Anna Bennett

Experiences of medical students who are first in family to attend university

Students from backgrounds of low socio‐economic status (SES) or who are first in family to attend university (FiF) are under‐represented in medicine. Research has focused on these students’ pre‐admission perceptions of medicine, rather than on their lived experience as medical students. Such research is necessary to monitor and understand the potential perpetuation of disadvantage within medical schools.

‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ aspects of learning as investment: Opening up the neo-liberal view of a programme with ‘high’ levels of attrition

For many decades in Australia, enabling educators have worked to engage people in higher education while remaining on the relative periphery of higher education institutions. Recently, there has been an intensification of focus on the value of enabling education from the government policy perspective of widening access for different equity groups, and from the institution, which increasingly operates with a focus on enabling as a source of student capital. Although different, these rationales - both governmental and neo-liberal - tend to consider the education of the student as a form of investment, conceptualised in the form of a productive, manageable citizen or as a potential source of revenue.

Re/conceptualising time and temporality: an exploration of time in higher education

ABSTRACT In this paper we deconstruct hegemonic conceptions of time in higher education. Drawing on a recent project, we argue that limiting assumptions about time dominate notions of student capability and prospects of success. The paper reveals how the conceptualisation of time is constituted within a framework that individualises and decontextualises difficulties. Within this frame, socio-cultural elitism is left largely unchallenged, with many students left out and misrecognised as purely lacking capability and commitment. Rethinking simple distinctions between ‘time’ and ‘temporality’, we consider ways to broaden understandings to enable a more inclusive and ‘inventive’ system. We apply a Foucauldian analysis to argue that we co-construct the future in the very ways that we react to the present and think about the past. We must recognise that the way we work in the present is how we create the future. Our everyday actions, assumptions and reactions re/produce our futures.

Travels in extreme social mobility: how first-in-family students find their way into and through medical education

ABSTRACT Higher education is understood as essential to enabling social mobility. Research and policy have centred on access to university, but recently attention has turned to the journey of social mobility itself – and its costs. Long-distance or ‘extreme’ social mobility journeys particularly require analysis. This paper examines journeys of first-in-family university students in the especially high-status degree of medicine, through interviews with 21 students at an Australian medical school. Three themes are discussed: (1) the roots of participants’ social mobility journeys; (2) how sociocultural difference is experienced and negotiated within medical school; and (3) how participants think about their professional identities and futures. Students described getting to medical school ‘the hard way’, and emphasised the different backgrounds and attitudes of themselves and their wealthier peers. Many felt like ‘imposters’, using self-deprecating language to highlight their lack of ‘fit’ in the privileged world of medicine. However, such language also reflected resistance to middle-class norms and served to create solidarity with community of origin, and, importantly, patients. Rather than narratives of loss, students’ stories reflect a tactical refinement of self and incorporation of certain middle-class attributes, alongside an appreciation of the worth their ‘difference’ brings to their new destination, the medical profession.

Pedagogies of care, care-full epistemological practice and ‘other’ caring subjectivities in enabling education

ABSTRACT This article explores and conceptualises the emergent and historic presence of a feminised pedagogical praxis in Australian Enabling (university access) programs. Analysing a participatory project at a regional university that sought to map these pedagogies, it specifically aims to visibilise the complexities of careful pedagogical practices which challenge deficit and assimilationist renditions of equity and inclusion, and which foster the possibilities for re-narrativisations of self, community and other. Such pedagogical practices not only develop ethics and practices of care but foreground careful recognition of the epistemological contributions of subjects from non-traditional backgrounds. These pedagogies of difference and other pedagogical subjectivities are situated within a broader context in which hegemonic careless masculinities render these transformative feminised pedagogies invisibilised, devalued and denigrated. Our paper concludes with suggestions for the ways in which these pedagogies of care and other caring subjectivities might be nurtured and rendered powerful within our current context.

University Choosers and Refusers: Social Theory, Ideas of “Choice” and Implications for Widening Participation

The purpose of this chapter is to critically interrogate ideas about “choice” and higher education as they are framed in second modernity societies. We argue that “choice” is a Foucauldian-type of problematization, or a key aspect of the social world that, despite appearing to be a common sense norm, is riddled with uncertainty. We demonstrate how the concept of “choice,” as it is framed within the context of second modernity societies and their neoliberal universities, is a problematization by deploying a set of specific theoretical lenses—choice biography, structure and agency, and instrumental rationality. These sociological lenses illuminate why the idea of making choices about going to university is neither as straightforward or as logical as it seems in equity policy and practice.

Global Perspectives on Widening Participation: Approaches and Concepts

The preceding chapters have demonstrated that widening participation (WP) is both an important and a complex issue, and it presents an enduring problematic for improving equity of access and success for people worldwide. This chapter highlights important aspects identified by contributors, not only in terms of outlining the important aspects of WP in their contexts, but also in relation to highlighting general recurring themes about the challenges and benefits to improving equity within increasingly diverse, stratified and complex higher education systems, which are interspersed with opportunities and limitations for equity groups.The preceding chapters have demonstrated that widening participation (WP) is both an important and a complex issue, and it presents an enduring problematic for improving equity of access and success for people worldwide. This chapter highlights important aspects identified by contributors, not only in terms of outlining the important aspects of WP in their contexts, but also in relation to highlighting general recurring themes about the challenges and benefits to improving equity within increasingly diverse, stratified and complex higher education systems, which are interspersed with opportunities and limitations for equity groups.