Working with Underachieving Students in Higher Education

Fostering inclusion through narration and reflexivity

Maria Francesca Freda, José González-Monteagudo, Giovanna Esposito

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317333104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Working with Underachieving Students in Higher Education: Fostering Inclusion through Narration and Reflexivity presents an international and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the relationships between narrative devices and reflexivity in higher education. Stemming from a collaborative European research project called INSTALL (Innovative Solutions to Acquire Learning to Learn), it focuses on an innovative model aimed at promoting personal resources and reflective competencies in non-traditional, disadvantaged and underachieving students.

The book is divided into three parts, with the first providing an exploration of the key theoretical issues that formed the basis of the theoretical and methodological approaches in the INSTALL Project. The second part presents an innovative narrative methodology and discusses the most significant phases of the training process and of the main products. The third and last part provides a broad discussion of higher education policies and of the need to encourage innovation and reforms to improve the academic inclusion of underachieving students. Chapters in the collection examine interventions in Italy, Romania, Ireland and Spain, using a broad transnational, intercultural and comparative approach, to consider narrative tools using four channels: metaphoric, iconographic, writing, and the body.

This book provides theoretical insights and practical methodologies which can be used to enhance quality teaching and innovation, as well as to help adapt to diversity in higher education. It will, therefore, be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education; sociology of education; education policy and politics; cultural and developmental psychology; and narrative research, as well as to those studying counselling, mentoring and coaching

SECTION II

Fostering reflexivity in underachieving students

Experience from the INSTALL Project

5A novel narrative method to foster reflexivity in higher education

The Narrative Mediation Path

Maria Francesca Freda, Giovanna Esposito, Maria Luisa Martino

Introduction

Reflexivity has been widely recognized as an important psychological process for improving people’s lives. As discussed in Chapter 3, using the mentalization model as the basis for investigation, we conceptualized a semiotic reflexive process model that distinguished two different process levels: reflection and reflexivity (Esposito and Freda, 2016; Freda et al., 2015a). Reflection is a stepping stone to reflexivity, as it is through reflection that a subject becomes aware of themselves as a subjective agent of the semiotic production (to reflect on oneself ), whereas reflexivity is when a subject understands the relational and inter-subjective processes they are involved in. From this perspective, mentalization can be redefined in line with reflection and reflexivity, in that mentalization can be seen to be the ability to recognize the reasons behind one’s own and other people’s behavior (reflection), that is, to understand mental states and link them to particular actions. At the same time, mentalization can also be understood as the ability to understand how mental states affect the relationships one participates in (reflexivity); in other words, it is the capacity to attribute meaning to relationships and analyze one’s own role in directing these relationships (Freda and Esposito, 2016).

Starting with these overlapping aspects, we developed, validated, and deployed an innovative formative method to address underachieving college students with the aim of promoting the Learning to Learn key competence. Through the development of mentalization, the students learned to understand their behavior and how the relationships they were involved in at university affected the achievement of their learning goals.

Some studies (e.g. Twemlow et al., 2005) have concluded that underachieving students are often only Average Mentalizers, who tend to show bias in their signification of their university experience when under stress. They evince mentalizing impairments when dealing with specific university-related events and relationships or specific developmental milestones, such as the transition to university and fundamental exams.

The European INSTALL (Innovative Solutions to Acquire Learning to Learn) Project was a response to the recent demand for the implementation of formative methods at university to promote reflexive competence in underachieving students at risk of dropping out. The project was founded in 2011 within the ERASMUS Multilateral project measure and was completed in 2014. The Center for Active and Integrated Inclusion of Students (SInAPSi) center at the Federico II University of Naples (Italy) took the lead in the project partnership with three other European universities: University of Seville (Spain), National University of Ireland Maynooth (Ireland), and National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (Romania). The INSTALL innovative support service targeted about 200 disadvantaged/non-traditional students who were falling behind in their studies. As discussed in Chapter 2, disadvantaged/non-traditional students are defined as non-conventional populations who are more at risk of dropping out and who might experience difficulties in adapting to life at the institutions or successfully graduating from university.

Specifically, INSTALL adopted an innovative formative method: the Narrative Mediation Path (NMP), which consisted of a group training process based on the use of a narrative group device and different narrative modes and media: metaphoric, iconographic, writing, and bodily. The method was innovative because of its multimodality and because individual and group narrative levels were integrated as a single methodology, which enhanced the reflexive meaning construction for the students’ university experience (Dicks et al., 2006; Kress, 2005).

The four modes were divided across a cycle of seven meetings, which were facilitated by Narrative Group Trainers (NGTs), psychologists, or pedagogists who had been trained to use the methodology.1 Each mode was developed over one or two meetings, making specific use of narrative media such as metaphors, vignettes, narrative writing assignments, and sculptures. Each narrative medium was conceived as an object of reflection, enabling the student to recognize themselves and achieve an awareness of their self in action at the university. At the same time, the narrative media were functional in the activation of reflexivity as the student could access the representation of the semiotic modality through which they constructed their university experience and recognize the link between these significant processes and the impact they had on actions (Freda et al., 2015a).

The modes were activated progressively throughout the training, presenting students with the ability to understand different perspectives of themselves in different situations; the activation of each mode gradually encouraged a different representation of the self that was more contextualized and action-oriented. From this standpoint, the variability of the experiences activated by the different narrative media gave the students the opportunity to modify their positions in front of a metaphorical mirror, to explore several perspectives mediated by the different narrative modes registers, and to pursue a continuity of the self.

In particular, each mode activated a different version of the mind, to allow for a reflection on the students’ own assumptions and, citing Bateson (1979), to build a specific “map” showing the way to read and understand their relationships within the university “territory.” Therefore, because of the use of multiple modes, students came to understand the many different versions of their mind and consequently developed multiple maps through which their university “territory” could be read and understood. Furthermore, the project promoted research oriented toward the students’ purpose to ensure the most suitable map choices in terms of functional representations. In summary, the use of the four modes allowed for the recognition of various representations so students could “map the territory” (Bateson, 1979) within which they are seeking to learn.

The narrative mediation path: A circular reflexive process aimed at fostering mentalization

The use of the different modes and media promoted a mentalization process that allowed the students to find a personal way to participate along their university path. Mentalization is a multifaceted capacity characterized by multiple functional polarities; it is a dynamic capacity on both analogical and digital levels and requires an understanding of both the implicit and the explicit influences on the self and on others (Bateman and Fonagy, 2012). Each narrative medium acted as a mirror that reflected different perspectives of a similar event, allowing the students to reflect and access a self-representation in terms of mental states as both an actor acting within their own semiotic experience construction and an observer watching it being acted. The narrative propositions activated through the different media generated a semiotic process of signification within which the student first recognized the object of their narration, and it was simultaneously a discursive semiotic process driven by the intersubjectivity of the group and its orientation toward the relationships within a formative setting.

Through the four modes, the students were given the possibility of mentalizing a personal way of participating in university and developing reflexive competences that allow them to learn in a way that was strategic and adaptive to the university context. Although mentalization/reflexive competences were the final outcome of the training, in each mode a reflexive register was activated regarding the formative experience of the student at the different levels of analysis in relation to the different formative situations and according to the different narrative media presented to the group as part of the training. With the use of individual and group levels and the media sequence, multiple mentalization dimensions were able to be targeted.

Mentalization is a composite competence, made up of four bipolar dimensions. According to Bateman and Fonagy (2012), mentalization can be distinguished in the following ways:

a) Implicit or automatic (non-verbal, unconscious, automatic modalities) vs explicit or controlled (verbal, attentive, conscious modalities); b) internally focused (focus on one’s own or another’s mental interior such as thoughts, feelings, experiences) vs externally focused (focus on physical and visible features, one’s own and another’s actions); c) self-oriented (one’s own mental states and behaviors) vs other-oriented (others’ mental states and actions); d) cognitive processes (thoughts, beliefs, etc.) vs affective processes (emotions, feelings, etc.). (Bateman and Fonagy, 2012)

The use of the NMP made it possible to target different polarities. All modes, for example, had a verbal and non-verbal component. The vignette, for example, is an implicit medium, but students were invited to write their thoughts and feelings about the main character and verbalize them within the group narrative. Proverbs and mottos, in particular, can establish a relationship between the students and the generic “Other,” as they have a cultural connotation that subsumes the viewpoint of others coming from the same cultural context. The media also evoked internal and external mentalization dimensions. The act of sculpture, for instance, required each student to focus on their feelings and on the way their own body was being “molded” to make that specific representation. Finally, the various media made it possible to target the affective and cognitive levels, by inviting student reflection on their thoughts and feelings. For instance, the low, high, or turning points in the writing mode required a verbalization of the students’ own cognitive and affective mental states.

Predominantly, the training was conceptualized as a circular, reflexive process focused on the students’ own formative experiences, starting from an initial synchronic representation of their educational experience (proposed in the metaphoric mode), passing through a diachronic analysis of a specific university situation (proposed in the iconographic and writing mode), and finally, returning to the synchronic level (bodily mode) in which the same experience was recrossed in light of the reflexive and meta-reflexive processes previously activated. The media presented the students with different levels of relationships with the reflective object.

The reason behind the choice of four different modes in the training stemmed from two different factors related to the characterist...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Epigraph
• Halftitle
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• SECTION I Theoretical background to reflexivity: fostering academic inclusion
• SECTION II Fostering reflexivity in underachieving students: experience from the INSTALL Project
• SECTION III Implications for policy and practice
• Index