Researching Student Learning in Higher Education

A social realist approach

Jennifer M. Case

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135120849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Many contemporary concerns in higher education focus on the student experience of learning.With a larger and much more diverse intake than ever before, linked with a declining unit of resource, questions are being asked afresh around the purposes of higher education. Although much of the debate is currently focused on issues of student access and success, a simple input-output model of higher education is insufficient.

This book turns this conversation on its head, by inserting a full consideration of student agency into the context of higher education.Working sociologically, it explores the influence of the social context on what the individual student achieves. The theoretical tenets of a social realist approach are laid out in detail in the book; the potential value of this approach is then illustrated by a case study of student learning in engineering education.Employing Margaret Archer's social realist theory, an analysis of student narratives is used to work towards a realist understanding of the underlying mechanisms that constrain and enable student success.Building on this analysis, the book develops a novel set of proposals for potential ways forward in improving student learning in higher education.

Part I

Setting the scene

The educational literature – both popular and serious – is full of rhetoric. Some accounts offer a golden past. What all offer is a contemporary state of crisis and the need for radical change. How can we think our way through all of this? Here an attempt is made to locate the current debates in higher education both historically and philosophically. In Chapter 1 a measured argument is made for how we might think of contemporary challenges in higher education, and the potential value, therefore, of student learning research. This then moves in Chapter 2 into a consideration about how such research might be conducted, arguing for the limitations of approaches that focus either purely on context (in a deterministic form) or on the individual (equally deterministic but unrelated to anything else). The conclusion is that a sophisticated sociological approach will be needed in order to do justice to the demands for a nuanced and productive line of research in this field.

Chapter 1

Contemporary challenges in higher education

There is a vibrant scholarship currently engaged with higher education, in both its international and South African contexts, and this chapter cannot hope to do justice to the full scope of those arguments. Towards the purposes of this book, however, salient issues will be outlined in this chapter.

The contemporary global higher education landscape

The global landscape of higher education has seen dramatic changes over the last relatively short period of time. On a growth trajectory since the middle of the twentieth century, participation in higher education continues to expand, now at an inexorable pace in contexts like India and China but with steady pressure everywhere. In 1970, there were just over 28 million students enrolled in higher education across the globe, with 75 per cent of these in the wealthy West. By 2006, with the world’s population having nearly doubled, the number of students in higher education had increased just over five times to nearly 144 million. At this point just over 40 per cent of these students were in the West (Unterhalter & Carpentier 2010). And this growth trajectory has been exponential over this period, with nearly half of the absolute growth over this period happening in the first few years of the new century. A key contemporary scholar who documents and analyses these trends is the Australian, Simon Marginson, and his work will be drawn on extensively in the discussion that follows.

Reflecting during the 1970s on the post-war growth in participation in higher education in Western democracies, an American scholar, Martin Trow, introduced a conceptual framework that has had enduring utility (Trow 2006), distinguishing between the traditional elite systems, which take under 15 per cent of the age cohort into higher education and a mass higher education, which works with a larger and broader group. Once participation is beyond 50 per cent, Trow describes this as a universal system. Significantly, Trow suggests that these different systems, by virtue of the proportion of the population in their intake, tend to be related with different functions. Elite higher education, working with a highly selective group, has changed from a focus on producing the ‘cultivated gentleman’ but still works with a group that have ambitions to be leaders in society, and these universities are set up to nurture these ambitions. Mass systems tend to be focused more on skills and preparation for particular vocational roles – by definition one cannot assume that up to 50 per cent of the age cohort will become leaders in society. Of course, elite institutions can and still do exist within a broader system that has mass participation. Once a country has higher education participation beyond 50 per cent, graduateness is no longer an assurance of anything special – Trow argues that in these cases, where university participation becomes similar to school participation, the system is geared towards adapting a whole population to a context of rapid change.

It is hardly surprising that in most places the growth in student numbers with a move away from elite participation towards mass and even universal participation has not been matched with a concomitant growth in state resource. Even in countries in South East Asia where dramatic growth in higher education has been largely state-directed, increasingly there is an expectation on students and their families to be contributing towards the cost of their studies (Marginson 2011). In many countries, universities are now required to achieve more with less state resource. This has been particularly notable in parts of the industrialised world where a set of government policies focused towards the welfare state made way in the 1980s for the harsh dictates of neo-liberalism. The paradigmatic case here is the UK, where in recent times there has been a rapid departure from full state funding of higher education towards a system driven by student fees. In low-income countries, state funding for higher education has typically not been able to keep pace with the exploding demand, and in many contexts private providers have moved in swiftly. The international movement of students from poor countries to obtain qualifications in rich countries is a largely post-war phenomenon, which has further intensified in recent times: between 1995 and 2004 the number of students studying outside their country of citizenship increased from 1.3 million to 2.7 million (Marginson 2008).

Higher education has truly become a global phenomenon in many respects. Marginson (2006: 57), recognising a radical increase in cross-national flows of staff and students, knowledge and ideas, states that ‘For the first time in history we can talk about “the university” in terms of not just a national field but a global field.’ We are all aware of the dramatic technological advances that have made this possible – most notably in the area of networked communications and computer power, but also in the availability of relatively cheap air travel. Marginson also cautions, however, that we need to recognise that despite these changes on the global level there remains considerable national and indeed local variation in higher education. We need to avoid simplistic arguments and recognise that the changes we see in higher education, indeed its transformation in global terms, is ‘never so complete, nor solely engineered from above by managers and governments, let alone cosmic forces of “capitalism” and “globalisation”’ (Marginson 2006: 46).

Those of us living in the Anglophone world need particularly to note that the way we tend to talk about higher education, especially our obsession with international rankings and our implicit valorisation of a Harvard/Oxbridge model, is maybe not as widespread as we might assume. Marginson (2006) challenges these normative assumptions by lifting out exemplars from elsewhere, such as UNAM in Mexico, which has 270,000 students and only recently started being selective in admission but which is also one of the world’s top research universities. The massive growth in higher education in South East Asia is also likely in the future to provide a strong challenge to Western ideas on higher education (Marginson 2011).

Rethinking the purposes of higher education

In contemporary times the economic arguments for the value and purposes of higher education have become increasingly salient. Marginson identifies the drivers:

Intensified status competition, locking neatly into neo-liberal government, is reconstituting the field of higher education (Bourdieu, 1988) as a competitive market in private status goods. This, not a structural transformation consequent on changes in scale, is decisive.

(Marginson 2006: 44)

The so-called ‘knowledge economy’ predicates economic growth on the production of appropriately skilled graduates. For the individual there has been a promise of higher earnings following an investment in higher education, but in the post-industrialised West that contract is increasingly broken (Brown et al. 2011). In middle- and low-income countries, the last two decades have seen a massive international policy shift, from a position where the World Bank and others decreed that school education should be prioritised over higher education, to a situation where higher education is now seen as the panacea to a range of societal and economic challenges.

A trenchant criticism of a narrow conception of the purposes of higher education, linking education too closely to employability, and economic growth too closely to broad social well-being, can be found in the work of American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum. Drawing on the work of Sen, she argues for a broader understanding of the relationship between higher education and human development (Nussbaum 2010). Crucially, she argues that a view of national progress that focuses solely, for example, on average Gross Domestic Product (GDP), can mask massive inequities in society. To advance in GDP terms, a nation need only educate a small technical elite. Importantly, to achieve this successfully, that small elite should not be exposed too much to critical thinking or indeed to any views that might have them questioning the basis for economic development. To illustrate these dangers, she draws on work in the Indian state of Gujarat, which has achieved massive technological and economic progress, but where many parts of that society remain destitute. She notes that in her perspective it is not a choice between economic development or human development, but rather that the broader view on human development also encompasses economic development.

To be able to find our way through this minefield we need a careful consideration and restatement of what the purposes of higher education might be. Noting again the differentiation across the sector both within and across countries, we need to know how to ask this question. South African sociologist and scholar of higher education, Saleem Badat, cautions well against a functionalist approach:

The meaning of higher education and universities cannot be found in the content of their teaching and research, how they undertake these, or their admission policies. Instead, the core purposes of higher education and universities reside elsewhere.

(Badat 2009: 4)

Drawing on contemporary scholarship, Badat (2011) asserts two core purposes for higher education:

1. The production of knowledge – which advances understanding of the natural and social worlds, and enriches humanity’s accumulated scientific and cultural inheritances and heritage.

2.The dissemination of knowledge – and the formation and cultivation of the cognitive character of students.

With regard to the so-called ‘third mission’ of the university, community engagement, Badat (2011) grapples with whether this is a third purpose or not but resolves that it is better seen as a role that needs to be in alignment with the two purposes; it is not a purpose in and of itself for the university.

A key issue at stake is whether the purposes of the university should be primarily oriented towards public or private goods. Marginson (2006), although acknowledging that these are concepts that have shifted over time, responds to this debate by drawing on classic liberal theory, which distinguishes between individual and collective goods. On this basis public goods are defined as (i) non-rivalrous, i.e. they can be consumed by any number of people without being depleted, and (ii) non-excludable, i.e. the benefits cannot be confined to individual buyers. On this basis it can be argued that university education and research, meeting most of these characteristics, are ‘part-public’ goods. It is also true that university education does confer private goods on individual graduates in their potential income and other benefits post-graduation, but the argument here is that to confine the purposes of universities to this outcome is to sell them very short. Even the view that sees the public good as the cumulative outcomes of many individual private goods is limited, as is that which confines public good to a consideration of economic public good.

There is a growing corpus of work in higher education scholarship, then, that is developing a nuanced and detailed understanding of the ‘public good’ purposes of higher education. A recent book by British scholar, Jon Nixon (2011), focuses on the ways in which the capacities that universities seek to develop in their students can be conceptualised as benefiting the public good. He summarises these as three core capacities, viz. (i) capability, (ii) reasoning together and (iii) purposefulness. Human capability theory, developed by Walker (2010) and based on the work of Sen and Nussbaum, is employed here by Nixon towards a perspective that focuses on students being able to ‘to gather their abilities and achievements, their gifts and talents, their failures and disappointments, and make of them lives that are worthwhile both for themselves and others’ (p. 83). Collective human reasoning is going to become increasingly important as a capacity for the survival of our species in the context of a resource crisis, yet we can note that higher education as currently constituted focuses almost exclusively on individual achievement. With regard to purposefulness, Nixon notes our current ‘back-to-front’ ontology, where school leavers are required to work out ‘what they want to be’, and then almost work backwards from that projected future. In its stead, Nixon emphasises figuring out what you want to do with your life, an ongoing process of ‘working our lives forward’.

To avoid being caught between the limitations of a functionalist approach or indeed what some might term an idealist approach, we need to go back to consider what it is that makes the university a distinct form, a particular space where certain things are possible that are not possible in other societal institutions. Here, the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has great relevance, as summarised by Marginson (2006: 51): ‘Bourdieu’s insight was that the autonomy of universities has enabled them to evolve distinctive forms of inner life and modes of social value.’ Bourdieu’s understanding of the university as a field allows us to account both for the way it deals with the external world, refracting external demands and thus modifying them into forms that suit its own inner logic (Maton 2005). A recent PhD study by Bruce Kloot shows how South African universities have refracted pressures from the external political environment to produce foundation programmes that both satisfy (to some extent) these external pressures as well as leaving the core workings of the university unchanged (Kloot 2011).

Marginson neatly summarises this as follows:

What makes universities socially distinctive is that they are self-reproducing, knowledge-forming organizations. They are defined by the binary between the known and the unknown. No other social or economic institution is defined primarily by this binary, although a growing number take it into their operation.

(Marginson 2007: 126)

Moving further in a Bourdieuian vein, Marginson notes how, while sociologists have focused their attention on the capacity of universities to foster (or not) upward social mobility (in economic terms), there has between little attention to what he terms ‘geographical’ and ‘cultural’ mobility. A univers...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series editors’ introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Setting the scene
• PART II Building a theoretical framework
• PART III Developing a case study in engineering education
• PART IV Drawing the strands together
• Bibliography
• Index