Research on Social Exclusion: what are the implications for WP

1
Research on Social Exclusion what are the
implications for WP?

• Dr Penny Jane Burke
• Head of School, EFPS
• Institute of Education,
• University of London

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WP Multiple Contexts

• Current trends in adult education policy,
  theory and practice also require interrogation
  and caution. Stirred by the progressive tone of
  some New Labour language, there is a danger that
  rhetorical assertions about the importance of
  widening participation, combating social
  exclusion and recognising social capital, for
  example, take too little account of the material,
  gendered, racialised and ideological context in
  which all these initiatives are located
  (Thompson 2000 8).

3
Access Participation

• Critical concepts of access to and participation
  in HE argue for a deeper level engagement with
  the operation of exclusion
• not only about gaining entry but also more
  complicated issues including access to
  meaning-making and being recognised as a knower
  and as a learner

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Conceptualising social exclusion

• Hegemonic discourses of social exclusion
• Notions of deficit and lack
• Blaming the victim
• Core society
• Lifting barriers
• WP policy and social exclusion
• Aimhigher raising aspirations
• Identifying disadvantaged individuals with
  talent, ability and potential

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Barriers

• The concept of barriers imagines that there are
  concrete obstacles that can be simply removed
• these barriers are important (e.g. financial,
  location, etc)
• However, barriers also works to conceal the
  politics of mis/recognition and
  mis/representation
• operates at the cultural and discursive level
• subtle, difficult to capture, complex about
  struggles over power

6
Critical concepts of social exclusion

• Challenges discourses of deficit and derision
• Considers social exclusion in relation to both
  distribution and recognition
• Distribution of opportunities and resources
• Recognition of difference and in/equality
• Focuses on the politics of identity formation and
  knowledge whose knowledge counts? What kind of
  knowledge is privileged? Who is recognised as
  knowing?
• Also exposes the social practices that perpetuate
  exclusions, inequalities and misrecognitions

7
Fear of failure

• Reays work seeks to uncover how the fear of
  failure leads middle-class parents to adopt
  highly competitive tactics for ensuring the
  reproduction of their privileged position through
  educational markets (Reay 2001 341).
• Reay argues that such tactics serve to deepen
  already existing social divisions in schooling.

8
Re/locating failure

• Middle-class children are learning an important
  lesson about failure and that it is intolerable,
  unwanted and belongs somewhere else. That is why
  contemporary educational policy is so
  paradoxical. It is nominally about raising
  working-class achievement although its practices
  generate the exact opposite, ensuring that
  educational failure remains firmly located within
  the working classes (Reay, 2001 341 342).

9
Naming, being, becoming

• Processes of identification, which involve the
  ongoing project of becoming (Hall 1992), are a
  key part of learning.
• Such processes are shaped by doing as well as
  being, thereby constituting self as (not)
  learner.
• Youdell (2006) develops theories of subjectivity
  by pointing out that the naming of certain
  subjects is also the making of certain subjects.

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Identity and exclusion

• the micro exclusions that take place in the
  most mundane moments everyday inside schools and
  universities cannot be understood as simply
  being experienced by students. Rather these must
  be understood as constitutive of the student,
  constitutions whose cumulative effects coagulate
  to limit who a student can be, or even if s/he
  can be a student at all (Youdell, 2006 13)

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Marginalisation

• Those in marginalized positions are aware of
  their marginalisation
• seek to act in ways to distance themselves from
  the classifications of others
• Yet, they are often unable to escape those
  classifications.
• E.g., in a study of working-class women
  participating on caring courses, Skeggs (1997)
  explains

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Recognising the recognition of Others

• The women in this study are aware of their
  place, of how they are socially positioned and
  the attempts to represent them. This constantly
  informs their responses. They operate with a
  dialogic form of recognition they recognize the
  recognition of others. Recognitions do not occur
  without value judgments and the women are
  constantly aware of the judgments of real and
  imaginary others. Recognition of how one is
  positioned is central to the processes of
  subjective construction (Skeggs, 1997).

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Struggles for recognition

• Policy texts construct the WP student as having
  natural ability yet always posing a threat to HE
  standards.
• Morley (2001) argues that concerns with quality
  and equality are in tension, yet this is not
  addressed in policy and practice.
• Expansion is often seen as placing the University
  at risk notions of potential contamination

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Expansion, Quality WP

• Our overriding priority is to ensure that as we
  expand HE places, we ensure that the expansion is
  of an appropriate quality and type to meet the
  demands of employers and the needs of the economy
  and students. We believe that the economy needs
  more work focused degrees those, like our new
  foundation degrees, that offer specific,
  job-related skills. We want to see expansion in
  two-year, work-focused foundation degrees and in
  mature students in the workforce developing their
  skills. As we do this, we will maintain the
  quality standards required for access to
  university, both safeguarding the standards of
  traditional honours degrees and promoting a
  step-change in the quality and reputation of
  work-focused courses (DFES, 2004 64).

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Contaminating University standards

• WP juxtaposed in policy texts with a concern
  about maintaining standards
• constructs a logical connection between Other
  (WP) student identities and an anticipated
  contamination of HE.
• Ability is constructed through white,
  middle-class, masculine values and judgements
• further implicating the WP student in
  disciplinary regimes of remaking and regulating
  the self (Gillborn and Youdell 2000).
• The project of remaking the self is a fragile one
  in which the subject is in constant danger of
  loss (Reay 2001)
• Working-class subjects engaging in HE are at risk
  of losing themselves through a changing sense
  of subjectivity (Reay, 2001, Burke, 2001)

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Academic exclusive practices

• My work argues that WP policy and practice needs
  to focus on the academic practices which
  privilege particular epistemologies ontologies
  and operate as exclusive mechanisms (whilst
  claiming to be value-free, objective and neutral)
• (see Burke Hermerschmidt, 2005 and Burke, 2006)

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Academic exclusive practices

• The essay is one example of such exclusive
  practices
• Essay writing is often seen as a skill, and as
  such as something which can be taught and learnt
  in a rather straightforward way
• how to write an introduction, how to
  reference, how to structure an argument

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Academic exclusive practices

• Yet essay writing is a social practice, situated
  in particular contexts and communities and
  embedded in taken-for-granted assumptions about
  the nature of knowledge and knowing (Burke and
  Hermerschmidt 2005)

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Academic exclusive practices

• As a social practice, essay-writing requires
  particular kinds of cultural capital and ways of
  doing and being learner.

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Academic exclusive practices

• Essay-writing involves struggles at the
  intellectual and emotional levels
• ultimately about author/ising the self
• the production of an authorial and authoritative
  voice.

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Academic exclusive practices

• It involves complex selection processes
• deemed to be objective
• talked about simply in technical terms of
  referencing and editing
• Yet about meticulous processes of orchestrating
  the voices of the field (Lillis and Ramsey
  1997), while also crafting an authorial voice
  that is recognised as authoritative by
  (legitimated) others in the field.

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Gate-keeping mechanism

• Audience is central in the process and assumes an
  ontological link between self and other
• However, only certain selves and others can be
  recognised through the practice of essay writing
• this demands conforming to the conventions of the
  essay (Lillis 2001).
• Essay-writing requires complex decoding of tacit
  understandings and conventions and as such
  remains mysterious to those on the outside of
  academia.

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Gate-keeping mechanism

• Essay-writing therefore is a highly exclusive
  practice
• serves as a gate-keeping mechanism to ensure
  certain identities are kept out.

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Ontological Epistemological exclusions

• The conventions surrounding the production of
  student academic texts are ideologically
  inscribed in at least two powerful ways by
  working towards the exclusion of students from
  social groups who have historically been excluded
  from the conservative-liberal project of HE in
  the UK and by regulating directly and indirectly
  what student-writers can mean, and who they can
  be (Lillis 2001 39)

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Summary

• WP requires a shift from attention to individual
  learners and teachers to transforming practices
  (e.g. assessment practices, pedagogical
  practices), cultures and institutions
• Challenges to assumptions about the ideal
  student challenging notions of what counts as
  learning and who counts as a learner (Burke
  and Jackson, 2007)

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Summary

• Critical literature on social exclusion helps us
  to understand the importance of both distribution
  and recognition in relation to the politics of
  access
• challenging notions of deficit and lack (e.g.
  material poverty does not translate to poverty of
  aspiration)
• Interrogating discourses of quality and ensuring
  that notions of equity are being addressed within
  quality frameworks
• Interrogating academic practices inclusive
  pedagogies and modes of assessment

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Discussion

• What insights from the critical sociological
  literature can be drawn on to develop strategies
  for widening participation?
• Can you make any connections between the
  theoretical perspectives outlines here and the
  challenges you face in your own professional
  contexts?
• What are the key challenges? What might make a
  difference?