Sarah O’Shea

I 'feel' like I am at university even though I am online. Exploring how students narrate their engagement with higher education institutions in an online learning environment

This article outlines a collaborative study between higher education institutions in Australia, which qualitatively explored the online learning experience for undergraduate and postgraduate students. The project adopted a narrative inquiry approach and encouraged students to story their experiences of this virtual environment, providing a snapshot of how learning is experienced by those undertaking online studies. The study explores what impacted upon students’ engagement in this environment and how different facets of their learning experience made a qualitative difference to how individuals enacted engagement. Drawing upon Sharon Pittaway’s engagement framework, the article seeks to foreground student voice as the learners define their engagement in learning, the strategies they employed to assist this process and how engagement was enacted at an individual level. The students’ reflections presented in this article can be used to inform teaching and learning strategies designed to improve engagement in the online environment within the higher education sector.

Discourses of betterment and opportunity: exploring the privileging of university attendance for first-in-family learners

ABSTRACT Much of the literature on university access and participation positions people from disadvantaged backgrounds as those who have not ‘traditionally’ attended university. Certain student cohorts are presented as lacking the skills or requisite knowledges to achieve academic success, requiring additional assistance from institutions to address these gaps. Rather than approach such students from a position of ‘lack’, this article problematises the concept of privilege, particularly as this relates to the perceived benefits of university attendance. Drawing on rich qualitative interviews with first-in-family students, this article discusses the nature of these learners’ expectations of university, particularly those related to the promise of a more secure financial future. In unpacking these constructs and interrogating the ways in which higher education sectors are located within discourses of betterment and opportunity, deep insight is offered into the embodied and experiential nature of university for these students and their families.

Australia’s supervising teachers: motivators and challenges to inform professional learning

ABSTRACT This paper offers an overview of what motivates and challenges Australian supervising teachers to work with preservice teachers in their classrooms. In the contemporary Australian context of new National Professional Standards for Teachers, a new national curriculum and new standards for Initial Teacher Education programs, what motivates and challenges supervising teachers becomes a focus for professional learning through analysis presented in this paper. Data are reported from a national data set that includes 314 responding supervising teachers who took the Mentoring Perspectives Inventory from 2012–2014. The MPI data are aggregated in this paper to suggest that the wider system of teacher education could benefit from attention at various levels of interest to develop the underlying knowledge base of supervising teachers and our understanding of how they are challenged and motivated in their work with preservice teachers.

Motivated Men: First-in-Family Male Students

While first-in-family (FiF) women’s experience of attending university has been examined in a growing body of literature, there has been little attention to the experiences of FiF males. This chapter presents an account of the motivations, transitions and participations of FiF male students using a narrative gender framework. The analysis especially privileges the idea of situated and relational masculinities (Hopkins and Noble, 2009). Age was found to be the chief organising category of their experiences structuring their embodied life course. Three main age and relational masculine performances emerged from these men’s stories, namely those of the Fathers, the Self-Starters and the Sons. Working to achieve or enact the breadwinner model of masculinity was found to be the dominant motivator behind their gender performances.

Trailblazing: Motivations and Relationship Impacts for First-in-Family Enabling Students

This chapter investigates the experiences of first-in-family (FiF) enabling students as they reflect on their participation in university. Due to the widening participation agenda, this cohort is increasing annually in Australia although they are little researched. The data have been harvested from interviews and surveys and analysed using biographical method to explore these enabling students’ motivations and relationship impacts. The chapter shows how their motivations are deeply embedded and complexly formulated within temporal and relational contexts as well as within their broader social, cultural and economic locations. Their trailblazing engagement in higher education (HE) is shown to be a social as much as an individual action, having impacts far beyond the transformations that the enabling learner personally experiences.

The Lack of What …? : First-in-Family Learners and Their University Experience

This chapter explores how the first-in-family (FiF) cohort is theorised and defined in various geographical and cultural contexts. Beginning with a critique around a lack of clarity of this cohort, the chapter moves to a review of related topics within the broad field of university participation and student engagement. O’Shea, May, Stone and Delahunty demonstrate the ways in which the FiF group is collectively framed as ‘lacking’. This deficit is articulated through reference to cultural, social, familial, academic and economic capitals. The chapter discusses how this focus on lack only serves to further disenfranchise these learners, arguably contributing to a pervasive sense of dislocation within the higher education environment. Chapter 3 continues this discussion by ‘disrupting’ this deficit framing through reference to narrative vignettes derived from the research projects.

Disrupting the Deficit: Beyond Notions of Lack for First-in-Family Students

This chapter draws upon a strengths perspective that seeks to frame first-in-family (FiF) students not as ‘lacking’ or as ‘deficit’ but rather as a cohort replete with cultural wealths. Building on Bourdieuian theories and referring explicitly to the work of Yosso (2005), the capabilities and cultural strengths of this older FiF cohort are revealed. The chapter provides a relational understanding of this student experience that considers the wider dynamics of learners’ lived realities. In exploring these unique contexts, three richly descriptive vignettes are featured and these are discussed collectively. This discussion reflects both upon the constraints that are expressed by the older learners as well as the personal strengths each story reveals about the narrator.

‘So How Was Big School Today?’ Family Perceptions of HE Participation

O’Shea, May, Stone and Delahunty have indicated how attending university for first-in-family (FiF) students can lead to significant personal transformation but highlight how the embodied nature of this experience can remain hidden or overlooked in the literature. Equally, the effects that university participation has on those around the student remain unclear, particularly understandings about how their attendance impacts upon the perceptions and ambitions of significant others. This chapter seeks to explore the reactions of family members to this higher education (HE) odyssey, particularly how this decision reverberated within the household. Findings indicate that university participation does not only impact on students in an emotional and potentially transformative sense but also on those closest to them, leading to new conversations in the home place and in some cases, broader educational futures.

The Online Student Experience: New Challenges for Engagement and Support

Online learning has an important place in widening access and participation in higher education (HE) for diverse student cohorts. One cohort taking up online study in increasing numbers is that of mature-age first-in-family (FiF) students. This chapter looks at the experience of 87 FiF students, for whom the opportunity to enrol in online undergraduate studies through an open-entry pathway, made it possible for them to embark on a university education. In-depth interviews and surveys were conducted with these students as part of a wider study into FiF students described in Chap. 1 of this book (Study B). Findings include the important role that opportunity plays in providing the impetus for study, as well as the importance of support and encouragement from family, friends, colleagues and institutions in being able to continue the journey.

Parents Managing University and Family Life

Many first-in-family (FiF) students begin their university journey not as traditional school leavers, but as mature-age students who have busy family lives, often with young children, as well as working lives to manage. While families can be powerful sources of inspiration, support and encouragement, their demands and expectations can also be problematic and stressful, at times needing careful negotiation. This chapter explores the role that family played in the lives of the mature-age students with children, who formed a significant part of the cohort in Study B. The positive contribution of family, the challenges arising from family needs and demands, and the implications of gendered practices of child care and domestic responsibilities are examined. This chapter also points to the need for institutions to better understand and accommodate the particular needs of parent-students.