Sole Parent Students and Higher Education

Gender, Policy and Widening Participation

Genine A. Hook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137598868
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137598875
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book examines how sole parents are constituted within university contexts, through social discourse and social policies. The gendered assumptions of female parental care-work are analysed as both constraining and enabling sole parent participation in higher education. Social welfare policies and the policies of university institutions are also considered as central to the experiences of sole parents who study at universities. This book explores the sense of belonging and engagement for sole parents in higher education with a view to challenging how universities engage with under-represented and diverse students. Equitable access to higher education is important as a potentially transformative personal and social good and this book contributes new thinking to understanding why a university education remains elusive for many students.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Genine A. HookSole Parent Students and Higher Education10.1057/978-1-137-59887-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Genine A. Hook¹

(1)

Department of Social Inquiry, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

End Abstract

This book examines the experiences of sole parents within the institutional conditions of postgraduate education in Australian universities. To investigate how sole parents negotiate the conditions of postgraduate education, I undertake a theoretical analysis of gender performativity and accountability drawing primarily on the works of Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 1997a, 2004e, 2005, 2009, 2013). Based on interviews with ten sole parents, this research is a collective case study which is attentive to how gender is performed through particular constructions of gendered parenting by sole parents in postgraduate education, given that:

We cannot take gender, or gendered meanings, for granted, since gender is precisely that which is being produced and organized over time, differently and differentially, and this ongoing production and mode of differentiation has to be understood as part of the very operation of power. (Butler & Weed, 2011, p. 3)

This analysis develops awareness of how diverse students engage with postgraduate education by considering the experiences of sole parents, who are largely ‘invisible in the literature and often within their own institutions of higher education’ (Burke & Grenier, 2008, p. 581).

This research is contextualised by the 2008 Bradley Review into Higher Education in Australia. The Bradley Review resulted in an important educational policy that aims for 20 % of university students to come from low socio-economic backgrounds. This 20 % target remains un-met and reflects broader concerns about the widening participation agenda which has sought to redress the ongoing under-representation of diverse social groups in universities. University responses to the needs of diverse student cohorts have social justice implications because they will determine equitable access to and participation in higher education. Sara Ahmed (2006) argues that ongoing dialogue concerning equitable engagement with higher education is important to enable recognition of education ‘as something that affects “everyone”, at the same time, as it would show how some people more than others are given social and educational advantage’ (p. 763). I situate this research within the broader, widening participation in education field by studying the experiences of sole parents in postgraduate education, understanding them as non-traditional and illustrative of how diverse students experience higher education. Through studies, such as this, institutional policies and practices may become more responsive towards alternative or non-traditional students which in turn can support their retention and engagement.

This book does not provide a comparative study which considers how different students experience postgraduate education differently. I understand the distinctive experiences of sole parent postgraduates as worthy of research, as a particular cohort without attempting comparative analysis. In doing so, I do not intend to take away from or diminish the experiences of diverse students, indeed many students experience similar conditions that I articulate in this book. Factors such as limited financial support and the time cost of parenting are not the exclusive experiences of sole parents. However, given that ‘mothers spend around 40 hours more per week on unpaid work (household and childcare combined) than fathers’ (Craig, Mullan, & Blaxland, 2010, p. 39), and many sole parents do not share any household or childcare work, the financial and time implication of raising children single-handedly becomes more apparent. Yvette Taylor’s (2009) work on lesbian and gay parenting reiterated such experiences, noting that ‘[s]ingle-parents reported financial and caring struggles, noting constraints on their income and everyday impossibilities where care could not be shared or divided’ (p. 112). All parents manage childcare responsibilities, and this book contributes to the body of academic literature regarding academic parenting. I make an additional contribution to the academic field by focusing on sole parent postgraduates, many of whom experience intensified responsibilities of everyday parental care-work because this work is not shared or divided.

This argument is supported by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) (2014), which reports that ‘lone’ parents with a child under 15 spend 9 % of their time on contracted activities such as employment and education, compared with 19.2 % in couple families. Sole parents spend 30.2 % of their time in committed work, defined as caring for children and housework, compared with 23.1 % for coupled families. These figures illustrate the additional family work that sole parents do; they spend less time in employment and education, and more time on childcare and household responsibilities, which impacts on how they are able to experience postgraduate education.

Questions Explored in This Book

This research focuses on how gender is constructed in the Australian higher education context. Specifically, my interest is how gender is re-inscribed in parental binaries and the ways in which this re-inscription influences engagement with higher education. By applying Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity to gendered parental constructs, I begin to explore how the socially constructed and sedimented notions of motherhood and fatherhood operate. I do not propose that my analysis is somehow outside these constructions or parental categories; however, I do aim to investigate how the category motherhood and fatherhood operate in ways to constitute gendered subjects. This exploration is opened up through my consideration of how sole parents operate within established categories of mother/father, which are created and reinforced as heteronormative. My aim is to open up possibilities of disrupting the power of the norms of parenting that tend to naturalise the care of children as a feminine act. I have also confined my research focus on postgraduate education as the gateway to the academy, as an important entry and access point to higher education.

My aim in this research is also to investigate educational and social policies that influence gendered engagement with higher education. By theorising policy as fluid and productive, my analysis considers new perspectives in relation to how social welfare policies can also act as educational policies. The interrelatedness of educational/social policy influences gendered constructions in higher education through the disparity of financial and other types of support which scaffold access and engagement with higher education. This analysis provides an examination of political, social and educational conditions that sole parents experience as they combine higher education and sole responsibility for childcare as a pathway to securing sustainable financial security for their families through academic careers.

This research book also questions how space influences engagement with higher education. By theorising education space as productive and potentially regulatory, I explore the ways in which higher education constitutes its spaces as ‘child-free’ and how this can operate as a gendered demarcation of belonging and engagement for parental carers. My research focus on policy and spatial arrangements draws on Butler’s theory of recognisability, a co-created sense of one’s self and of belonging. When analysed through a gendered theoretical framework, these questions make a contribution to equitable access and engagement in higher education. My research questions begin to unsettle the deficit notions of sole parenting and disrupt the gendered binaries associated with female responsibilities for childcare through the productive category of motherhood within an important social context of higher education.

Therefore, this book is a theoretical analysis which scrutinises gendered parental practices that regulate sole parent postgraduates in institutions of higher education.

Theoretical Framing of the Study

The foundations of this research are based in feminist theory which supports my aim to examine how gendered parental constructs impinge on engagement with postgraduate education. I seek to unsettle accepted, established and appropriate practices of postgraduate education by examining the experiences and acts of sole parents which are able to produce postgraduate student subjectivity. This study facilitates a particular focus on how universities frame women and parental involvement because 84 %¹ of all sole parents in Australia are female/mothers. The high percentage of female-lead sole parent families in Australia is reflected in this study, as all of the postgraduates who participated in this research are female, despite numerous attempts to recruit males who were also sole parents and postgraduates.

In response to all my participants being female, I repeatedly received advice that my study should be about mothers, not parents, because I did not interview any fathers. However, my focus on parental care-work is purposeful and theoretical, and often this position was contentious. I decided against including motherhood in the title of this book or my discussions within the work because I aimed to explore and disrupt how the motherhood/fatherhood binary operated. Following Butler, I understood motherhood and fatherhood as not only descriptive but productive and as having material effects on how parents can engage with higher education. Indeed, I suggest that the fact that no fathers agree to participate in this research after widely repeated calls for participant fathers illustrates the power of the association between caring for children and mothers. This is also reflected in the high percentage of women as sole parents, 84 % in the Australian context.

This study will demonstrate how regulatory regimes continue to (re)produce a hierarchy of knowledge within the academy through exclusions of predominantly female sole parent postgraduates. To explore the intersection of higher education and sole parenting, the principal text I draw from is Judith Butler’s work, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). In this text, Butler provides a theoretical framework that allows for the ‘operation of agency’, the possibilities of which ‘takes place in the context of enabling and limiting field of constraint’ (p. 19).

The following chapters construct the argument that sole parents constitute themselves as postgraduate students within the enabling constraints of university spaces. That is, they are able to ‘put a life together under often contradictory and partly incompatible conditions’ (Beck & Beck-Gernshein, 2001, p. 126). This book seeks to illustrate the negotiations and agential responses sole parents undertake within the enabling and contradictory conditions of postgraduate education.

Judith Butler’s work is central to the theoretical analysis I provide in this book because it enables a critique of gendered norms that I employ to disrupt the naturalised assumptions of motherhood/fatherhood as binaries wherein ‘[g]ender norms operate by requiring the embodiment of certain ideals of femininity and masculinity’ (Butler, 2013, p. 23). Butler’s (1990, 2005) theory of gender performativity supports this investigation of naturalised and (re)productive gender norms because it pays close attention to everyday, incremental and repetitive exchanges that accumulate and re-inscribe gendered patterns and norms. This performative process is evident and productive in establishing and maintaining sedimented understandings of motherhood and fatherhood as ideals of femininity and masculinity.

In this study, I aim to illustrate how the repetitive acts of mothering and fathering are (re)productive and regulatory, in relation to sole parents and particularly insofar as they are able to engage with postgraduate education. Butler’s theory of accountability is a useful theoretical framing to consider how particular social and historical productions of femininity and masculinity are maintained through parental acts within families because it facilitates close examination of the conditions of account, as always and already relational and open to possibilities of alternative and adaption. Inspired by Butler’s gender performativity and accountability, this book seeks to draw attention to how these familial practices can influence sole parents imagining of themselves as students, as well as their engagement with postgraduate education, universities and government agencies that have provided financial support while studying.

Why Is This Important?

My analysis of the experiences of participants in this stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Epistemological Foundations
• 3. Perspectives of Sole Parents in Higher Education
• 4. The Case Study
• 5. Judith Butler’s Gender Performativity and Recognition
• 6. Sole Parenting in Higher Education Spaces
• 7. Access and Attachment to Higher Education for Sole Parents
• 8. Policy: Performative Recognisability
• 9. Equitable and Widening Participation in Higher Education
• 10. Conclusion
• Backmatter