Is ‘first in family’ a good indicator for widening university participation?

Universities use ‘first in family’ or ‘first generation’ as an indicator to increase the diversity of their student intake, but little is known about whether it is a good indicator of disadvantage. We use nationally representative, longitudinal survey data linked to administrative data from England to provide the first comprehensive analysis of this measure. We employ parametric probability (logit) and non-parametric classification (random forest) models to look at its relative predictive power of university participation and graduation. We find that being first in family is an important barrier to university participation and graduation, over and above other sources of disadvantage. This association seems to operate through the channel of early educational attainment. Our findings indicate that the first in family indicator could be key in efforts to widen participation at universities.     

Māori university graduates: indigenous participation in higher education

Māori, the indigenous population of New Zealand, are gaining university qualifications in greater numbers. This article describes the history of Māori university graduates, their current situation and the implications for indigenous futures. Section one provides a brief overview of historical policies and practices that, similar to those used on other indigenous populations, resulted in the widespread exclusion of Māori from university education until the 1970s and 1980s. Section two describes findings for Māori university graduates (n?=?626) from the Graduate Longitudinal Study New Zealand (GLSNZ). Results show that nearly half (48.4%) were the first member of their immediate family to attend university. Humanities/education (50.8%) was the most common domain of study followed by commerce (17.7%), science/engineering (15.4%), health sciences (10.9%), law (2.8%) and PhD study (2.4%). More Māori graduates were females (71%). One-third of graduates were parents, and being a parent was associated with a lower likelihood of studying science and engineering compared to those participants without children. The most common areas/fields that participants wished to work in post-graduation were education and training (28.3%), health care and medical (17.4%) and government (11.8%). Despite increases in higher education participation and completion, parity remains an issue. Similar to previous indigenous research findings, Māori are under-represented as graduates (7.1% of the total sample) and in particular as postgraduates (5.8%) considering that Māori constitute 14.9% of the New Zealand population. Contemporary indigenous graduates are critical for indigenous development. Over the next 10 years, the GLSNZ will follow graduates and provide insights into Māori graduate outcomes.     

‘Walking yourself around as a teacher’: gender and embodiment in student teachers’ working lives

This paper considers the psychic and social dynamics reported by student teachers when learning to embody their teacher persona in the secondary school environment. Focusing on gender dimensions of embodiment and drawing on qualitative interview data from a UK study of postgraduate teacher‐training students, teaching is examined as a physical experience. The paper conceptualises findings under two related headings: the appropriately gendered body, signified by heteronormative readings of gender and sexuality; and the gendered authoritative body, conceptualised as male. The ‘teacher body’ emerges as an important element of student teachers’ stories of trying to fit with the new professional environment and the paper concludes by arguing for a consideration of gender and body politics in the practice and training of teachers, thus challenging the assumption that professional occupations are essentially ‘disembodied’ and gender neutral.     

Positioning participation in the NGSS era: What counts as success?

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) strives to shift science learning from the teacher as a single cognitive agent, to a classroom community in which participants are working together in directing the classroom's communal knowledge to figure out questions about how phenomena occur, and building, testing, and refining their ideas to address those questions. To achieve this type of classroom environment, teachers should attend to students' knowledge and ideas and pay attention to how students are located within teacher-led interactions, such as being positioned as active discussants or designated listeners. In this study, we explore if and how this is occurring in the NGSS era. We used a naturalistic inquiry to explore how an experienced first-grade teacher used a new NGSS-aligned unit that called for students to use the science and engineering practices (SEP) to build content knowledge. We used a macro-analytic lens to answer the research question “how are class discussions shaped to address the SEP”? We used a micro-analytic lens to answer the research question “how are students positioned during these science discussions in this classroom?” Evidence suggests that the teachers' whole class discussions incorporated and involved the SEP which were specified in the unit lessons for content learning. However, on a micro-analytic level, we found that few students were positioned as active discussants. The teacher heavily relied on those students who could provide succinct and clearly relevant answers while positioning the remainder of the students as silent spectators. Implications from this research suggest that not only new NGSS curriculum materials need to focus on what students should know and do but they also need to address heuristics for teachers that show them how to position all of their students as active doers of science so all students have opportunities to build deeper, core science knowledge.     

University as vocational education: working‐class students’ expectations for university

Labor market conditions, a pervasive public discourse about the benefits of higher education, and parental hopes push many young working‐class people into university. The institutional culture and demands of university, however, often remain elusive and fraught with uncertainty. In this paper, I draw on qualitative interviews with first‐generation, working‐class students at a Canadian university to analyze the ways in which these students discuss their reasons to attend and their expectations for university, and the implications of their attitudes for their future success at university. Analysis of the interview data shows how the relatively high and risky investment of working‐class youth in education leads to strong utilitarian and vocational orientations toward university. Although a narrow focus on the career potential of university is generally perceived as problematic, I argue that it may also help working‐class students in their transition to university. Nonetheless, a critical educational process is necessary that not only helps working‐class students achieve their educational and occupational goals, but also understand their unique status in a social institution that they entered as outsiders.     

Enhancing graduates’ enterprise capabilities through work-integrated learning in co-working spaces

Higher Education - Complex and rapidly evolving work contexts augment industry calls for future-capable graduates that can demonstrate enterprise capabilities such as critical thinking,...     

Beyond hard outcomes: ‘soft’ outcomes and engagement as student success

This paper questions current policy discourses that equate student success with hard outcomes like retention, completion and employment. It offers another view, one that uses ‘soft’ outcomes and student engagement literature to widen our understanding of student success. In the paper, we first draw on literature to explore student engagement, usually understood as a means to achieve success, and ‘soft’ outcomes as acceptable student outcomes, as success. We present possible indicators for these forms of success and a matrix of factors which influence such success. We then examine these ideas using data gathered from a project that investigated success as experienced by post-school foundation learners in Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The findings suggest that the ideas have value. Finally, we identify some implications for teachers, arguing that, contrary to some current views, all four quadrants in the matrix are the business of teachers.     

Fostering students’ participation in creating educational content through crowdsourcing

This paper proposes and evaluates a model of crowdsourcing in microlearning that includes the balancing of collaborative learning and crowdsourcing mechanisms. The goal of the research is to implement a learner-centered approach through crowdsourced content creation and to improve the process and outcomes of learning. Crowdsourced content creation was accomplished through a collaborative project within a higher education institution. Micro-courses in the form of short video lessons were created by students and published on the Coursmos platform and a certain group of students attended these micro-courses. The evaluation was carried out at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences, the University of Belgrade on a sample of 71 students who created micro-courses and 74 students who attended these micro-courses. The results show that the developed model provides simple communication and collaboration among students, high level of their self-organization and satisfaction, efficient management of crowdsourcing network and collaborative knowledge building.     

The deviant university student: historical discourses about student failure and ‘wastage’ in the antipodes

The emergence of academic development in Anglophone higher education was linked to post Second World War massification and concerns about student failure. These concerns were driven by increasing statistical investigations into student attrition and degree times to completion, particularly in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. There was a dominant discourse about student ‘wastage’ (the deviant student). However, if we fast-forward to the late 2000s, we can see that these discourses have been replaced by discourses about university responsibility and teaching quality. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis, this paper aims to trace the historical roots of contemporary teaching and learning dilemmas and to show how the responsibility for student failure was gradually shifted from perceptions of deviant students to perceptions of teacher ‘deviance’, which academic development units were designed to ameliorate.     

Individual and school factors affecting students’ participation and success in higher education

The purpose of this study is to identify school factors that affect students’ achievements at the secondary and tertiary levels of education. The analysis included data of 9,894 students who studied in Auckland regional secondary schools in 2004. The results indicate that, although student demographic characteristics are associated with students’ pathways and achievements, schools’ demographic composition did not affect student outcomes. It was found, however, that schools’ organisational factors do have an effect. At the university level, none of the schools’ characteristics was related to students’ achievements at the higher end of the achievement scale (GPA ≥ 4). However, students from private or state-integrated schools were found to be more likely to achieve low GPA (<2) than students who came from state schools. In conclusion, it is suggested that interventions targeting at-risk populations based on demographic factors should focus on individuals or groups rather than on institutions; while school-based interventions should identify the schools by their structure and function rather than by their demographic characteristics.

Parents’ participation on school councils analysed through Arnstein’s ladder of participation

Although parent school councils are the archetypal arrangement for engaging parents in school improvement planning, their effectiveness is negligible when it comes to building parents’ capacity for and confidence in educational decision-making. Using Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation, this qualitative case study investigated the nature and degree of parents’ participation on six school community councils (SCCs) in Saskatchewan, Canada. Focus groups and interviews with SCC parent members, and school and district leaders were the chief data sources. In most schools, the SCC structure did not dislodge time-honoured barriers that restricted parents’ influence on extracurricular issues. A conceptual examination of participation affords a process-oriented understanding of parent involvement that complements the existing focus on the factors that impact school council effectiveness as an outcome.     

Teachers’ and principals’ reflections on student participation in a school science and technology competition

Background The European Union asks for renewed pedagogies in schools according to teaching strategies and necessary competences for the twenty-first century, instead of the often-used transmissive pedagogies. The national Swedish competition in science and technology for grade eight, The Technology Eight, provides an opportunity for teachers to work with instructional strategies in line with suggested pedagogies.

Purpose To investigate teachers’ and principals’ reflections on the competition in schools.

Sample Seventeen secondary school teachers and three principals from districts in the south-western part of Sweden participated in the study. All teachers had long experience of the competition, and their classes had reached at least the regional finals during the last year.

Design and methods Semi-structured interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and then analysed using content analysis. Focus was put on why the teachers decided to participate, how the teachers integrated the competition in their education and roles of the principals.

Results There were various reasons for participating in the competition. Teachers reported development of twenty-first-century skills such as better cooperation between the students. They also noticed an increased interest in science and technology and how learning in the subjects was stimulated. Furthermore, the teachers found participation in the competition to be positive for them too. They integrated the competition in ordinary education and gained teaching ideas as well as found connections to the curriculum. Participating in the competition seemed to be a tradition in most of the schools. The principals’ role was to facilitate the organisation around the competition and to provide social support.

Conclusions Participation in a school competition was considered as an instructional strategy with several positive outcomes. Use of this strategy can be supported by earlier suggestions to use pedagogies that are opposite to transmissive methods, enhancing students’ development of important skills for the future.     

Teachers’ use of rational questioning strategies to promote student participation in collective argumentation

Educational Studies in Mathematics - Teachers’ questioning plays an essential role in shaping collective argumentative discourse. This paper demonstrated that rationality dimensions in...     

‘Teaching’ the path towards university: understanding student access through storied-futures and meritocratic grand narratives

The notion that the stories of our lives shape dispositions towards imagined futures is another lens through which university underrepresentation should be viewed. A storied lens attends to how futures, like university attendance, are storied during childhood to the extent that some youth imagine, and therefore plan, these futures as natural progression. Such was the case for study participants, indicating that childhood stories contain answers for mitigating social reproduction connected to parental education and cultural forces within the home. Examining social mobility through the underexplored storied-futures grand narrative presents unique solutions that lay hidden within the dominant meritocratic grand narrative.     

Becoming an educable lifelong learning subject: adult graduates’ transitions in education and working life

Continuous learning and updating one’s competences and abilities have become requirements for staying ‘up-to-date’ and ‘at the top of one’s game’. Lifelong learning policy has been persuasive in its emphasis on equal learning opportunities for all: everyone has endless possibilities and capabilities to learn according to her/his needs and desires throughout life. This discourse has been especially encouraging for the eight Finnish general upper secondary school adult graduates followed in this study; they had received little formal education in their youth or had been labelled as ‘poor’ students at school through the assessment criteria maintained by the schooling system’s prevailing meritocratic discourse. In order to become lifelong learning subjects, they first needed to prove their ability and competence as students and learners, that is their educability. This was also the key for their transitions in further and higher education and working life. Consequently, half of the interviewees told ‘success stories’ about these transitions. Moreover, they continued to have faith in ‘the great salvation of education’ as well as their own educability. For the other half, however, these transitions turned out to be disappointing or perceived as a broken promise. These adults also started to doubt their own abilities as students and learners.     

Farmers’ participation in extension programs and technology adoption in rural Nepal: a logistic regression analysis

Purpose: This paper examines the factors affecting farmers’ participation in extension programs and adoption of improved seed varieties in the hills of rural Nepal.

Methodology/approach: Cross-sectional farm-level data were collected during July and August 2014. A sample of 198 farm households was selected for interviewing by using a multistage, random sampling technique. We employed a logistic regression model, frequency counts, and percentages to analyze the data.

Findings: Adoption decisions were mainly affected by extension-related variables – training, membership in a farmers’ group, and off-farm employment. Extension participation was found to be influenced by socioeconomic variables – age, education, household size, and distance to the extension office. Our findings reveal that distance to the extension office and off-farm employment limited participation in extension activities and adoption, respectively, and education, household size, and group membership stimulated participation in extension programs.

Practical implications: Recognition of the determinants of farmers’ participation in extension services and innovation adoption ensures that targeted extension approaches are used to address these factors in various stages of planning, delivering, and evaluating extension programs.

Theoretical implications: Innovation adoption follows a systematic decision-making process. Although personal characteristics are important, widespread use of new technology requires a conducive social and institutional context. Because contexts vary by country or region, extension services providers should create institutions favorable for innovation adoption within a social system.

Originality/value: This research is original and highly valuable to identify the factors associated with extension participation and innovation adoption in the rural hilly region of Nepal. This also provides a new direction to operationalize farmer-oriented policies of agricultural extension and so can be helpful for agricultural policy-makers in devising programs of extension services.     

Declining quality of Nigerian university graduates： Revitalizing quality assurance through foreign agencies＇ support

Increasing and uninterrupted supply of high-level manpower has become a fundamental pre-requisite for social and economic development of any nation. Hence, the direction of the university education in Nigeria is intensifying and diversifying its programmes for the development of high-level manpower within the context of the needs of the nation. To achieve this, the government of Nigeria initiated higher education policy reforms that intended to bring its university system more in line with international good practices. It is however disheartening to note that the quality of university graduates in Nigeria has continued to decline due to inadequate funding. The focus of this paper is to examine how foreign agencies＇ support would help to increase the quality of Nigerian university graduates.     

Critical pedagogy and emotion: working through ‘troubled knowledge’ in posttraumatic contexts

This article critiques some of the existing literature in critical pedagogy and the way it tends to overlook or downplay the strong emotional investments of troubled knowledge in posttraumatic situations. Examining existing literature in critical pedagogy reiterates the argument that the discourse of critical pedagogy constructs and sustains its own disciplinary affects. This article builds further on this argument and highlights the importance of foregrounding rather than backgrounding the complexity of difficult emotional knowledge and its pedagogical implications. Working from the assumption that critical pedagogy, especially in the context of posttraumatic societies, must engage this terrain of difficult emotional knowledge in ways that have not been sufficiently addressed by the current rhetoric of critical pedagogy, I look to work that gestures toward a discourse of critical pedagogy which considers troubled knowledge as a source of fruitful and responsive learning. As it will be emphasized, this argument entails making pedagogical space for understanding troubled knowledge in more nuanced terms. This task requires a constant reconsideration of new pedagogical resources to enhance the potential of critical pedagogy; this article discusses three such resources: the significance of pedagogic discomfort, the pedagogical principle of mutual vulnerability, and the value of compassion and strategic empathy.     

Less inequality through universal access? Socioeconomic background of tertiary entrants in Australia after the expansion of university participation

This article investigates the consequences of an expansion of domestic university places in Australia after 2009 for inequalities in access to tertiary education. I focused on how different individual-level socioeconomic factors were influencing not only the likelihood of continuing education at the tertiary level but also a type of institution one studies at. Thus, I simultaneously analyse vertical and horizontal dimensions of inequalities in access. The expansion has not dramatically changed the differentiated access within different socioeconomic groups. However, the influence of parental education and secondary school context on continuing education has weakened. But those who have benefited the most are young people from upper service class. They not only approach near-universal access faster than other social classes but also improve their relative chances to study at the most prestigious institutions. Controlling for academic ability at the age of 15 showed that socioeconomic background continuous to matter after that age. This means that student-oriented equity policies undertaken closer to the point of transition to tertiary education have a capacity to decrease educational inequalities. Results are discussed against the background of the current higher education policy trends regarding equity in access.