Widening Participation: Tutors’ and Students’ Views of Relationships and Values on Access to Higher Education Courses in England

Author(s):

Hugh Busher(presenting / submitting)Nalita James Anna Piela

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 09 D, Inclusion and Diversity in Higher Education Settings

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-04

11:00-12:30

Room:

B019 Anfiteatro

Chair:

Hugh Busher

Contribution

Objectives and research questions,

The study reported in part in this paper focused on how economically challenged adult learners on Access to Higher Education (HE) courses in England struggled with institutional and social structures in particular socio-economic circumstances (Foucault, 1977) to attend their courses and pursue the project of the self (Giddens, 1991). Despite the power-invested relationships (Handley et al., 2006) with their tutors and their interactions with each other the students appeared to generate collaborative communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) on their courses, transforming their identities.

Participants in the study, Access to HE students and their tutors were asked about students’ past and present learning experiences, the transformation of students’ views of themselves as learners during the Access course, relationships between students and tutors, and the impact on their learning of students’ socio-economic contexts including their relationships with their families, friends and fellow students.

Theoretical framework

Little seems to be known nationally in England and Wales about mature students’ views of their engagement with learning on Access courses and how these influence their transitions to Higher Education and their shifts in identity (Askham, 2008). Yet about 40,000 students join these courses each year, of whom about 50% are successful in gaining access to Higher Education (QAA, 2012). Those studies that have been carried out tend to regard mature or non-standard students as homogenous groups who are socio-economically and culturally disadvantaged (Warmington, 2002) most of whom hold negative memories of earlier compulsory education (Brine and Waller 2004).

Access to HE courses, requiring less than one year of full-time study, provide a unique route into HE for mature learners, often from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. These courses were originally established in the 1970s in England and Wales, to encourage people to return to education who were ‘excluded, delayed or otherwise deterred by a need to qualify for (university) entry in more conventional ways’ (Parry, 1996: 11) in an attempt to redress the balance of educational disadvantage (Jones, 2006: 485). The courses lead to a diploma that is awarded by regional award validating authorities (AVAs) for vocational education which are regulated by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), an agency of central government in England and Wales. They are designed to provide adult learners with generic skills and subject knowledge in a wide range of areas such as nursing and midwifery, social science, arts and humanities and science and technology to prepare students for study at university. They are usually delivered in Further Education (FE) Colleges which generally offer a collaborative ethos or culture focused around values celebrating mature learners (Warmington, 2002).

Yet, widening participation is a contested notion linked in part to social justice and equality of opportunity and in part to strengthening economic prosperity both for individuals and nationally (Burke, 2007). Despite the rhetoric of ‘access to higher education,’ education policy in England increasingly emphasise strengthening the national economy and lessening youth unemployment (BIS, 2012) rather than creating opportunities to broaden student diversity and encourage participation in HE from non-traditional students. These contradictions face governments across Europe, as countries strive to create mass HE to generate high-skilled labour to compete in a global market (Field et al., 2010). Social and political changes in Europe since 2000 are constructing dichotomies between economic competitiveness and social cohesion which are influencing discussions on the nature of HE (Zgaga, 2009).

Method

The study took a social constructivist perspective (Lave and Wenger, 1991), using a linked case study design (Miles and Huberman, 1994) across seven FE Colleges in the East Midlands of England in 2012-2013. It used mixed methods to triangulate the perspectives of students on Access to HE course within and across colleges to enhance the trustworthiness of the study. Subject to their ethical consent, all Access to HE course students in each college were invited to complete two questionnaires about their views of themselves as learners, one at the start of their course and one at the end, to gain a broad view of their perspectives and to complement the in-depth views gained from the student focus groups and concept maps. In each college, seven Access to HE students were invited to participate in focus group interviews on three occasions during the academic year to track their changing views. We tried to gain as wide a spread of students by social status and subject pathway within the Access to HE courses as possible. Access to HE tutors were invited to take part in individual semi-structured or group interviews on two occasions during the year to provide an institutional perspective on the courses. Data was analysed on a college by college basis as well as across colleges. We had 365 questionnaire responses (out of more than 700 possible replies) from the seven colleges/institutions in the Autumn 2012. Overall, 70% of respondents were female but in College 4 no men answered the questionnaire while in College 6 50 % of the answers came from men. The quantitative data was analysed with simple descriptive statistics while the open-ended answers were scrutinized to generate numeric codes that would help to illustrate trends and patterns within the cohort of the study. The qualitative data from the interviews was audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed using a grounded approach (Corbin and Strauss, 2008) powered by NVivo to construct themes that reflected participants’ own constructs of themselves and their contexts. The visual data from the concept maps, through which students could express their views visually of their transitions and transformations was analysed hermeneutically (Prosser, 2006).

Expected Outcomes

Although the Access to HE courses seemed to become communities focused on an enterprise of learning, they involved power and negotiation between tutors and students about means and ways of learning and the construction of acceptable knowledge outcomes. These negotiations were between tutors and students who had asymmetrical power relationships (Handley et al., 2006) but ones in which tutors gave students access to knowledge and skills needed to gain the Access to HE diploma, while students had access to their own sources of power that could inhibit Access tutors from governing the courses without their agreement or making extensive demands on tutors’ time. In these hierarchical communities, tutors exercised formal authority and played important boundary or peripheral roles, as models of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) predict, negotiating with college leaders and Access to HE diploma awarding bodies how to meet the demands of the curriculum and policy contexts in which the learning communities were located. It left them socially slightly apart from the students, but allowed them to project power to steer the community in directions to make learning as successful as possible by asserting particular values (Lave and Wenger, 1991) to encourage student engagement with learning. Under the guidance of the tutors, participants constructed cultures at the core of which were respect for other people, collaborative working and purposeful activity. Collaborative cultures are said to be at the core of learning communities and communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991).To facilitate this tutors provided students with support and facilitation of learning as well as care and support personally. These courses cultures reflected what are said to be stereotypic FE college cultures (Warmington, 2002), helping students to become independent learners and meet the demands of their course validators and course providers.

References

Askham P (2008) Context and identity: exploring adult learners experiences of higher education, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 32 (1)85-97. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) (2012) Government response to ‘Students at the heart of the system’ and ‘A new regulatory framework for the HE sector’, Available online at: http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/higher-education/docs/g/12-890-government-response-students-and-regulatory-framework-higher-education Brine, J. and Waller, R. (2004) Working class women on an access course: risk, opportunity and (re)constructing identities, Gender and Education, 16 (1) 97-113 Burke, P. J. (2007) Men Accessing Education: Masculinities, Identifications and Widening Participation, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28(4) 411-424. Corbin, J., and Strauss, A. (2008) Basics of qualitative research : techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory 3rd ed. Los Angeles, Calif. & London : Sage, Field, J., Merrill, B., and Morgan-Klein, N. ‘Researching Higher Education Access, Retention and Drop-Out through a European Biographical Approach: Exploring similarities and differences within a research team’, European Society for Research on the Education of Adults, Sixth European Research Conference, University of Linköping, 23-26 September 2010. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Allen Lane Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Handley, K., Sturdy, A., Fincham, R. & Clark, T. (2006) Within and Beyond Communities of Practice: Making Sense of Learning through Participation, Identity and Practice, Journal of Management Studies, 43, 641-653 Jones, K. (2006) Valuing diversity and widening participation: The experiences of Access to Social Work students in further and higher education, Social Work Education, 25 (5), 485-500. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miles, M. B, and Huberman, M. (1994) Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook, C.A., Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications Inc Parry, G. (1996) Access education in England and Wales 1973–1994: from second chance to third wave, Journal of Access Studies, 11, 10–33. Prosser, J. (2006) Image-based research: a sourcebook for qualitative researchers. London: RoutledgeFalmer Quality Assurance Agency (2012) Access to Higher Education: Key Statistics Warmington. P. (2002) Studenthood as Surrogate Occupation: Access to HE Students' Discursive Production of Commitment, Maturity and Peer Support, Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 54 (4) 583-600. Zgaga, P. (2009) Higher Education and Citizenship: ‘the full range of purposes’ European Educational Research Journal, 8 (2) 175-188.

Author Information

Hugh Busher (presenting / submitting)

University of Leicester

School of Education

Keyworth

Nalita James

University of Leicester, United Kingdom

Anna Piela

Leeds Trinity University

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