The Educational Attainment Of Minority Ethnic Students At University: The Rhetoric And The Reality

Author(s):

Ratha Perumal(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 01 B,

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-22

13:15-14:45

Room:

K5.05

Chair:

Helen Avery

Contribution

I am a senior lecturer at the Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London (UEL), with research interests that include a focus on issues in educational (in)equality, from a language perspective, in compulsory and post-compulsory education. I have been employed by UEL for 11 years, initially as an hourly-paid, part-time lecturer. During this time, I gained an MA in Education, and am now a doctoral student and full-time member of academic staff at UEL. I self-identify as a member of a minority ethnic group and find the rich cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity encountered in the undergraduate and postgraduate students I teach to be one of the most inspiring aspects of my work. Virtually all the students I work with here are committed to their studies and the potential improvement to their lives (and that of their families) that such academic qualifications can confer. They are ambitious and determined to do well in their lives and careers.

So, it is troubling that academic research continues to consistently identify ‘gaps’ in the attainment of minority ethnic learners in education across Europe (Strand, 2008; 2014; PISA, 2015). In the UK, such ‘gaps’, or differential outcomes, extend beyond compulsory education, to university attainment – in the degree classifications that minority ethnic graduates achieve in comparison to white British students – and also in the jobs that minority ethnic graduates secure after University. Recent data and research confirm the persistence of such differential outcomes for minority ethnic students at University (HEFCE, 2014), but do not appear to have engaged meaningfully with minority ethnic students themselves to better understand its causes (Mountford-Zimdars, et al., 2015).

Students who self-identify as British Minority Ethnic (or BME) make up a significant proportion of the undergraduates who study at UEL. Institutional data also points to similar patterns of differential outcomes among this group of students (UEL, 2015).

This research will investigate this phenomenon by gathering information from minority ethnic students themselves, to see what (if any) causes can be identified from their views that might explain these statistically discernible differential outcomes.

Bourdieu’s (1977) theoretical constructs of capital, habitus and field, will be used to examine the university experiences of BME undergraduate students. This information may offer explanations for the ways minority ethnic students behave in events and situations that they encounter in their daily lives that are influenced by their previous experiences of society and education (Reay, et al., 2009).

Bourdieu's constructs have, in recent times, been nuanced by the work of contemporary researchers such as Shah, Dwyer & Modood (2010) and Basit (2012), which engage more relevantly with issues relating to the educational experiences and attainment of minority ethnic learners in contemporary times. Research by Bowl (2004) on non-traditional entrants to higher education will also feature, particularly in the ways she engages Bourdieusian theory with contemporary educational issues and concerns.

It is expected that the conclusions derived from the analysis will offer some insight into the possible explanations for the differential outcomes for minority ethnic students at university.

As a researcher who was once herself a minority ethnic University undergraduate, this issue has particular resonance for me, and the answers I uncover are as relevant to my students’ future success as they are for me – to better understand the then unidentified, unacknowledged influences on my own academic attainment.

Method

Methodology: The HEFCE (2014) data suggests that the lived experiences of minority ethnic students at university is different from the experience of the white majority at university; and that such differences are sufficiently profound to exert a downward influence on their academic outcomes in higher education. It is also likely that such university experiences are influenced not only by events, interaction and activity during their three years of undergraduate study, but also by individuals’ daily experiences of life that pre-date entry to higher education. Bourdieu’s theoretical framework (1977) on cultural capital, habitus and field is a useful starting point with which to examine the university experience of minority ethnic students. These concepts offer an explanation of the ways in which behave in events and situations that they encounter in their daily lives that acknowledge the influence of their previous experiences of society and education. In recent years, the Bourdieusian framework has been refined to engage with and interrogate the multiple diversities that are now a common feature of our contemporary world – specifically, the cultural capital and habitus of minority ethnic groups who now also inhabit the fields of education, employment and society generally. This has led to the very welcome introduction and consideration of more nuanced constructs such as ‘ethnic capital’ (Shah, Dwyer & Modood; 2010) and ‘aspirational capital’ (Basit, 2012), that – their authors assert – engage more relevantly with issues relating to the educational experiences and attainment of minority ethnic learners; such ideas, it is suggested, go some way to explain the differences in their attainment at both compulsory and post-compulsory levels of education (Perumal, 2015; Bowl, 2004). The data and responses gathered from minority undergraduate students will be considered to understand their social and educational experiences in ways that might enable a better understanding of how (if at all) those experiences might provide an explanation for the differential outcomes at university and beyond. Research instruments: Fieldwork data will be gathered in semi-structured interviews with participants, in other discussions with and observations of participants’ interaction with each other, at on-campus and off-campus locations. Such data will be audio-recorded and transcribed in readiness for analysis.

Expected Outcomes

It has been asserted that the critical omission in the statistical data from HEFCE is the voice and views of the students themselves, views that might provide an explanation for the underlying reasons for the existence of the gap in university attainment and outcomes between minority ethnic students and the rest of the population of university students (HEFCE, 2014). Bourdieusian theory of capital, habitus and field is advanced as a possible explanation for the presence of this gap in attainment. It is argued that minority ethnic students – by their social and cultural characteristics – can be regarded as a ‘subordinated social group’ (Reay, 2004, McClelland, 1990) within Bourdieu’s constructs of capital, habitus and field – and this paper will tentatively map their key characteristics to that framework, and posit Bourdieu’s hypotheses of ‘disjuncture’, ‘discomfort’, and ‘des miraculés’ as possible explanations for the differences in attainment and outcome (1992). Whilst this approach is not without its challenges (Stahl, 2013; Sullivan, 2003), this Bourdieusian framework is a potentially useful conceptual tool with which to engage with this concern. This research will test this hypothesis, with key research design elements that are intended to address the gaps/omissions in the initial report (HEFCE, 2014), such as the subordination of the student voice/views in their findings. The data gathered will be interpreted from a Bourdieusian perspective, whose social constructs – see above - will also inform the analyses. In this research, it is intended that minority ethnic students’ voices will play a central role throughout, and offer a much-needed ‘human’ context to the statistics that pronounce on the presence of the gap in attainment in outcomes at and beyond university between them and their white British counterparts.

References

Basit, T.N. (2012) ‘My parents have stressed that since I was a kid’: Young minority ethnic British citizens and the phenomenon of aspirational capital. Education, Citizenship & Social Justice, July 2012 (2), pp129-143. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.-C. (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage Bourdieu (1992) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bowl, M. (2003) Non-traditional entrants to higher education: ‘they talk about people like me’. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. McClelland, K. (1990) Cumulative disadvantage among the highly ambitious. Sociology of Education, 63(2) pp102 – 121 Mountford-Zimdars, A., Sabri, D., Moore, J., Sanders, J., Jones, S. & Higham, L. (2015) Causes of differences in student outcomes. HEFCE: London Reay, D. (2004) “‘It’s all becoming a habitus’: beyond the habitual use of habitus in educational research.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 25 (4): 431-444. Reay, D., Crozier, G. & Clayton, J. (2009) ‘Strangers in paradise?’: Working class students in elite universities. Sociology 43(6), pp.1103 – 1121. Shah, B., Dwyer, C. & Modood, T. (2010) Explaining educational achievement and career aspirations among young British Pakistanis: Mobilising ‘Ethnic Capital’. Sociology, December 2010, Vol.44 (6), pp1109–1127. Stahl, G. (2013) Habitus disjunctures, reflexivity and white working class boys’ conceptions of status in learner and social identities. Sociological research online 18(3) 2. [Available online at http://www.socresonline.org.uk/18/3/2.html#thorpe2010, accessed 12th August 2015]. Strand, S. (2008) Longitudinal Study of Young People in England. DCSF: London Strand, S (2014) ‘School effects and ethnic, gender and socio-economic gaps in educational achievement at age 11’, Oxford Review of Education. 40(2) 223-245. Sullivan, A. (2002) “Bourdieu and Education: how useful is Bourdieu’s theory for researchers?” The Netherland’s Journal of Social Sciences 38 (2): 144-165

Author Information

Ratha Perumal (presenting / submitting)

University of East London, United Kingdom

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