Class, Race, Disability and Mental Health in Higher Education

Questioning the Access, Success and Progression of Disadvantaged Students

Mike Seal

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350247406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

All universities have to produce plans to eliminate the gaps in access, success and participation of disadvantaged student in higher education, setting targets with regards to Global Majority, working class, disabled and student with mental health conditions. In this book, Mike Seal examines the terminology, theoretical debates and positions, identifies the causes of gaps, and evaluates proposed initiatives. He argues that there is an unexamined assumption that higher education is a 'good thing' materially and intellectually, which demonises those for whom this is questionable. The book also highlights the continuing structural and individual discrimination in terms of class, race and disability and a denial of the extent to which higher education is a cause of mental health issues and negative well-being. It uncovers unexamined 'assimilation' models in higher education that expects these students to abandon their culture and communities, despite students wanting to give back to these communities being a major extrinsic motivation, and to embrace a culture that will not embrace them. The book starts from the perspective that contemporary international higher education reproduces existing privileges, and the book goes on to argue that widening participation agendas should recognise the changing nature of academic life through a more inclusive, holistic approach. Seal argues that it is essential to include an informed understanding of how students position themselves in academia and how their identity and academic status is enabled and developed with the support of the university. In order to do this universities need to redefine their purpose and the nature of their relationships with the communities they purport to serve.

1

Theoretical Perspectives on Widening Participation

Introduction

Higher education is not neutral in what is taught there, who goes there, which institutions groups of students attend, who thrives and what is re-inscribed. Freire sees it as a source of indoctrination ‘Education …. functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity’ (Freire, 2000, p34). Positively he also sees it as having potential to be ‘the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world’ (Freire, 2000, p34). Other authors, such as Hinton-Smith (2018), see the neo-liberal university as promoting the image on an economically solvent, individually orientated, internationally mobile student that positions the marginalized student as deficit, in receipt of an education ‘gift’, and consequently as one who should demonstrate gratitude (Hinton-Smith et al., 2018).

Theories of widening participation should not be neutral and need to have a perspective on higher education and those students who are disadvantaged within it. They also, crucially, need to articulate what needs to change, in policy and on the ground, and have a sound theoretical base. Taking this further, Boeren and James (2017) feel widening participation theories need to be explicit about the theoretical positions that underpin them, as they are often ideologically, and all too frequently ideologically conservative. This chapter will explore these perspectives and the difference debates and narratives of widening participation in higher education.

A historical perspective

Kettley (2007) examines the historical development of widening participation in higher education in the UK comprehensively. He states that educational research was, after 1945, dominated by structural functionalism and social-class analysis. Functionalism also flourished in the United States until the 1970s. Class analysis or educability studies predominated in the British sociology of education until the 1960s. Functionalist approaches tended to view working-class culture as ‘unsuited’ to higher education, and blamed working-class communities and families for this (Kelly, 2007). As Kelly says, ‘this approach to access is inadequate because it dichotomised material and cultural experiences, depicted working‐class culture as pathological and tended to ignore social processes within education’ (Kettley, 2007, p339).

Class-based approaches saw education, including higher education, as a way of controlling or placating the working class. Elsewhere I have traced this Marxist account of education, and how progressive forces have responded in turn (Seal, 2021, Seal and Smith, 2021). I outline a series of turns in the process – the first turn being denial of education to the working class, epitomized by the MPs speech against developing elemental education for them in 1807.

It would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture, and other laborious employments to which their rank in society had destined them; instead of teaching then subordination, it would render them factious and refractory,.. it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors.

(Giddy, 1807, p798)

The progressive reaction was to fight for at least elementary education for the working class, while concurrently creating alternate modes of education for the working classes such as the Workers Educational Association and the Mechanics Institute. The second turn was ruling elites’ acceptance that minimal education for the working class was necessary to improve the economy through skilled labour, but that it should be set to a minimum. Education was to reinforce social distinction and separation, later expressed through private, grammar and secondary modern schools. The progressive response was to demand comprehensive education to degree level for the working classes, although private education and grammar schools for the middle classes were never eliminated.

Ruling elites’ reaction to comprehensive education constituted a third turn in their construction of education for the working classes. It was to ‘manufacture their inabilities’ (Tomlinson, 2017). Education became sedentary in nature, convincing the working classes that education was boring, not for them. It was to be vocational and technical, a transference of set knowledge, rather than seeing students as partners in the creation of it. Education that encouraged true learning was the preserve of private, public and some grammar schools, where students were encultured into the values needed for higher education. Working-class people were encultured into working-class employment, not higher education. Perhaps the most famous account of this is in Willis’s Learning to Labour in 1977, subtitled ‘How Working-class Kids Get Working-class Jobs’.

Policy-wise, the report of the Robbins Committee (1963) was a sea-changing, if not radical, document. It exposed how members of the professional class were thirty-three times more likely to enter HE than their counterparts from semi‐skilled and unskilled backgrounds. This difference was explained in terms of familial, educational and socio‐economic processes, although gender and race were notably absent in its analysis. Moore (1996) in the UK and Bowles, Gintis and Meyer (1975) in the States track the growing post-Robbins influence of neo-Marxist, phenomenological, feminist and ethnographic approaches. Phenomenologists were primarily interested in exploring the stratification of knowledge, knowledge production and de-constructing the curriculum, neo‐Marxists with the reproduction of existing class relations, feminists with the reproduction of patriarchy and ethnographers with the exploration of student life.

Concurrently critical pedagogy grew in Latin America. Its ideas and approaches were first articulated by Paulo Freire (1972) and since developed by authors such as Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, Michael Apple, Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg and Peter Maclaren. It grew out of a concern amongst educationalists with how education was being used as a method to re-inscribe power relations in society, to create a ‘common sense’ that re-inscribed dominant elites’ social positions as ‘natural and inevitable’ and, rather than to develop enquiring minds, to shut them down and make exclusive knowledge creation. However critical pedagogy has rarely flourished in higher education (Cowden and Singh, 2013, Giroux, 2017, Seal et al., 2021) apart from being taught as a mode of education on some of the more radical education studies and youth and community work courses. It has certainly rarely featured in any higher education institution’s approach to widening participations, with the exception of the ‘student as producer’ movement that came out of Lincoln University (Neary, 2016).

Since 1997 there has been a massification of higher education. However, as we shall see, this expansion has not been even across institutions for disadvantaged groups. The old universities, and particularly the Russell Group institutions, remain the privilege of the elites with a smattering of working-class and disadvantaged students to maintain the illusion of meritocracy. Disadvantaged students go to post-1992 universities, which are the higher education equivalent to comprehensive schools. The educational experience is also different. The Oxbridge and Durham models of one-to-one teaching do not prevail in new universities. Instead, lecturer halls of up to 500 students are the norm where critical engagement is not possible. Education is again transference of elite knowledge, with an emphasis on the technical and vocational.

While some post-1992 universities are committed to widening participation (they will all say they are), many would rather have more ‘traditional’ students as widening participation students affect their retention rates negatively, and therefore their position in the leagues tables echoing Parkes et al.’s (2014) analysis that success in higher education, particularly retention, has historically been seen as attributable to entry characteristics such as family, class, race, academic aptitude and economic status alongside the level of student involvement in social and academic activities (Goodenow and Grady, 1993, Walker et al., 2004). This ignores more recent studies that show retention is a much more complex social and cultural picture (Quinn, 2004, Walker et al., 2004) and ‘though many of the aforementioned student characteristics play a part, student persistence is further influenced by the interaction between individuals, institutions and wider society’ (Parkes, 2014, p4).

Kelly and Cook (2007) argue that modern research on widening participation, a field they trace back to the 1980s, has reflected the three distinct and separate strands: a focus on the analysis of rights to education and contestation of policies and constructions of inclusion and exclusion; a focus on social causation, often through measuring participation and quantitative analysis of the barriers to learning; and a focus on social formation through analysing the constructions and meaning of student experiences. Since that article the research base has been extended by a plethora of governmental, managerial and monitoring studies of widening participation as well as more theoretical, ethnographic, feminist and post-modern research and studies of access discourses (Burke, 2002). Kelly (2007) makes a call for research that conjoins exploration of social formation and social causation.

Many contemporary theorists on widening participation use a Bourdieuan analysis, particularly utilizing the concepts of ‘field’, ‘habitus’ and ‘capital’. The field is the social environment, such as university, in which individuals operate. It has its own culture and rules, often not explicit, which, nevertheless, need to be learnt. Bourdieu also saw it as a battlefield, where vested interests may be right for resources, in this case academic achievement and progression, particularly pertinent in days of perpetual accusations of grade inflation. Field is also not neutral. The field invests in certain beliefs, types of behaviour and rituals with the aim of reinforcing a stable relationship between a dominant form of agency and the structure in which it operates. It perpetuates a dominant culture through the ‘orchestration of habitus’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p146). As Bennet et al. (2009) expand, this habitus may not be conscious; indeed higher education often makes a point of its neutrality and seems surprised when those othered have difficulties ‘adapting’.

Authorized/institutionalized knowledge(s), are built up through communal banks of know-how and contain self-celebratory discourses of belonging and surreptitious exclusionary discourses of an Otherness that does not share those views/that knowledge/the specific values contained within them – the largely incognizant ‘rituals of cultural consensus’ – will simply join in and conform.

(Bennet et al., 2009, p251)

Parkes (2014) talks about ‘institutional habitus, which is’ ‘ … the impact of a cultural group or social class on an individual’s behaviour as it is mediated through an organisation in turn, determining … the way in which difference is dealt with, and thus the way students encountering difference for the first time react’ (Thomas, 2002, p439). Institutional structures and attributes can either perpetuate or deconstruct (Seal and Parkes, 2019) the dominant cultures in society through pedagogy and process that socialize and reinforce societal status (Thomas, 2002, Quinn, 2004). Organizational attributes of institutions that go on to influence student persistence should be considered when discussing student retention (Berger and Lyon, 2005, Kuh et al., 2005, Tinto, 2006, James et al., 2016).

Bourdieu believed different levels of access to various forms of capital are the root causes of social inequality, something perhaps magnified in higher education. For Bourdieu ‘capital’ is not just economic, it is cultural and social. He saw a person’s knowledge and tastes as a form of cultural capital, which is ‘institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications’ (Bourdieu, 1986, p245). Social capital is more difficult to define. Bourdieu (2000, p28) described it as ‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’. Or, to put it in more common parlance, ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’.

Social capital is an important factor shaping an individual’s understanding of the world, what Bourdieu called ‘habitus’ and which can be defined as a framework of skills, knowledge and expectations that guide behaviour. Habitus is heavily influenced by personal experiences from upbringing and schooling from an early age. Broadly speaking, if no one in a young person’s family or social circle has been to university, they are less likely to go themselves or feel they fit when they do go exemplified in the phrase ‘it isn’t for the likes of me’. Universities’ middle-class image culture conflicts with a working-class identity.

On a deeper level, one’s habitus has a major influence on the way one performs and situates oneself in the field of higher education. Not knowing the rules that govern the field of action means students cannot situate themselves in the playing field as agents with relative authority. Many authors (Burnell, 2015, Reay, Crozier, and Clayton, 2010) have reported how the habitus of widening participation students is at odds with the activities that direct the field of higher education and which conflict with persisting culture in academia.

Other perspectives have emerged, such as critical race theory, that, similarly to Marxist approaches, see higher education, at least to date, as largely an instrument of control, oppression and social reproduction. Walmington (2020) notes its success in re-igniting the race debate in higher education and that it has helped ‘shape many of the current youthful movements to dismantle racism in higher education, such as ‘Decolonising the University’ and “Why Is my Curriculum White?”’ (Walmington, 2020, p25). We will explore this approach in more detail in Chapter 6.

Underlying narratives and debates around widening participation in higher education

Throughout the literature, there seem to be a number of ongoing debates and narratives around widening participation which need examining. The debates are overt and the narratives less so. Underpinning them, and the different versions of them, are the theoretical wider perspectives mentioned above. It seems sensible to talk about the narratives first, as the debates are, at least in part, attempts to resolve and ameliorate some of these underlying narratives.

The poverty of aspirations narrative

Raising the aspirations of under-achieving young people from deprived backgrounds has been a cornerstone of widening participation policy (Sinclair, McKendrick and Scott, 2010).

As Sinclair et al. (2010) indicate, the concept of aspirations is a key driver in widening participation policy. The ‘poverty of aspirations’ narrative broadly holds that people from deprived communities do not successfully participate in university that they have low aspirations. Interventions should therefore concentrate on raising their aspirations. Behind this is an assumption of the neo-liberal construct of meritocracy, whereby ‘aiming higher’ and working hard will result in economic rewards (Spohrer, 2015, Zipin et al., 2015). Failure to aspire is attributed as the failing of an individual, rather than a structural condition (Bauman, 1998, Archer, 2007). Shildrick, MacDonald and Furlong (2016) link such thinking to the ‘failing families’ agenda and notions of an ‘underclass’ (Murray, 2003). In the next chapter we will explore how this thesis has historically informed much widening participation policy and continues to do so.

It is not that aspirations do not play their part. Gutman and Akerman (2008) and Copestake and Camfield (2010) postulate that there are correlations between low aspirations and low educational achievement, with parental and community influence a key factor (HM Treasury, 2007). However, this is contested. Gutman and Akerman (2008) argue that although constraints have a major impact on aspirations, these do not materialize until the post-school years (between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one). Even if aspirations do play a part, are they truly lower in disadvantaged communities? Cuthbert and Hatch’s (2009) longitudinal case study concluded that almost all parents projected positive aspirations for their children regardless of their social position, contradicting the evidence which suggests that low parental aspirations will lead to low aspirations for children. Cummings et al. (2012) found that most people have high aspirations and attach great importance to education and want to go to university or to attain professional jobs irrespective of barriers and constraints they may face.

Even where aspirations do wain in disadvantaged communities, we need to ask why. Robers and Atherton (2011) reported that at the age of twelve, disadvantaged young people have high aspirations. As we shall explore later, with Global Majority students, why aspirations wain at a certain point is a fundamental question. Several authors (Campbell and McKendrick, 2017, St Clair and Benjamin, 2011) argue that even if aspirations are an issue, individualized solutions are not the solution. Both authors argue that aspirations are embedded within social contexts and are therefore influenced by structural constraints as well as social expectations. Other authors (Hutchings and Archer, 2001, Reay, Crozier and Clayton, 2010) see cultural constraints such as lack of confidence and self-efficacy can result in disadvantaged young people forming low aspirations. We will explore this in more depth in the third narrative. What the aspiration thesis does not take account of is that many from disadvantaged communities may not be suffering from low aspirations but are making a cost–benefit analysis of university and concluding that it is not worth it, either economically or more generally in terms of well-being. These phenomena are explored in more detail in the working-class and Global Majority chapters.

Higher education as inherently ‘good for you’ narrative

HE study and the accumulation of intellectual and social capitals is constructed as an inherent good, linked to individual benefits including higher earnings, increased employability, better health and greater life satisfaction (Naidoo and Callender 2000, BIS, 2013a, Brown, 2013, Purcell et al., 2013). However, existing research into equity and access demonstrates that HE’s ‘premium’ is neither available equally to all, nor experienced unifo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Questioning the Access, Success and Progression of Disadvantaged Students in Higher Education
• 1 Theoretical Perspectives on Widening Participation
• 2 Social and Higher Education Policy and Widening Participation
• 3 Access, Success and Progression of Disadvantaged Students: Case Study of the UK
• 4 Working-Class Students, the Politics of Social Mobility Denied
• 5 Global Majority Students: The Politics of Denial
• 6 Student with Disabilities: The Politics of Marginalization
• 7 Students with Mental Health Issues: The Politics of Complicity
• Conclusion: Setting a Realistic Goal for the Access, Success and Progression of Disadvantaged Students in Higher Education
• References
• Index
• Imprint