Possible Selves and Higher Education

New Interdisciplinary Insights

Holly Henderson, Jacqueline Stevenson, Ann-Marie Bathmaker, Holly Henderson, Jacqueline Stevenson, Ann-Marie Bathmaker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138098039
• eBook ISBN: 9781351598569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing together example studies from international contexts, this edited collection provides a new and cross-disciplinary perspective on the concept of the possible self, exploring its theoretical, methodological and empirical uses with regards to Higher Education. Building on research which examines the ways in which possible selves are constructed through inequalities of class, race and gender, the book interrogates the role of imagined futures in student, professional and academic lives, augmenting the concept of possible selves, with its origins in psychology, with sociological approaches to educational inequalities and exclusionary practices.

Possible Selves and Higher Education considers both the theoretical and methodological frameworks behind the concept of possible selves; the first section includes chapters that consider different theoretical insights, while the second section offers empirical examples, exploring how the possible selves concept has been used in many diverse higher education research contexts. With each chapter considering a different aspect of the structural barriers to or within education, the examples provided range from the experiences of students and teachers in the language learning classroom, to graduates entering employment for the first time, and refugees seeking to rebuild lives through engagement with education.

Offering a broad and diverse examination of how concepts of our future selves can affect and limit educational outcomes, this book furthers the sociological dialogue concerning the relationship between individual agency and structural constraints in higher education research. It is an essential and influential text for both students and academics, as well as anyone responsible for student services such as outreach and widening participation.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Why possible selves and higher education?

Holly Henderson, Ann-Marie Bathmaker and Jacqueline Stevenson

Just over thirty years ago, Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius (1986), two psychologists working in the USA, published a paper that offered a new way of thinking about a long-standing issue. Their work was located in the field of social psychology and they proposed the concept of possible selves to describe the ways in which the future is imagined as embodied and personalised, and how this imagining of the future impacts upon behaviour in the present. They explained:

Possible selves are the ideal selves that we would very much like to become. They are also the selves we could become, and the selves we are afraid of becoming.

(Markus and Nurius, 1986, p. 954)

Thirty years after their paper was first published, we have put together this volume, because we believe that the concept has the potential to help us think in still newer ways about temporality and the self. More specifically, we argue that the concept can be put to use in addressing key issues in the current context of an increasingly globalized field of higher education (HE). In this introduction, we first highlight a number of these contemporary issues, showing where the possible selves concept is useful in theorising and researching HE. We then outline where the concept intersects with other theoretical or methodological approaches, and where its potential pitfalls might be, using the responses we received to the question ‘Why possible selves?’ from contributing authors in this volume. We conclude by summarising the structure of the book and the chapters that follow.

Since the proposal of possible selves by Markus and Nurius, the concept has been widely used in the discipline of cognitive psychology in the US, in research literature and in the development of programmes of educational intervention for school-age students, especially adolescents (see, for example, Oyserman, Terry and Bybee, 2002; Pizzolato, 2007). Over time, the concept has been used outside of these specific geographical, disciplinary and empirical parameters. In relation to HE, possible selves has been used to address contexts as diverse as English Language learning in Iranian universities (Khajavy and Ghonsooly, 2017), sexual identity and university experience in the US (Anders, Olmstead and Johnson, 2017), and teacher education in Turkey (Dalioglu and Adiguzel, 2016). The range of these uses of the possible selves concept demonstrates its dynamism and its endurance as a way of thinking about the future, and the role that ‘future’ plays in current HE practices. Particularly important for us, as researchers with disciplinary backgrounds in the sociology of HE, is to acknowledge that the possible selves concept has its origins in the field of social psychology, and is used to study the role of cognition in educational contexts, but that its application can be usefully augmented with sociological analysis. The project of writing for and editing this volume has therefore been in part an exploration of the reasons we and our contributing authors are drawn to the concept, and in part an argument for its applicability and relevance in multi-disciplinary analyses of HE. Our subtitle ‘New Interdisciplinary Insights’ points to how different authors in the book bring to bear ideas and thinking from sociology in particular, but also from educational linguistics (Chapter 5), occupational health (Chapter 6) and widening participation practice (Chapter 7), and how the book as a whole foregrounds discussions of disciplinary interactions.

Possible selves and higher education: why now?

The current unprecedented increase in rates of participation in HE across the globe is, as Marginson (2016) argues, driven by the associations between degree education and the maintenance or upward revision of social class positions. Participation in undergraduate education is indivisible from the expected outcomes of that education; the implied graduate future is ever-present, and all the more powerful where the costs of tuition are increasingly being passed on to students themselves, as is the case in the UK. This graduate future is drawn upon by school career services and university marketing materials (Duggan, 2017; Symes and Drew, 2017), as well as by undergraduate curricula and extra-curricular activities that focus on career futures and employability (Baker and Henson, 2010).

One of the key reasons for using the possible selves concept in HE research, therefore, is that it is already there. It is there in the ways that students are guided towards university education through schools-based outreach activities, and there in the ways that they are required to navigate through and beyond HE, including those employability initiatives which start at the point when students arrive in HE. Beginning with an acknowledgement that the possible selves concept describes HE’s future-oriented present (see Clegg, 2010) allows the concept to be put to work in important ways. Most crucially, it enables a focus on how access to imagined futures in HE might differ along lines of privilege and disadvantage (Stevenson and Clegg, 2011). As the chapters in this volume highlight, using the possible selves concept means thinking about what is impossible as well as, and sometimes over and above, what is possible. In turn, thinking about what is impossible requires that the imagined future is understood in the context of the ever-present legacy of the past.

In an example of the ways that HE possible futures are caught up in past impossibilities, Corbett’s (2007) analysis of rural school leavers’ ambitions for the future in Canada argues that:

The ability to think into future scenarios and to construct imaginary ‘project selves’ (Giddens, 1991, pp. 32–34) that involve ‘realistic’ or what Bourdieu (1990) called ‘coherent and convenient’ (p. 86) mobility trajectories is differentially distributed along social class lines.

(Corbett, 2007, p. 785)

From a Canadian context in which participation in HE requires geographical mobility, Corbett argues that this requirement has an underlying and often unseen prior condition – access to that mobility as an imagined future. We have taken access to imagined futures as an important focus in this volume, exploring the multiple ways in which structures within and outside of HE constrain the ways that futures can be imagined. While social class is one of the structures that these chapters address, we also look at factors such as race, disabilities and immigration status as markers of inequality that enable and limit particular kinds of HE futures. Just as Corbett uses the work of Giddens and Bourdieu in his discussion of imagined futures in the above quotation, throughout this volume the different authors work to conceptualise possible selves alongside other theoretical tools. In doing so, we create a dialogue that seeks to open future possibilities for social research into HE, just as it illuminates the role of the possible future in our current research contexts.

Possible selves and higher education: why possible selves?

It is to this dialogue that we now turn, drawing on the words of our contributing authors. We asked each of them the question, ‘Why possible selves?’, and their responses pick up a range of important aspects of working with the concept, each of which is explored further in the chapters that follow.

Possible selves are about the individual idiosyncratic meaning given to goals, beyond motivational models with generalized goal-conceptions where individual variance is lost.

This response, from Martin G. Erikson (Chapter 2), highlights both the unique nature of the concept, in its attention to the individual rather than the general, and the concept’s potential problems in social research contexts. After all, most authors in this volume are not seeking to focus on the individual to the exclusion of the social, but, as Angela Murphy (Chapter 6) puts it, to use possible selves to:

Highlight injustices when sociological and occupational injustices obstruct perceptions of possible selves and/or prevent meaningful actions.

This dialectic, between the focus on the individual and the critique of sociological injustices that shape and limit what is possible for the individual to imagine, is important to all our authors. Jacqueline Stevenson (Chapter 9) and Vanda Papafilippou and Ann-Marie Bathmaker (Chapter 8) argue that the concept of possible selves ‘allows researchers to bring into consideration both structure and agency’ (J. Stevenson). It is this comment, with its focus on how researchers use the possible selves concept, that is crucial to the chapters in this volume, and to the reasons that the contributing authors have continued to work with and wrestle with the concept.

Martin G. Erikson further argues:

No other theory of motivation I am aware of (even in a broad sense) offers such a broad scope, particularly when it comes to bringing in cultural and social factors. The drawback is that the complexity at the same time gives rise to methodological challenges, not the least because subjectivity is at the core of the model, but the theoretical advantages make it worth struggling with the methodological issues.

As Erikson’s response points out, there are complex methodological consequences involved when setting out to research what is, by definition, in the abstract of the imagined. Engaging with a concept that deliberately seeks to explore complexity, drawing together understandings of subjectivity and structure, agency and motivation, requires a constant critical re-examining of theoretical and methodological assumptions in research. There are important questions to be asked of how the concept can be used in research methodologies. What questions, for example, can we ask about what students imagine, without implicitly suggesting what they should imagine? If, as suggested above, the possible selves concept also attends to the impossible, how can the impossible be researched? How can lost or un-imagined possible selves be present enough in data to be analysed? And, perhaps most importantly, how can such analysis move beyond the tendency to situate such absence in the failures and deficits of individuals, rather than in the structures that shape them? What Jacqueline Stevenson argues is that the possible selves concept can ‘help illuminate broad patterns of disadvantage across social groups’, because it can put emphasis on how the past influences the present and imagined future. While the material present of HE contexts relies so heavily upon the future and while both present and future are so consequentially linked to advantages and disadvantages in educational pasts, the methodological struggle involved in a critical approach to these temporalities is worth it.

The broad themes elucidated by our contributing authors of the interplay between structure and agency in social research, of the dialectic between abstract theorisation and empirical methodology, of narrative temporality and its place in HE contexts and HE research, are touched upon in multiple ways by the chapters in this volume. In the chapters in Section 2, which demonstrate the uses of possible selves in empirical work, there are studies which include the experiences of healthcare students, training and practising teachers, recent graduates from HE and refugees in the UK. While this deliberately demonstrates the diversity of contexts in which the possible selves concept may be applied, the chapters also serve to further the volume’s central project of adapting the concept to sociological thinking about HE. Each study separately takes as its subject an aspect of the structural barriers to or within education. By applying the possible selves concept as a theoretical and methodological framework, the studies both individually and as a whole further the sociological dialogue concerning the relationship between individual agency and structural constraints in HE research.

The book: an overview

The book is divided into two sections. In the first section, three chapters offer different theoretical insights into the possible selves concept and its potential for use in HE research contexts. The second section is empirically driven, and each of the chapters shows how the possible selves concept has been used in different and diverse HE research contexts.

Section 1: theorising possible selves

Chapter 2, by Martin G. Erikson, summarises and challenges the ways that the possible selves concept has been used in studies of student motivation in HE. Arguing strongly for a specific and elaborated definition of ‘motivation’, Erikson explores the language associated with the possible selves concept, focusing on positive and negative valence and on the important distinction between possible selves and life tasks. The chapter then sets out a development of the possible selves concept which includes the notion of ‘possible others’, necessitating a shift away from the individual and towards social context and social construction. Throughout the chapter, Erikson discusses and problematises the ways in which studies of student motivation frequently assume a collective understanding of the broader purposes of HE.

Chapter 3 sustains the focus on interrogating the language of the possible selves concept, in order that the concept can be used critically and productively. This chapter, by Holly Henderson, suggests that while the possible selves concept originates in the field of cognitive psychology, it can be theorised sociologically. In order for this theorisation to be productive, the chapter argues, a thorough conceptualisation of narrative temporality and subjectivity is necessary. Henderson therefore works through these conceptualisations, looking first at the discursive structures of possible selves if they are positioned as narratives, and then at the role played by narratives of possible selves in the construction of educational subjectivities. Finally, the chapter uses these conceptualisations to question how useful the concept of possible selves can be in addressing and analysing inequalities in HE contexts.

Chapter 4, by Sue Clegg, interrogates the purposes of extending the reach of the possible selves concept from its original disciplinary field, looking at uses of social theory in the field of HE research. This chapter situates the concept of possible selves among theories of the ‘middle range’ (Merton, 1968), which offer a way of negotiating between theoretical abstraction and the analysis of empirical data. This discussion argues for more attention to be paid to the practices of theorising in educational research, and suggests that the possible selves concept is unusual in both opening up avenues for further theoretical work, and offering the tools for meaningful data analysis and dissemination. Like the first two chapters, this third chapter is structured around the importance of thoroughly defining conceptual terms. The chapter positions the possible selves concept within discussions of temporality and HE more broadly, before offering a definition of the sociological self through ideas of agency and reflexivity.

Section 2: using the possible selves concept empirically

In the empirically driven second section, Chapter 5 applies the possible selves concept to the language-learning classroom, arguing that the possible selves created in these contexts have a direct impact upon HE futures. Magdalena Kubanyiova addresses methodological questions around the concept of possible selves in this chapter, showing how her grounded theory ethnographic approach to data collection allows discourses of future temporalities to emerge from qualitative data analysis. This methodology therefore works against the perception that representations of possible selves are found only when explicitly targeted by data collection methods. Instead, Kubanyiova’s methodological approach further emphasises the ubiquity of discourses of future temporality in educational contexts. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the contributors
• 1 Introduction: why possible selves and higher education?
• SECTION 1 Theorising possible selves
• SECTION 2 Using the possible selves concept empirically
• Index