Transcript Examining the im/possibilities of widening participation

Examining the im/possibilities of
widening participation
Prof Penny Jane Burke
Director, London Paulo Freire
Institute
WP praxis
• long-term strategies embedded in deep-level
understandings of the subtle and insidious
operations of inequalities in higher education
• practice-based perspectives
• embodied educational and pedagogic
experiences
“fair access”
• the Coalition Government has reframed
widening participation in hyper-meritocratic
terms, thus intensifying the stratification,
diversification and selectivity of higher
education sites
• a focus on students of ‘high potential from
disadvantaged backgrounds’ (OFFA 2011: 5.2).
Neoliberalism & WP
• operate at both the macro-level of policy
formation and the micro-level of identity
formation
• policy level: WP framed as largely an
economic oriented project aiming to produce
employable individuals
• Micro-level: implicating subjects in regulatory
and disciplinary technologies of the self –
Peripheral
• WP professionals tend to work on the periphery of
universities, in separate centres and outside of academic
faculties and departments (Jones & Thomas, 2005).
• WP activities have been prioritized (e.g ‘raising aspirations’)
-- yet such activities tend to be detached from the main
work of universities
• arguably have ‘little or no impact on institutional structure
and culture’ (Jones & Thomas, 2005: 617)
• How are WP professionals constructed and positioned?
implications for the processes of decision-making,
allocation of resources and the development of WP
strategies?
Professional identity
• Whitchurch – professional identity – unbounded
& cross-boundary professionals:
• Unbounded professionals have a ‘more open-end
and exploratory approach to the broadly based
projects’ they are involved in
• Cross-boundary professionals use boundaries to
‘build strategic advantage and institutional
capacity, capitalizing on their knowledge of
territories on either side of the boundaries that
they encountered’ (Whitchurch, 2008b: 377).
Methods
• Small scale qualitative project funded by NTF award
• Interviews and reflective accounts with WP
professionals at 7 different HEIs
• All participants given pseudonyms
• Aim: to elicit data about the participants’ sense of
professional identity & how this shapes/constrains WP
strategies & practices and access to resources
• I draw on the accounts of three of the WP
professionals, all of whom are based at high status HEIs
(Lisa, Sarah and Jack).
Politics of mis/recognition
• Social class background emerges as a
significant theme in the accounts of the
participants as a form of ‘othering’ and
institutional marginalization
• This is about the contradiction within the
professional community about who might be
recognized as ‘one of us’ -- and the signifiers
that might contribute to processes of
professional subjective construction
Not acknowledged
• It was unbelievable to me that people who
claimed to believe in WP should treat colleagues
who had come from that background in such a
bad way. Our big boss used to walk past me on
the corridor and not even acknowledge me. I
would go to meetings with colleagues in my team
who were officially less qualified than me, yet if I
spoke, they would talk over me or smile
condescendingly then put my ideas across in a
slightly different way, the ideas always seemed to
be worth more if one of the others put them
across (Lisa, written reflection, July 2010).
An outsider
• Another response to discovering where I
originally come from is to assume that I don’t
know anything – it shocks my colleagues to
discover that a working class girl has been to a
‘posh’ university. Is it any wonder that I feel
like an outsider when people are patronising
me in one way or another! (Sarah, written
reflection, February 2011).
Institutional authority
• Jack positions himself quite differently in his
account
• a strong sense of his institutional authority in his
role as a manager and leader of WP at a Russell
Group University
• He takes up the cross-boundary identity
described by Whitchurch (2008b), in the ways he
seems to use his ‘understanding of boundaries
to perform interpretive and translational
functions across the institution’ (Whitchurch,
2009: 2).
Greatest achievements…
• Greatest achievements are, I think, introducing contextual data in
the admissions process, but also having a strategic commitment to
this in the first place, actually having a story to tell, a strategy, which
is very clear about what we are trying to achieve at different stages
of the student life cycle, I think we articulate that well here,
whereas I think, particularly in Russell Group institutions it’s easy to
muddy what you are trying to achieve. So quite honest where we
are trying to recruit students to this university and where we are
not. I think having a clear strategy is key to that. But I think in
terms of policy strategies first, I’d say is important, because
everything comes from that. Policy, I think, is what we’ve done
with the contextual data, that’s one of the big achievements, also
our Access Programme, which as our targeted regional programme
for sixth form students, is the largest of it’s type in the country, and
again that’s very successful at getting students into this university
(Jack, interview, July 2010).
Big battle
• I think what’s happened is widening participation
has become a highly competitive space, and it’s
also one of the few areas of Higher Education
that’s had any money. So it’s become the site of
a big battle, a lot of which is ideological, and
some of which is about people’s careers. I know
people at university where I work try and make
their careers on the back of WP and they don’t
really know anything about it. (Sarah, interview,
July 2010).
technologies of regulation,
class/ification and normalization
• I felt that it took me a while to feel confident enough
to overcome my own personal issues to gain a strong
voice for the WP cohort in my previous jobs and now I
feel like I’m being stifled. I feel like I’m being told to
get rid of my principles in order to fit into this
department and that’s never going to happen. It’s such
a conflict and I don’t know people like this so I don’t
know how to reach them. They have no visible
empathy with the groups not traditionally represented
in HE and that’s the thing I find most difficult to
understand (Lisa, written reflection, May 2011).
A fight over money
• In the new funding regime, universities will have
to spend more money on WP. I think that WP will
become an even more contested site because
there will be a fight over the money. There will
be all this money and who is deciding how it is
spent? Is it people with no understanding [of WP]
- then there will be the argument that all this
money has been spent and it hasn't made any
difference at all, so the problem must be with the
young people (Sarah, written reflection, May
2011).
Authoritative positioning
•
•
Interviewer: And are there any key issues that you address, that you are concerned
with, personally, or professionally?
Jack: Yeah, both, I think…when I say personally or professionally I wouldn’t put a
lot of the reasons into either of those, I just think they are evident through social
research and theory more than anything, rather than they are my own views, or
they are part of the work we do. I think they are evidently true from everything
that we understand of the social processes, the research that we understand
about this. So I think the key issues are that life chances are distributed unequally
long before people go to school in the first place, so the idea there is just, you can
say it is to do with differences in attainment between different groups, or
something happens before that that causes differences in attainment in the first
place. I think most research we know about in this area would identify social
class or socioeconomic factors as being the single and largest most important
variable, and that’s what the research shows, it’s what I personally believe, and
it’s what, professionally, our strategy aims to address, so I think that ties together,
the personal and professional dimension to your question, it being informed by
research really (Jack, interview, July 2010).
Changing university culture…
• We’ve done a massive amount of work in the
organisation, we’ve done a massive amount of work on
admissions and what the issues are with our
admissions, at the university, so trying to tackle it from
all directions really. So we work with young people,
because they are competing with other young people
who have had every advantage and privilege you can
think of, including being taken around the world by
their parents. And some of them go to the poorer
schools in the city, so we are trying to counteract that.
And equally we are trying to change the culture of the
university, including its admissions processes (Sarah,
interview, July 2010).
Working around the margins…
•
But if you say, well, that’s the system we work within, can we make that system yet
fairer? Yes, of course, you can, there are things that could be done within
universities to make our existing system much, much, fairer, without having to tear
apart the whole system itself. But of course some people would say there’s a limit
to how much you can do, and that’s ameliorative, and actually it’s a hierarchical
system, that’s hard-wired into the very notion of Higher Education, which is
selective. I’ve a lot of sympathy with that view. I think the existing educational
landscape, if you like, can be made a lot fairer, which I think is that kind of work
around the margins, very important work around the margins, which I am
passionate about, and our team is committed to do through it’s widening
participation strategy, because we are, clearly, whilst you can’t change the nature
of society, there are really important opportunities that can be given, and young
people can take those opportunities, and indeed achieve very significant, positive,
improvements in their lives, which they could not get if those initiatives, policies,
programmes etc, weren’t available (Jack, interview, July 2010).
going out to meet the world
• All of us, regardless of credentials, regardless of time since
receiving advanced degrees or prominence in our
respective fields, have an obligation to educate ourselves
about the world around us, about developments in our
fields, and most especially about people, events, and ideas
about which our class, race and/or social position would
normally insulate us from knowing. (…) earning an
advanced degree and entering a profession in the academy
is still predominately the province of Whites who come
from privileged backgrounds. (…) Primarily, the obligation
to educate ourselves means going out to meet the world,
and not expecting it to come to us – or, perhaps more
pointedly, not assuming that one has come to us
constitute ‘the world’ (Gordon, 2007).