Penny Jane Burke

The right to higher education: beyond widening participation

Introduction Part One: Contextualising Widening Participation 1. Deconstructing the Discourses of Widening Participation 2. Re/conceptualizing Widening Participation 3. Subjects of Widening Participation: identity and subjectivity Part Two: Methodologies and Approaches 4. Methodological approaches 5. Researching widening participation Part Three: Widening Participation Strategies and Practices 6. Raising aspirations: challenging discourses of deficit 7. Fair Access: challenging discourses of fairness and transparency 8. Lifting Barriers: conceptualising inequalities and misrecognitions 9. Professional subjectivities and practices Part Four: Imagining the future 10. Conceptualising WP differently 11. Beyong Widening Participation

Men Accessing Education: Gendered Aspirations.

Raising aspirations has been identified as a key strategy for widening educational participation in lifelong learning policy. This article deconstructs the hegemonic discourse of raising aspirations through Economic and Social Research Council‐funded research on men, masculinities and higher educational access and participation. The article examines the ways that men students on access and foundation programmes talk about their aspirations and considers the multiple influences and practices that shape their decisions to participate in education. It is argued that a range of interlinked, and contradictory, masculine identifications are central to understanding the formation of aspirations, which are not fixed but shifting through different kinds of life and learning experiences, orientations and relations. The article suggests that widening participation policy and practice is too narrowly focused on simplistic notions of ‘raising aspirations’, leaving hidden intricate operations of power, privilege and in...

Men accessing education: masculinities, identifications and widening participation

Drawing on ESRC‐funded research (RES‐000–22–0832), this article examines the accounts of men participating in London access and foundation programmes in relation to their shifting masculine identifications. I consider how the men’s early memories of schooling shape their student masculinities. Their accounts are contextualised in relation to hegemonic discourses of widening participation and neo‐liberalism. Drawing on feminist critique, I pay attention to the men’s self‐regulating practices in their struggle to be recognised as deserving of higher education access and participation. The interconnections and contradictions within men’s identifications across a range of differences are considered in relation to their experiences and imaginaries of accessing higher education.Drawing on ESRC‐funded research (RES‐000–22–0832), this article examines the accounts of men participating in London access and foundation programmes in relation to their shifting masculine identifications. I consider how the men’s early memories of schooling shape their student masculinities. Their accounts are contextualised in relation to hegemonic discourses of widening participation and neo‐liberalism. Drawing on feminist critique, I pay attention to the men’s self‐regulating practices in their struggle to be recognised as deserving of higher education access and participation. The interconnections and contradictions within men’s identifications across a range of differences are considered in relation to their experiences and imaginaries of accessing higher education.

Widening participation in higher education: the role of professional and social class identities and commitments

Since the neoliberal reforms to British education in the 1980s, education debates have been saturated with claims to the efficacy of the market as a mechanism for improving the content and delivery of state education. In recent decades with the expansion and ‘massification’ of higher education, widening participation (WP) has acquired an increasingly important role in redressing the under-representation of certain social groups in universities. Taken together, these trends neatly capture the twin goals of New Labour’s programme for education reform: economic competitiveness and social justice. But how do WP professionals negotiate competing demands of social equity and economic incentive? In this paper we explore how the hegemony of neoliberal discourse – of which the student as consumer is possibly the most pervasive – can be usefully disentangled from socially progressive, professional discourses exemplified through the speech and actions of WP practitioners and managers working in British higher education institutions.

The right to higher education: neoliberalism, gender and professional mis/recognitions

Despite the political commitment expressed through numerous international and national policies to widen educational access and participation, we are living in a time of increased and widening social and economic inequalities. Although we have largely moved from an elite to a mass higher education system in England and in many other countries, those benefitting the most from policies to expand higher education are those with relative social, economic and cultural advantages. Suffering from a recession and financial crisis, the Coalition came into government in Britain with the promise to make ‘tough decisions’, referring to significant funding cuts to the public sector. This has had serious implications for widening participation (WP), with universities increasingly becoming sites of selectivity, marketisation and competitiveness. The decentralisation of WP has relocated the responsibility of widening access and participation to universities themselves, putting increasing levels of responsibility on WP professionals and units. This study draws on research on WP professional subjectivities and practices to examine the current impossibilities of WP and to consider possibilities for sustaining a commitment to social justice and equity in higher education participation.

Art for a few: exclusions and misrecognitions in higher education admissions practices

In this article, we examine the policy and practice of admissions to art and design courses in the context of the UK widening participation (WP) agenda. We draw on our qualitative study of admissions practices funded by the National Arts Learning Network (NALN). To provide context and background, we outline and critique WP policy discourses, focusing on issues of admissions and access, followed by an analysis of our research data, drawing on the conceptual tools of subjectivity and misrecognition. In using this analytical approach, we attempt to expose the subtle and insidious workings of inequality and exclusion in processes of selection. We argue that admissions policy problematically conflates notions of ‘fairness’ and ‘transparency’ and fails to address complex socio-cultural inequalities in processes of recognition of the potential student-subject of art and design. We show how a focus on individual practices rather than on policy discourses and processes of subjective construction helps to hide the ways that ‘potential’ is constructed in ways that privilege and recognize particular student subjectivities, whilst excluding Others.

Re/imagining higher education pedagogies: gender, emotion and difference

This article explores work published in Teaching in Higher Education that critically engages complex questions of difference and emotion in higher education pedagogies. It considers the ways that difference is connected to gender and misrecognition, and is experienced at the level of emotion, often through symbolic forms of violence such as shaming. Through such processes, some bodies are pathologized through misogynistic discourses that manipulate fear of the ‘feminization of higher education’. Characteristics associated with difference in HE, such as ‘being emotional’ or ‘caring’, are regulated and controlled through a range of disciplinary technologies. Pedagogical relations are thus deeply implicated in the gendered politics of (mis)recognition, and profoundly connected to the impact of the emotional on the body and the self. I conclude by re/imagining difference within feminist and critical pedagogies, aiming to open up interventionist spaces that address our relationality with Others.

First Freire: early writings in social justice education

I approached this book with great respect for its author and its subject: both highly influential public educators and major figures in the struggle for social justice within Latin America. As firs...

Masculinity, subjectivity and neoliberalism in men’s accounts of migration and higher educational participation

In this article, I explore men’s educational experiences and aspirations in the context of UK policy discourses of widening participation and migration. Critiquing discourses that oversimplify gendered access to higher education, I develop an analysis of the impact of masculine subjectivities on processes of subjective construction in relation to be(com)ing a university student. Neoliberalism and self‐regulation emerge as significant themes by which the men make sense of their educational experiences and aspirations. Widening participation policy discursively constructs the subject as ‘disadvantaged’, ‘with potential’ and responsible for self‐improvement through participation in (alternative forms of) higher education (HE). The concept of diaspora illuminates the complex ways the men reconstruct their traumatic experiences in terms of hope and possibility, across different cultural spaces and expectations. A key question is how do the men construct and make sense of their masculine subjectivities in relation to diasporic experiences and aspirations to become HE students?

Communicating science: exploring reflexive pedagogical approaches

This paper considers the value of reflexive pedagogical approaches in the teaching of academic communication and writing. We focus on a course developed for pre-degree foundation students at a London higher education institution. Drawing on the students’ learning journals, we examine their reflections of the approaches practised on the course. Reflexive pedagogical approaches place emphasis on the contextualized and subjective learner, challenging dominant scientific discourses and opening spaces for students to critically reflect on their learning experiences and the ways that they can positively build on these throughout their university journeys. The course recognized the students’ contributions and understandings through the group work and their journal writing, shifting the emphasis from outcome to process and from competition to collaboration. However, reflexive pedagogical approaches are problematic and the paper examines the dilemmas that we faced in taking this approach.