The Politics of Widening Participation and University Access for Young People

Making educational futures

Valerie Harwood, Anna Hickey-Moody, Samantha McMahon, Sarah O'Shea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138830912
• eBook ISBN: 9781317568513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Young people with tenuous relationships to schooling and education are an enduring challenge when it comes to addressing social inclusion, yet their experiences remain overlooked in efforts to widen participation in higher education. The Politics of Widening Participation and University Access for Young People examines the existing knowledges and feelings these young people have about higher education, and, through the authors' empirical research, demonstrates how sustained connections to educational futures can be created for them.

Drawing from an empirical study with nearly three hundred young people who have precarious relationships to schooling and live in disadvantaged communities, this book offers new insights into their subjects' experiences of educational disadvantages. It explains the different ways the university is constructed as impossible, undesirable, or even risky, by young people experiencing educational disadvantage. The book brings their stories into focus to offer new ways of thinking about the educational consequences of alienation from school. It shows how our understanding of the politics of experience of these young people has an important impact on our ability to develop appropriate means through which to engage them in higher education.

This book challenges and significantly advances the popular frames for international debate on widening participation and the ethical right to educational participation in contemporary society. As such, it will be of be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education, sociology of education, anthropology of education, cultural studies of education, sociology as well as to those concerned by the impact of disadvantage on young people's understandings of, and aspirations towards, education and attending university.

1 Educational futures

No wonder everyone is thick . . . inbreeding must damage brain development.

Message posted by UK primary teacher on Facebook (Press Association 2011)

A report that the Center for American Progress published yesterday shows that teachers expect students of color and low-income students to graduate college at lower rates than white students.

(Segal 2014)

The majority of white working-class children attend persistently inadequate, low-calibre schools. The UK’s education system is beset by deep problems: a lack of progress and innovation, pessimism about students’ ability, a fetish for never-ending surface-level change, and inadequate teacher training [to name a few].

(Stahl 2014, emphasis added)

On the feelings of others

How would it feel to be a six-year-old at the school where a teacher posted comments on Facebook about their students being ‘thick’ and how ‘inbreeding’ must ‘damage brain development’? Or what would it be like if, day in and day out, based on your ethnicity or low income, you were expected to have a lesser educational future than your classmates? If the first two of these quotes seem extreme, what then of daily encounters of educational pessimism about your ability? These three quotes show up ongoing problems with education for disadvantaged students. Indeed, these problems tell a story which has ostensibly not changed for a long time. In order to develop a new perspective on experiences of educational disadvantage, we explore ways that feeling works to mark out, re-inscribe or facilitate change in the learning biographies and life stories of disadvantaged youth.

While it may be the case that some teachers say and do things that are problematic for young people and their feelings, simple teacher blaming is not the answer, and indeed serves to further obscure the complexity of processes that contribute to producing negative feelings in education. For instance, we need to acknowledge the sphere of pessimism that infiltrates contemporary Western education, a pessimism tightly coiled with a larger culture of educational neoliberalism, one replete with maxims of ‘deliverology’ (Ball, Maguire & Braun 2012) and enactments of policy (Maguire, Braun & Ball 2015). Or as Teague (2016) carefully describes, the obeisance and hyper-vigilance to an ever present threat of student, teacher and school appraisals, such as that which occurs in England with ongoing OFSTED [Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills] inspections.

What then, would it be like to be at a contemporary primary or secondary school and feel this thick culture of educational pessimism? This brings to mind the imperative behind Geertz’s (1973) argument for ‘thick description’ and interestingly, his mention of the importance of ‘imagination’ for being in touch with others:

It is not against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.

(Geertz 1973, p.16)

Getting in touch with the lives of strangers is what we are called upon to do time and again in the multifarious practices occurring in education, and especially in the ethical task of making educational futures. Yet, all too often we are mistakenly fooled to believe we know this other [in the sense of Foucault’s (2000) use of the French connaissance as opposed to savoir]. Teachers need to be encouraged to imagine the lifeworlds and contexts of students whom they experience as other. Developing a knowledge of, or coming to know, the experience of disadvantage is the first step in creating learning environments that are responsive to and accommodate the needs of disadvantaged students.

Getting in touch with the lives of schoolings’ strangers, then, demands we attend to the thick culture of educational pessimism that young people encounter. To do so is to engage not only beyond any simplistic assumption of connaissance/knowing and be alert to the lazy/thin ways young people are known. This is also to enter into an awake relationship to savoir/knowing. This demands us to be aware of how we believe we know them [and be mindful of adhering to diagnostic lines of connaissance]. This awareness demands of us to think through how young people feel and to appreciate their experiences with learning, schooling and education. To do so, as we argue in this book, is to ask that we engage with the feelings of others.

Heeding Arendt’s (1981) exhortation to think and ‘go visiting’ (Harwood 2010a), let us pause to think about the young people who might be connected with the above quotes. What would it feel like to experience pessimism at school and in relation to your personhood, education and learning? What would a young person do with all these feelings? How might these feelings have shaped our own learning biographies? What about how you might feel about your young child and their learning and education? Somewhat naively, misplaced assumptions are frequently made that ‘the poor’ or people experiencing disadvantage or from low socio-economic status [LSES] ‘don’t value education’. Nothing could be further from reality. For instance, there is work that critiques assumptions of Indigenous parents’ ‘lack of engagement’ in their child’s school education (Chenhall et al. 2011; Lea, Thompson & McRae-Williams 2011). Poor engagement is a constantly circulated term, yet as Lea, Thompson and McRae-Williams (2011 p.321) argue, ‘The education sector does not systematically engage with the grinding issues that Indigenous families face in their everyday worlds …’. Moreover, certain discourses are activated that turn Indigenous parents experiencing disadvantages into particular kinds of problems; ‘Vague policies reproduce a normalizing discourse which posits a narrow definition of good parenting and understates the material attributes underpinning the cultivating parent’s high visibility involvement in their children’s education’ (Lea, Thompson & McRae-Williams 2011, p.334).

Research by Harwood and Murray (2016) into promoting educational futures in early childhood reveals how parents from LSES backgrounds who have not experienced further education, and many of whom left schooling early, strongly value the role of schools and education. At the same time, these parents describe having problematic feelings toward education and educational futures. This clearly is not the same as not valuing education. How, then, do we theorize and come to understand the ways in which experiences and feelings of disadvantage and precarious education impact educational futures?

Here we draw on Foucault (2000) and connect with his interest in l’experience [as opposed to the existentialist or phenomenological le vécu or lived experience] (Gutting 2002; Thompson 2014). L’experience involves:

(1) The complex set of correlations that encompass and make possible both the subjective dimension of lived experience and (2) the objective domain of the state of affairs that it encounters and the idea of wisdom or learning gained through exploration, experimentation, or a journey of discovery (the sense of being ‘experienced’).

(Thompson 2014, p.147)

This take on experience sanctions the space to engage with experience away from an existentialist or phenomenological imperative. Following Thompson (2014, pp.148–9), l’experience permits us to do three important activities in this book. Firstly, it enables us to think methodologically through the forms of experience and produce thick descriptions inclusive of feelings. Secondly, we work with the idea of the limit-experience to consider how young people respond to and effect subjectivization and desubjectivization. This second activity enables us to more exactly describe precarious relationships to education as well as the limit moments where this precariousness changed. Thirdly, l’experience is engaged with the ‘. . . embodied knowledges of subjugation or exclusion …’ (Thompson 2014, p.149). Here we expand and develop this well-known approach by Foucault and extend our analysis to engage with Spinoza and Deleuze in order to think on the feelings of others who experience disadvantage and precarious relationships with education.

Bringing feeling to the fore

There are many rich knowledge traditions that bring feeling to the fore, and sitting with these is instructive for a number of reasons. An example from our own learning that deeply connects with our experience and thinking helps to frame this point. Turning to Anthony McKnight’s (2015) discussion of feeling and learning from Yuin Country, strategies can be found for ‘thinking differently’ (Foucault 1990, p.8). Most of the writing, thinking and learning for this book happened on the Countries of the Wodi Wodi People, the Dharawal people and the Yuin people in the south-east coast of Australia. The fieldwork moved onto many different Countries in Australia [which, as we explain in Chapter Two, we are not naming in order to protect confidentiality], with our participants including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people. Country is deeply woven into our experience and stands as a teacher reminding us to remember to listen for feelings.

Such a connection with Country also exists for non-Aboriginal people [such as the authors of this book]. Though, significantly, as McKnight explains, rarely is this acknowledged outside a Western dualistic [and arguably Cartesian], view:

Many non-Aboriginal people’s identities are linked to the Country now known as Australia; however, the Western dualism connects them to enjoying the view of Australia, not seeing Country as placing them into identity. In Yuin ways of knowing, learning and behaving, you are placed by Country into the networks of reciprocal relationships.

(McKnight 2015, p.283)

To emphasize feelings, to conceive of the felt and embrace openness to ‘thinking with feeling’ or ‘feeling with thinking’, we can learn by ‘seeing Country as placing [ourselves] into identity’ (McKnight 2015, p.283). In practice this means watching, pausing, listening and learning from Country. McKnight shares with us Mingadhuga Mingayung [My Mother Your Mother], the Yuin way of learning and listening to Minga [the Mother], where we encounter the centrality of feelings, without which stories from Country are inaccessible. As he explains, ‘The silence while on Country, while listening and viewing the story, provides the depth in meaning, placing the responsibility on the viewers of the story to feel the story’ (McKnight 2015, p.282, emphasis added).

Here, the heightened accent on feeling disrupts a dominant archetype of rationalizing thought. This is the very rationalizing thought that, we might venture to argue, erases feelings from how we seek to understand and instead prioritizes what is a disembodied technique of ‘knowing’ chaotically applied in education. Pausing to listen is simply essential to understanding – to really understanding. Our office where we came together to work on this book is below Geera [called Mt Keira since colonization]. As Aunty Carol Speechly (Organ & Speechly 1997; Speechly 2014) explains, Geera is a teaching mountain. With our office windows often failing to automatically close [a problem that only through writing these words can be recognized as a gift] we felt the outside, we felt mother Geera, constantly. We felt rushes of wind, lots and lots of cool, thick, rain over hot January days and long nights marked by the sounds of crickets across the Australian summer. We saw the sunsets on Geera, we heard the songs of kookaburras as darkness wrapped the trees and Grandmother Moon shone on the wet walls, weaving her light. We stopped to rethink our work, to retrace our conversations, to remember anew.

Tuning in, pausing, listening in this relationship teaches us to learn a way of prioritizing feeling. Listening to Country privileges feeling as awareness. Pausing to sit and contemplate how living knowledge traditions, passed on for many thousands of years to the present and into the future, hold respect for feelings gives us strength to challenge the dominance of a system of thinking that accepts a higher education system that articulates through ideas of knowledge as being necessarily distinct from feeling and preserves as abject those lost to the system. Connecting with and pausing to listen to different knowledge systems have helped us to remember that we can learn to listen for feelings in the stories of the young people. Pausing to listen reminds us that feeling is the beginning of all processes of learning.

Emotional landscapes of educational foreclosure

The comments cited at the start of this Chapter might be dismissed as carefully chosen one-offs, or criticized as a singular misguided eugenic comment about ‘inbreeding’. The five years of empirical work on which this book is based illustrate the fact that this is not the case. Furthermore, such swift dismissal disavows the emotional impact of such thoughts and the psychic realities that accompany such thoughts. Thoughts produce feelings, and feelings about bodies impact on bodies’ capabilities. We use the word feelings as a term that refers to emotions and orientations; how we feel about things often expresses our emotions. It also signifies our proximity or distance to a thing and our orientation toward or away from it. Human feelings, the raw material of all our experience, are part of the human imagination. The imagination is made up in part from feelings as embodied responses: images, memories and what in vernacular terms we might consider our unconscious orientations to things, places and people. It would be an error, then, to assume the quotes at the start of the Chapter are one-offs. The first quote was found via a newspaper database search [Factiva] that shows many more instances in which a deficit view is taken and disadvantage, LSES, social class or ‘race’ becomes equated with lack of capacity. Media reports are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to the issues of how the educational futures of some children and young people are, to draw on Butler’s (1990) term, foreclosed. Through necessity, feelings are the starting point for all thought, and feelings are also, initially, very passive, as they are a response to experience; ‘the ideas that we generally have of ourselves, and of external bodies, are only inadequate ideas or passive affections that indicate an encounter between some external body and our own’ (Duffy 2011, p.57). Feelings are an inescapable part of life, and as such, they matter. More than this, feelings comprise an underutilized resource in educational theory. Too often ignored, feelings should be conceived as core to all educational projects.

Dismissal of feeling also ignores the work that needs to be done to re-cast negative feelings. Such dismissal disguises the power of neuro-discourses proliferating through education as authoritative knowledges in schools that cultivate pathologizing opinions about feelings (Harwood & Allan 2014; Youdell 2011). The word feeling also signifies aspects of the work of two thinkers who developed ideas that have been of use for us in understanding young people’s relationships to higher education. In our use of the word feeling, we gesture toward both Foucault’s work on experience, introduced above and Spinoza’s work on affect and imagination as a primary or initial kind of knowledge. Feelings are not only the first product of all experiences, they are often used by teachers in schools as ways of teaching young people ideas about themselves as learners.

What then of the emotional landscape of educational foreclosure, of having an educational future reduced or removed? Returning to the questions we posed previously, what might it be like to be six and in a classroom with teaching staff that describe you as thick? How does this experience manifest in feelings? What impact do these feelings have on your future? What happens when the student listens to the teacher or wants to ask a question? Two quotes from Spinoza’s the Ethics (2001, p.139)¹ offer a way to map the political impact and psychic reality of this negative thinking: ‘Proposition 54. The mind endeavors to imagine those things only which posit its power of acting’ and ‘Proposition 55. When the mind imagines its own weakness it necessarily sorrows’.

Spinoza’s statements, taken from consecutive sections of his book, give us pause to think through how the mind and emotions are intricately entwined. Further, these quotes remind us that being shown one’s weakness causes weakness. That sorrow manifests, that feelings move and flow through the body, is suggestive of the enormity of the moment one’s mind imagines it cannot do something in the classroom. More than this, the fact that ‘[t]he mind endeavors to imagine those things only which posit its power of acting’ (Spinoza 2001, p.139) very simply explains why some young people never imagine going to university and don’t conceive themselves as good learners. If institutionalized educational cultures are spaces that posit they have no power, then as an act of self-protection, they do not imagine themselves in such sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Educational futures
• 2 Method assemblages and methodology
• 3 The embodied imagination and capacities to act
• 4 Beyond the widening participation agenda – toward ecologies of learning
• 5 Precarious education and assemblages of disadvantage
• 6 Feeling different
• 7 Orientations, pathways and futures
• 8 Reorganizing images
• 9 Recommendations for widening participation
• Bibliography
• Index