Access does not automatically equate to success: Diverse learners and the capability to participate in higher education
Event Details
Online event
9 June 2022
Education Research Seminar Series, CERII, School of Education & Social Care, ARU with Prof. Sarah O’Shea (NCSEHE/Curtin Univ., Australia)
About this seminar
In the last decades, many countries have seen significant growth in the diversity and numbers of students attending university. This increasing volume of participants and apparent greater educational accessibility is largely perceived in positive ways, considered to evidence opportunity for social mobility and an assumed equitable capacity to achieve academic success. This presentation seeks to interrogate the ways in which attending university is experienced by learners from more disadvantaged or under-represented groups. Drawing on interviews and surveys with near completing undergraduate students all of whom were first in their family to attend university, the focus will be on the ways in which the students themselves considered the interplay of access and exclusion in their engagement with higher education, particularly the ways in which academic success and persistence was measured and articulated. Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach (1992) was used to ‘open up’ student narratives and reflections to consider the relative freedoms to enact success in this environment. In unpacking the nature of persistence and understandings of ‘academic success’, this session will explore how a truly equitable university landscape is characterised by more than admission and participation rates but also, must consider how the actual lived experiences of individual learners can subtlety inform and underpin engagement.