Transcript Marketing participation: student ambassadors’ contribution

STEM Ambassadors
and Equality in HE
Dr Clare Gartland
[email protected]
The study: background
• An ethnographic study
• Data collected over 2 years
(2008-2009)
• Study centered on 2
contrasting universities in the
same geographic area
 Bankside – a new university
 Royal – a traditional ‘elite’
university
STEM (science, technology, engineering and
mathematics, including medicine)
• Engineering
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Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subject (SIVS)
13 percent undergraduate population were women in 2009
attracts predominantly middle class male students
some ethnic minority groups underrepresented
• Medicine
 women now out number men on undergraduate courses
 some ethnic minority and lower socio economic groups
significantly underrepresented
(Conner et al, 2004; HESA, 2009; RAEng 2009)
Partnership working: the stakeholders
• Aimhigher
• Higher education Institutions (HEIs)
▫ Project managers (WP units)
▫ Management
▫ The Medical Access Scheme (Royal)
• Further Education (FE) Colleges
▫ Teachers/ FE lecturers
• Schools
▫ Teachers
• Local Education Authorities (LEAs)
▫ Borough coordinators
• External organisations/ charities
▫ Charitable funding supporting the MAS at Royal
▫ Accessing Engineering Project (AEP) at Bankside
Policy Assumptions
• ‘Coordinators commend the way in which interaction
with higher education students’ can ‘play a part in
breaking down cultural barriers’ and the way in
which ambassadors can make higher education ‘cool
in the schools’(p38). (HEFCE (2005) Evaluation of
Aimhigher
• An evaluation of the student associates scheme (for the
TDA) is also cited in this report: ‘by being close in
age and experience, student associates can
relate to the issues young people face’ (p38).
Research approach: conceptualising
learning
• Hodkinson and Macleod (2007) suggest that a focus in
research on the outcomes of learning, the ‘static products
of learning’, are ‘all indicative of seeing learning as
acquisition’.
• David (2010) outlines the need for a nuanced
understanding of teaching and learning and the
‘development of a social scientific understanding of
teaching and learning in different settings and how
diverse learning occurs’ (David, 2010: p6).
Research: a multi-stranded, reflexive
approach
‘a toolbox of diverse concepts and theories – an applied
sociology rather than a pure one’ (Ball, 1994)
Diverse Concepts and Theories
• Foucauldian discourse analysis and Post-structuralism (Willig,
2001; Wetherell and Potter, 1992; Wetherell, 1998, 2001; Butler,
1988; Hey 2006; Youdell, 2006; Davies, 2006)
• Psychosocial research (Hey, 1997; Renold and Ringrose; 2008)
• Learning theory (Colley Hodkinson and Malcolm, 2003)
Toolbox
• Ethnography (Skeggs, 1997; Hey, 2006; Youdell, 2006)
• Social Psychology (Willig, 2001)
• Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2003; Charmaz and Mitchell, 2007)
Participants
• Activities targeted pupils from south east London state schools from
‘deprived’ boroughs (according to the 2004 Multiple Deprivation
Index) with extremely low participation rates in HE
• Ambassadors were predominantly 1st generation HE
• Pupils and ambassadors were ethnically diverse with the largest
group represented being Black African
Data
• Interview/ conversations with project organisers
• Observation of activities & meetings
• Informal conversations/ focus groups held with:
 Royal: 41 pupils; 16 student ambassadors
 Bankside 71 pupils; 16 student ambassadors
Marketing discourses: pupils as consumers
within the marketplace of HE
‘slowly … the internal pressures mount – there is a
benchmark and you are asked what you are doing to meet
it? You get – it’s lovely you’re doing charity work but …
(WP manager, Royal)
‘They’ve sold it to us …’(SS)
Related neo-liberal discourses of:
individualism (Royal)
employability (Bankside)
Chanelle: Yes, you don’t have to come from an upper
class background or a grammar school to get to
university. You can come from where they are coming
from; there’s no real boundaries apart from your
actual expectations in your head, I think. It’s like, if
you think you won’t be able to make it then that’s going
to limit you in where you’re going. If you think I can do
this, I can achieve what I want to achieve then that will
give you inspiration to go and if there is someone telling
you, you know I came from where you come from;
I came from a lower privileged background and
I’m here; it inspires them (Royal: Medical Day)
Head of Recruitment (Bankside):They need to be
professional – corporate … they are representing the
institution they are working for
Wendy: working for the AEP is like customer
services – you treat the children with respect so that
they’re nice back to you (Bankside: STEM day)
Fabienne: the supervisors didn’t really help me- it’s 3
years till I go to university – I don’t really want to
know – I’m not bothered. I already know what you have
to do – I knew the stuff that you can do – stuff you can
gain from it (Bankside: Engineering Camp)
Learning Practices and Identities: the
importance of learning contexts
Discourses related to teaching and learning were
notably different in different learning contexts.
The balance of informal and formal ‘attributes’ in the
learning contexts ‘inevitably changes the nature of the
learning’ (Colley, 2005; Colley, Hodkinson and
Malcolm, 2003)
Yvonne: I used to argue with Adam – I would say,
that’s the way to do it – he’d say, that’s another way… I
knew a formula that, what’s it called – where you do
that table thing?
Bim: The green method
Yvonne: Yeah, the green method, I would say, that’s the
way you do it and he was like, no, you have to do that
and I went and told Miss M and she said it was the
green method (MW)
Martin: ... (we talk) about everything. Obviously most
of us here want to go into medicine – so we have
very similar ideas (G&T SS)
Sarah: (engineering) there are some difficult things to
consider ...I wouldn’t say it’s an easy subject – it’s
something where you’d need to use your initiative –
you need to put other people into what would go wrong
and what would go right
Ayisha: you need to plan it all out exactly ...it’s about
team work ...although it’s complicated you are able
to work it out in small stages so you will eventually
get there... (TT)
Social Relationships and Identities
In contexts with more ‘informal attributes’ pupils
repeatedly described ambassadors as like ‘friends’,
‘cousins’, brothers’ and sisters’
‘like a sister or a brother or someone ‘cause you can tell
them what you’re thinking…’
Butler … posits a performative politics in which she
imagines discourses taking on new meanings and
circulating in contexts from which they have been barred
or in which they have been rendered unintelligible, as
performative subjects engage a deconstructive politics
that intervenes and unsettles hegemonic meanings.
(Butler 1997: in Youdell, 2006: p512)
Ayisha:... because we’re students and they’re
students –I know they might not be the same age but you kind of have the sense of...they seem like us (TT)
Jenny: … they understand what we need …
Tosin: When they talk freely they don’t talk really, really
formal like
Abi: … like they break it down for us and they don’t talk
like all confusing – they speak how we do kind of
Tosin: And they are more straightforward – you know
teachers they just go on and on …
John: I heard one of them say, “butters” (laughter) –
slang (MD)
Laticia: She looks like a Miss P type. She’ll talk about – I
don’t eat animals, I eat miso – but she looks smart
Janine: I don’t know – she looks like one of dem girls
that will speak to me about things that I don’t even care
– like, I don’t eat meat, I don’t do ....
Yvette: … she’s like … Organic people – the ones that kill
their own chickens …
Bim: I saw her jogging …She’s a vegetarian but we
like Kentucky chicken (MW)
Conclusions
Contemporary neo-liberal discourses operate as ‘regimes
of truth’ (Foucault, 1980) within these HEIs. These
dominant discourses:
▫ position ambassadors as marketers and pupils as
consumers
▫ problematise pupils as lacking appropriate ambition
▫ individualize success
▫ ignore structural obstacles and can embed existing
stratification within the HE sector
But….
Working collaboratively with ambassadors in subject specific
contexts with informal ‘attributes’ provides pupils with an
opportunity to enact student/ subject identities where pupils
briefly take up new ‘ways of being’ (Davies, 2006)
In these contexts, ambassadors can contribute to disrupting
existing gendered, raced and classed subject identities and ’
and ‘interrupt dominant identity patterns of
(dis)identification’ (Archer et al, 2010) in STEM