Improving Learning by Widening Participation in Higher Education

Miriam David, Ann-Marie Bathmaker, Gill Crozier, Pauline Davis, Hubert Ertl, Alison Fuller, Geoff Hayward, Sue Heath, Chris Hockings, Gareth Parry, Diane Reay, Anna Vignoles, Julian Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135282677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Improving Learning by Widening Participation in Higher Education presents a strong and coherent rationale for improving learning for diverse students from a range of socio-economic, ethnic/racial and gender backgrounds within higher education, and for adults across the life course.

Edited by Miriam David, the Associate Director of the ESRC's highly successful Teaching and Learning Research Programme, with contributions from the seven projects on Widening Participation in Higher Education (viz Gill Crozier and Diane Reay; Chris Hockings; Alison Fuller and Sue Heath; Anna Vignoles; Geoff Hayward and Hubert Ertl; Julian Williams and Pauline Davis; Gareth Parry and Ann-Marie Bathmaker), this book provides clear and comprehensive research evidence on the policies, processes, pedagogies and practices of widening or increasing participation in higher education. This evidence is situated within the contexts of changing individual and institutional circumstances across the life course, and wider international transformations of higher education in relation to the global knowledge economy.

Improving Learning by Widening Participation in Higher Education also considers:

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• the changing UK policy contexts of post-compulsory education;

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• how socio-economically disadvantaged students – raced and gendered – fare through schools and into post-compulsory education;

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• the kinds of academic and vocational courses, including Maths, undertaken;

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• the changing forms of institutional and pedagogic practices within higher education;

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• how adults view the role of higher education in their lives.

This book, based upon both qualitative studies and quantitative datasets, offers a rare insight into the overall implications for current and future policy and will provide a springboard for further research and debate. It will appeal both to policy-makers and practitioners, as well as students within higher education.

Part I
What are the issues?

Chapter 1
Introduction to the dilemmas of widening participation in higher education

Miriam David

1 Introduction

The aim of Improving Learning by Widening Participation in Higher Education is to provide clear and comprehensive research evidence on attempts to extend access to and participation in post-compulsory and higher education in the twenty-first century. Specifically our concern is with widening participation to a diversity of individuals comprising the economically, educationally and socially disadvantaged, in terms of poverty or social class, and also age, ethnicity or race and by gender. These may also now be seen as under-represented social groups although we will consider changing definitions and concepts in this respect. We will cover an array of English policies, processes, pedagogies and practices. We will bring together our views on appropriate teaching and learning strategies as well as institutional policies and practices. Our collective evidence is drawn from a set of social science research projects which were commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England in 2005 to consider what was happening in England and to evaluate the evidence about policies, practices and pedagogies.

These projects were, of course, situated within the context of wider UK and international transformations of higher education in relation to the global knowledge economy. In presenting our research we will, inevitably, have to consider the changing policy contexts of post-compulsory education and how these have developed out of policy and practice initiatives over a long historical sweep. This will take into consideration the second half of the twentieth century as a backdrop to these particular policy shifts towards mass higher education (and indeed massive universities) and wider economic and labour market changes with demographic implications. These changes were also entwined with the more international and global economic transformations, often considered as part of globalisation.

A linked consideration will be conceptual: how educational or learning opportunities were transformed, increased or widened for men and women as individuals across the life course and through changing institutional policies and practices, nationally and internationally. We will consider how economically and socially disadvantaged (classed or poor, raced and gendered) students fare through primary and secondary schools and into post-compulsory education, whether in colleges or universities. What contribution, in particular, do prior educational or learning experiences have to continued educational participation, or the desire to return to educational opportunities as adult men and women, and over the life course? This research takes into account the changes in both individual identities and institutional circumstances. The processes of transforming post-compulsory and higher education into a mass or universal system will be taken into consideration. We will also focus on the specific kinds of subjects or disciplines studied, through the kinds of academic or vocational courses undertaken and what the different future employment and other prospects are for either academic or vocational pathways. One focus will be on the criticality of mathematics education for some subjects and forms of higher education, especially in relation to courses in science, technology, engineering and mathematics itself or medicine, often known as STEM subjects. We will also review changing forms of institutional and pedagogic practices within higher education to cope with new and diverse students rather than those previously considered traditional students in universities, namely, conventional 18 year olds. Forty years ago a conventional under-graduate student was typically white, male and from the middle or upper classes. We will also evaluate how adult men and women, mostly over the age of 21, think about higher education in their lives and across the life course, in relation to families, friends, employment, work or leisure.

As part of a series of books emanating from the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), and whose overall aim is to draw from research findings about how to improve learning and teaching across the life course, our aim is to present a strong and coherent rationale for improving learning for diverse students. Here we will focus on the meanings of widening access to, or participation in, higher education for students from a range of socio-economic, ethnic/racial and gender backgrounds within different higher education settings and across the life course. In our concluding section, having presented and reviewed the evidence in part two of the book, we will therefore address the question of what are appropriate policy contexts and changes for the post-compulsory sectors of education to ensure a more consistent and equitable system for diverse students and across a diversity of subjects and institutions. We hope to contribute to current policy debates about equity and diversity in student access, successes in and outcomes from diverse educational and learning opportunities and different institutional practices and across the life course, including family and employment.

Indeed, to anticipate our conclusions, the central core of our findings is that educational or learning opportunities have been massively increased in the twenty-first century, and for an increasingly diverse array of students, from diverse families and disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. However, these policies have not led to fair or equal access to equal types of higher education or outcomes in the labour market. For example, whilst more women and people from ethnic minorities now participate in some kinds of higher education, their opportunities and successes in the subsequent labour market are not necessarily equal to those of men from white and middle-class families. The diverse educational or learning opportunities that are on offer may not lead to equal benefits in graduate or professional labour markets. Indeed with recent and significant economic downturns in wider global contexts many opportunities may not lead to economic benefits although social benefits may well accrue and be extensive for some previously disadvantaged people. Social mobility on a widespread basis is not demonstrated through these projects; diverse instances of individual mobility and involvement in educational opportunities across the life course are revealed.

The projects also show that some UK policies have provided the opportunities for the development of potential new institutional practices and pedagogies to engage diverse students for the twenty-first century. We can see how influential critical pedagogies have been, and what the potential for further developments in inclusive and personal pedagogies might be. This potential could only be achieved however if the policies and practices that limit progressive developments were to be changed. If post-compulsory and higher education in all subjects and institutions is to be more equitable we raise questions about relevant national policy contexts, and institutional practices, as well as the appropriate pedagogies to ensure social justice across disadvantaged, gendered and ethnic minority students.

2 Higher education policy debates in a changing global knowledge economy

Given the global as well as local changes in higher education, and the expansion to mass or universal post-compulsory or higher education in the context of transformations in global and international knowledge economies, the question of how to transform policies on fair access and participation, pedagogies or teaching and learning, and practices becomes an urgent one. Access, diversity and equity are key concepts in relation to expansion of higher education nationally and internationally and changing contexts especially labour markets and economic globalisation. In policy terms, ideas about increasing ‘access’ for various socio-economic groups have gone beyond a simple issue of entry into institutions of higher learning. They have been translated into questions of ‘widening participation’ in higher education or post-compulsory learning for the socially or economically disadvantaged, or social class and gender. The term ‘diversity’ has achieved common currency in both policy and research circles, and no longer only as race/ethnicity but as a more all-embracing yet contested term about learners not simply students.

The recent expansion of post-secondary educational opportunities and their differential structuring internationally into diverse forms of college, university or higher education plays out very differently from a global or European perspective with many individuals, institutions and systems at a significant disadvantage compared to others. The experiences of individuals and institutions existing at the margins of mainstream higher education developments are diverse as they are often overlooked in identifying institutions and systems at the leading edge of development. Poverty, war, violence and diaspora can affect opportunities for and attitudes towards learning in fundamental ways, while cultural attitudes and practices at school can also create or reinforce disadvantage even in developed or advanced systems and practices of higher education.

Moreover, political, social and cultural globalising tendencies are influencing policy-makers and institutions to address issues such as social justice and equity, including questions of not only ‘access’ to institutions but inclusive participation, pedagogies and practices within them. There are a variety of diverse, expanding and changing educational contexts, particularly global higher education as it is changing in the twenty-first century, and learning in forms of formal education such as in schools, colleges, university or higher education and the relations between formal education and employment.

Growing socio-political awareness of the central importance of innovation in universities, colleges and post-compulsory learning makes these fundamental questions. Recent research agendas in globalising higher education have highlighted the problematic nature of the exchange and transfer of knowledge, through rapidly changing forms of digitalisation, understanding and skills between different institutional contexts and their implications for pedagogies and practices between forms of learning, work and employment. These raise questions about equity in learning and work across the life-course and not only in higher education itself. The development of a social scientific understanding of teaching and learning in different settings and of how diverse learning occurs over the life course and across contexts is therefore critical to these questions. Research on diverse learning after the compulsory stage of schooling in a variety of diverse, expanding and changing educational contexts is a vital element of global, regional and national forms of higher education today. This book builds upon precisely these manifold developments in social scientific ways of studying these complex questions.

Several key themes around access, diversity and equity can be identified as a basis for researching these questions from the perspectives of education and social research, namely aspects of the rapidly changing contexts of higher education, state or local policies and institutional forms of higher education and post-compulsory learning; how this expansion of post-compulsory learning and higher education plays out differently from a global perspective with many individuals, institutions and systems at a significant disadvantage compared to others; and conceptual in teasing out and mapping the diverse pathways and transitions individuals follow into higher education, with their origins in differentially structured and inequitable opportunities for education, training or employment; the interaction of learning and identities for adults following different gendered paths through the life course after leaving compulsory education; and new ideas for pedagogies and educational futures for the twenty-first century.

These themes relate not only to the twenty-first century expansions of higher education but also to the historical developments of higher education in relation to globalisation and economic competitiveness in the twentieth century, diverse stakeholders in transforming higher education in the twenty-first century, including national policy-makers and their focus on access and equity policies for widening participation in higher education, and also pedagogies and practices for the future of higher education in the twenty-first century. These then provide the broad context for conceptual understandings of the policies on access, diversity and equity in expanding English higher education relative to other countries in the UK, in Europe, Australasia and the Americas.

3 Origins and meanings of the widening participation in higher education research projects in UK policy context

The UK government, during the first half of the first decade of the twenty-first century, has been eager to develop and extend learning opportunities for both young people and adults, across their life course, to ensure that the education and skills base of the UK economy is internationally competitive. This emphasis in educational policy has built upon previous initiatives in the twentieth century to extend and enhance the UK economy through developments in its skills and knowledge base, including with computer and digital technologies. In keeping with many other industrial countries and in relation to developments in the knowledge industries and economies, this has led to new emphases on how to expand and enhance educational opportunities beyond secondary or compulsory education, and into new and traditional forms of higher education. Deploying new ideas about forms of governance and what have been called new managerialism or neo-liberalism has meant that a variety of new and innovative approaches to education and individual or personal learning opportunities have been tried and tested.

These various policy and governance initiatives have also been associated with new and innovative subjects, disciplines and the uses of new technologies, including education and digital or computer-based, in forms of teaching and learning, as well as in the kinds of appropriate resources and forms of organisation to achieve these developments. Indeed, the pace of developments in the balances between transformations in what has been called ‘the knowledge economy’ and new forms of teaching or learning regimes has become known in some contexts as new forms of ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). In other contexts, economic globalisation is often attributed to these manifold processes.

Widening participation in higher education was not a new policy mantra in the twenty-first century. Indeed, ideas about how to make educational opportunities more equal for various groups such as those in poverty, economically and socially disadvantaged, or on the basis of being working class, from an ethnic or racial minority, and according to gender, had been a policy theme throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Initially, though, it was a theme applied to reconstructing secondary and compulsory education, rather than access to, or participation in, higher education. This was mirrored in policy developments in other countries such as Australia, Canada and the USA, as well as developing countries, such as Brazil, India and Tanzania. The ideas were linked to broad political and democratic campaigns for citizen, civil, social or human rights, including ethnicity, race or gender and played out differently in different national contexts. In the UK a key emphasis was on social class or disadvantage whereas in the USA, given differen...

Table of contents

• Improving Learning TLRP
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I What are the issues?
• Part II What does the research tell us?
• Part III What are the overall implications for both policy and research?
• Appendix 1 Universal Access and Dual Regimes of Further and Higher Education (the FurtherHigher Project)
• Appendix 2 Widening Participation in Higher Education: A Quantitative Analysis
• Appendix 3 Socio-Cultural and Learning Experiences of Working-Class Students
• Appendix 4 Degrees of Success: Learners’ Transitions from Vocational Education and Training to Higher Education
• Appendix 5 Keeping Open the Door to Mathematically Demanding Programmes in Further and Higher Education
• Appendix 6 Learning and Teaching for Social Diversity and Difference in Higher Education
• Appendix 7 ‘Non-participation’ in Higher Education: Decision-making as an Embedded Social Practice
• References
• Index