aspirations
• Neglected group-know little about their lives and
their learning
Our Research
Jocey Quinn, Rob Lawy and Kim Diment, 2008
Marchmont/Exeter, funded by ESF, Learning and
Skills Council and Connexions
Conducted in collaboration with Connexions
careers service-capacity building and
participative approach
112 young people, 184 interviews
From across South West England -rural, sidelined
and ignored
Education = Misery
“ When I got to secondary school it was downhill all the
way”
“ We were the thick bunch”
Interviewer: How about FE college?
Jane: Pass
Interviewer: Could you go to college to do training?
Tom: Not an option, no way
Interviewer? : So you’ve been doing a cleaning job?
Liz: Yes, as you do. I did anything to occupy myself,
anything apart from school
Feeling Good for nothing
Interviewer: What are you good at?
Josh: Don’t know really, talking, laughing, don’t
know, nothing really
Interviewer: What are you good at?
Adam: Don’t know, don’t know
Interviewer: What are you good at?
Carl: I’m rubbish
Interviewer: What are you good at?
Jamie: Not much
HE not on the Horizon
Do have some positive symbolic networks
• Those who work with their hands
• Those who learn from experience
• What I am not: not unemployed or drug user
But-this symbolic capital has little use value in UK
society and sets them apart from education
Cannot counteract being part of the symbolic
network “the thick (stupid) bunch”
Symbolically excluded from learning
HE becomes unthinkable as well as materially
undoable because of poverty, locality
Study 2: Working class ‘drop outs’
from HE
In the UK rates of retention are higher than
many EU countries
But because the system is inflexible and
demands completion within 3 years as the
norm- ‘drop out’ is seen as a big problem
‘Drop out’ highest (eg 30%) in less elite
universities where more students are
working class, local and first generation
Our research
Quinn, Thomas, Slack, Casey, Thexton and Noble
(2005) Joseph Rowntree Foundation:
Socio-cultural study of meanings/implications of
drop out in provincial areas of industrial decline
4 universities : England, Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland
4 research jury days-stakeholders
80 interviews with students who had dropped out
Policy symposium, Admissions survey
Institutional interventions v cultural
narrative of working class drop out
All HEIs involved had multiple support and
information processes to increase
retention
BUT
Could not counteract prevailing circulating
story that: working class students are
lacking, they can enter HE but they will
probably fail and withdraw
Where is imagined social capital?
• Students attach themselves to the lost working
communities of their localities: the tightly knit
networks of mining or potteries
• These symbolic networks were very powerful in
family and community memory-even though they
no longer exist. They shape educational choices
• “I live in a council estate-They say you don’t
need to get an education, get a job, go into an
industry, but industry is very low now in this
area” ( ex student)
Pulling both ways
These imagined communities produce
benefits:
• Sense of loyalty, belonging, feeling that
working together with common goals and
solidarity is possible
And problems:
• Mournful conclusions: education can never
compensate for the loss of these networks
• Why stay in HE?
Project 3: Mature women surviving
HE
Women students are the majority of
undergraduates in the UK
But
Widening participation has focused on
young people under 30 without
commitments
HE Curriculum and pedagogy is still
masculinised
The Research
Quinn (2003) Powerful Subjects: are women really
taking over the university? ( Stoke:Trentham)
PhD research ( ESRC)
• In-depth study of 21 diverse women students
aged 19 to 62 studying 2 interdisciplinary
subjects in 2 universities
• Focus on curriculum, subjectivity and negotiation
of life inside and out of the university
• Interviews, Focus groups, diaries, observations
Imagined Social Capital
• Mature women faced many problems-juggling care,
finance and study, self doubt and doubts of others,
• intergenerational conflicts with students/staff
• What mattered was symbolic networks either with other
‘real’ women - “ladies who lunch” or with women they
only knew on an imagined level through study -“really
strong women”
• These networks created: imagined social capital: a
sense of power and safety and resources for ‘identity
change’
• Enabled them to negotiate and remain in the universitythe benefits were intangible but material
Study 4: Student volunteers:
Agents of access?
Students in the UK encouraged to volunteer
HE seen as path to citizenship
Encouraged to work with local communities
And disadvantaged people
Seen as a significant element in widening
participation-breaking down boundaries
and encouraging non-traditional students
to enter the university
The research
Holdsworth and Quinn ( 2011 forthcoming )
Antipode: Journal of Radical Geography
‘The epistemological challenge of HE student
volunteering : “reproductive” or “deconstructive”
volunteering?’
Mapping study of university/community links
(ESRC)
20 biographical interviews student volunteers
Theoretical concepts drawing on imagined social
capital
Theory
“Universities facilitate the production of
imagined social capital by opening up the
strange and unfamiliar to be reframed and
re-used by students in their own symbolic
networks”( Quinn, 2005:15)
Volunteering has the potential to do this and
link the university to the local community
to facilitate access
Does it in practice?
“Reproductive” volunteering
Does not challenge but reproduces and reenforces existing power relations and
inequalities
“ Where I live at home its like a white majority
area. The volunteering thing (in a deprived inner
city school) highlighted it more because
everyone in the school I went to , it is a good
school-there isn’t many people from different
backgrounds. But coming here like it being a big
city…it just brought out the differences like that
nowadays the families are common and its like a
lot of immigrant families” Stacey
“ Deconstructive” volunteering
Allows volunteers to critique, deconstruct and
resist power structures and inequalities
“Doing volunteering ( gardening projects in local
communities) suddenly there was this explosion
of community and culture and my mind was
becoming aware that actually there was more to
life than school and sometimes school doesn’t
have all the answers” Molly
Some conclusions for Access and
Retention
Take symbolic and imagined factors in students lives
seriously and work with them-produces material change
• Validate young people’s different symbolic networks so
their capital can have value and help build access to HE
• In pedagogy try to foster some of the communal values
held by lost symbolic networks of industry
• Critical exposure to radical thinkers in HE fosters
imagined social capital
• Use outreach and volunteering to learn from local
communities, not impose HE values on them: bring
these learning experiences into the curriculum