University student perspectives on institutional non-disclosure of disability and learning challenges: reasons for staying invisible

ABSTRACT

Students with disabilities (SWD) in Australian higher education need to disclose to their institution to access a range of ‘reasonable adjustments’ to support their learning. Nationally, 5.8% of the university population disclose their disability to their institution. It is suspected that there is a much larger population of students who choose non-disclosure, and therefore decide not to access support. Very little is known about the reasons for non-disclosure as this group represents a hidden population in higher education. The research reported here is based on a survey of undergraduate students in one regional Australian university where disability was reframed as ‘learning challenge’. This identified the institutionally non-disclosed group. This research identified that there were sound reasons for non-disclosure, students continually weigh up potential disclosure during their study, and students have difficulty with the disclosure process. We conclude that institutions need to understand that they have an invisible group of non-disclosing SWD in their student populations and that, to meet their learning challenges, universities need to support changes to policies, procedures and curriculum design.     

Engaging students as digital citizens

ABSTRACT

Learning and teaching on physical university campuses have been enhanced by digital technology both in formally scheduled learning and teaching events and in the less formal spaces in which the higher education experience unfolds. The digital skills and know-how with which students arrive at university will arguably develop throughout the academic journey, though the extent to which they will underpin students’ growth into digital citizens, that is, confident and competent participants in a broader range of digitally enhanced social and professional communities, is likely to vary. The present article is the outcome of a research project which explored how students experience learning, teaching and communicating through digital technologies on a range of undergraduate courses at a UK university. Focus groups with fifty-five students in different years of study across twenty-three undergraduate courses revealed a nuanced understanding of the notion of ‘digital native’, yet a lack of readiness to link participation in digital spaces to digital citizenship and to articulate attributes of an effective participant in digital communities. The focus groups highlighted inconsistent alignment between personal, academic and professional digital spaces. They clearly signalled a need to explore further the commonalities and points of intersection between the three, moving beyond a skills mindset, and paying particular attention to the way in which participants in higher education construct and take up virtual identities, how they negotiate access to digital environments, the degree of control they are able and ready to exercise over digital spaces, and the contribution that universities can make to facilitate the complex developmental journeys towards digital citizenship.     

‘You need a system’: exploring the role of data in the administration of university students and courses

Universities generate a mass of data related to students and the courses that they study. As such, ‘data work’ using digital technologies and digital systems is integral to educational administration within higher education. Drawing on in-depth interviews with administrative and managerial staff in an Australian university, this article examines the data practices and processes that have grown up around students and courses. In particular, the article explores the ‘back-stage’ issues surrounding data – e.g. concerns and tensions associated with appropriate uses of data; the organisational cultures that form around the use of data; and the (un)intended consequences of data work. These findings point towards an implicit ‘black-boxing’ of data that shapes the generation and use of digital data in ways that are predominantly restricted and bounded. The article concludes by considering how these constrained forms of data use might be problematised and reconsidered.     

What might the school of 2030 be like? An exercise in social science fiction

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the deliberately speculative question of ‘What might the school of 2030 be like?’, with a specific focus on the influences of digital technologies. The article adopts the methodological approach of ‘social science fiction’ to explore the ways in which digital technologies might be used in one Australian high school in 2030 (Lakeside), and what this might mean for the people whose lives are enmeshed with these technologies. Through the co-construction of five social science fiction ‘vignettes’ about life within Lakeside, the article considers the increasing prevalence of dataveillance, digital deskilling and the de-territorialization of schooling. The article then goes on to consider changing relationships between time/place, material and coded structures, as well as the increasingly platformized and data-driven nature of schooling in the 2020s. The article ends by considering the ways in which critical scholars can continue to use the methodological approach of social science fiction writing with regard to unpacking the politics of digital education futures.     

The nineteen eightees: Prelude to curricular reform

Abstract

The massification of higher education in Australia since the early 1990s has foregrounded issues of access and participation for a range of ‘non‐traditional’ students. Such issues can unsettle academics’ normative assumptions of the learning behaviours of the traditional, ‘ideal’, university student and highlight normative beliefs and practices about teaching and learning. This can be seen most acutely in regard to the increasing numbers of students with disabilities, especially students with ‘hidden’ disabilities such as psychiatric disabilities and learning disabilities. The impacts of these disabilities go to the very core of the business of the academy: cognition, intellectual ability and academic success. Using Smith's (1999) notion of ‘cultural cartography’, this article takes a sociocultural approach to investigate and give voice to the responses of a small number of students with a ‘learning difficulty’ at a regional university about problematic aspects of their teaching and learning experiences. This demonstrated that the after‐effects of access and equity admission polices can play out in deeply personal ways for individual students when normative, behaviourist notions of ability and achievement continue to prevail within higher education environments. Although non‐traditional students are now permitted to enter the academy, this occurs at some personal cost to their feelings of belonging and self‐esteem, and can result in students taking on deficit or helpless positions within the academy.     

Persevering,educating and influencing a change: a case study of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander narratives of academic success

ABSTRACT

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ experiences in Australian higher education continue to be influenced by the sociopolitical narratives of alterity which locate the students as more likely than their nonIndigenous peers to struggle academically and need support. These western-centric perceptions of indigeneities not only affect Indigenous students’ everyday university experiences but can even influence their decision whether to persist with their studies or not. Drawing on data collected in a large, metropolitan Australian university, this article presents a case study of Indigenous students’ ways of perceiving and resisting their positioning by the dominant university systems as ‘problematic’, at risk of failure and needing support. Specifically, the article explores educational pathways of three Indigenous students, their narratives exemplifying primary strategies of enacting and articulating resistances to the dominant education structures in order to fuel academic success.     

Contract cheating in Australian higher education: a comparison of non-university higher education providers and universities

Abstract

This article reports on one aspect of a nationally funded research project on contract cheating in Australian higher education. The project explored students' and educators’ experiences of contract cheating, and the contextual factors that may influence it. This article reports the key findings from non-university higher education providers (NUHEPs). It compares survey responses from 961 students and 91 educators at four NUHEPs with previously reported findings from eight universities (14,086 students and 1,147 staff). NUHEP and university students report engaging in contract cheating in similar ways. However, while NUHEP educators spend more time teaching academic literacies and discussing contract cheating, NUHEP students are 12 times more likely than university students to report use of a professional academic writing service. Both NUHEP and university educators require systematic professional development regarding the relationship between the teaching and learning environment and students’ contract cheating behaviour. NUHEPs need to be cognisant of students’ vulnerability to commercial contract cheating services, and ensure they have access to timely academic and social support.     

Learning to Be: The Modelling of Art and Design Practice in University Art and Design Teaching

Learning to be an artist or designer is a complex process of becoming. Much of the early phase of ‘learning to be’ occurs during the time emerging artists and designers are students in university art/design programmes, both undergraduate and postgraduate. Recent research reveals that a critical role in assisting students in their maturing identities as artists and designers is played by artist/designer‐academics teaching in university art and design programmes. By maintaining active art/design practices and drawing from these in their teaching, artist/designer‐academics model professional practice to students. Witnessing and interacting with such modelling is part of the process of students learning the shared discourses, views and practices of the art or design worlds to which they aspire to belong. The modelling of professional practice is critical to an artist or designer's ‘learning to be’ experience because it enables students to access the tacit and nuanced behaviours, languages and cultures that constitute contemporary art or design practice. This article outlines findings from a recent Australian study revealing the role of professional practice modelling in university art/design teaching. It highlights the centrality of professional practice modelling to artist/designer‐academics in their beliefs and approaches to teaching their academic disciplines. In critically exploring the research data and findings this article describes the role that modelling of practice plays and how it comprises a core part of the value that artist/designer‐academic participants contribute to the teaching of art/design education.     

Travels in extreme social mobility: how first-in-family students find their way into and through medical education

ABSTRACT

Higher education is understood as essential to enabling social mobility. Research and policy have centred on access to university, but recently attention has turned to the journey of social mobility itself – and its costs. Long-distance or ‘extreme’ social mobility journeys particularly require analysis. This paper examines journeys of first-in-family university students in the especially high-status degree of medicine, through interviews with 21 students at an Australian medical school. Three themes are discussed: (1) the roots of participants’ social mobility journeys; (2) how sociocultural difference is experienced and negotiated within medical school; and (3) how participants think about their professional identities and futures. Students described getting to medical school ‘the hard way’, and emphasised the different backgrounds and attitudes of themselves and their wealthier peers. Many felt like ‘imposters’, using self-deprecating language to highlight their lack of ‘fit’ in the privileged world of medicine. However, such language also reflected resistance to middle-class norms and served to create solidarity with community of origin, and, importantly, patients. Rather than narratives of loss, students’ stories reflect a tactical refinement of self and incorporation of certain middle-class attributes, alongside an appreciation of the worth their ‘difference’ brings to their new destination, the medical profession.     

The production of ‘proper cheating’ in online examinations within technological universities

This paper uses poststructuralist theories of governmentality, agency, consumption and Barry’s (2001) concept of Technological Societies, as a heuristic framework to trace the role of online education technologies in the instantiation of subjectification processes within contemporary Australian universities. This case study of the unintended effects of the adoption and usage of an online educational technology (WebFreedom) for online examinations in an Australian university setting is analysed using poststructuralist theories of governmentality, agency and consumption. The analysis demonstrates how techniques of governing the learning practices of students via online educational technologies intersect with the agentive capacity of students who are relocated as consumers in the higher education marketplace. In particular the paper focuses on the production of unintended localized online examination behaviours resulting in a form of ‘subterranean ethics’ or cheating in online exams. The results from this case study raise critical questions concerning the ways in which both students and tertiary educators are constituted within neoliberal governmental thought, as well as the ways in which students produce themselves in practice as autonomous agents and educational consumers within tertiary education. Suggestions on the focus of future research in the area are discussed.     

Performativity and enjoyable learning

This paper takes critical lenses to interpret what students find enjoyable in their learning in specific ‘subject’ environments within the prevailing socio-economic climate in higher education. It considers student dispositions that emerged from dialogues with two groups of students attending a non-traditional university and taking vocational degrees within England, UK. We argue that although each higher education institute can become its own destiny, it can only do so within the boundaries of state policy and its technologies. Higher education, when affected by cultures of ‘performativity’, is arguably focused less on knowledge for ‘emancipation’ and its own sake and more on the ‘use value’ of its products. This paper argues that what is valued by these particular students in their learning and what gives them positive feelings as they engage with this process of learning is not altogether independent of the current governances shaping higher education.     

De-coding or de-colonising the technocratic university? Rural students’ digital transitions to South African higher education

ABSTRACT

Despite wide-ranging policies and practices intended to address historical inequalities in South African higher education, and calls for decolonisation to include more local relevance, little attention has been paid to the experiences of rural students, especially their digital participation once at university. Previous research has highlighted limitations in technological access in rural areas and the importance of mobile phones for transitions. Whilst universities offer wide-ranging digital support, there remains a tendency towards universalist mechanisms. Drawing on a longitudinal study across three universities, and employing Holland’s theory of figured worlds, we highlight rural students’ experiences of digital transitions across different cultural worlds, prior to university and once they arrive, including the bewildering technocratic systems and practices and resulting conflicts and positionings encountered. We show how students improvise to decode the digital university and figure out new practices. Decolonisation of universities involves rethinking the ‘technocratic consciousness’ (both colonialist and neoliberal) and its apparatus including digital systems and structures. For rural students to become successful digital practitioners in higher education, universities should acknowledge prior digital experience and forms of knowledge and focus on expanding individual and collective agency in supporting transitions, as mechanisms for shaping a decolonised digital education.     

Digital downsides: exploring university students’ negative engagements with digital technology

Digital technologies are now an integral feature of university study. As such, academic research has tended to concentrate on the potential of digital technologies to support, extend and even ‘enhance’ student learning. This paper, in contrast, explores the rather more messy realities of students’ engagements with digital technology. In particular, it focuses on the aspects of digital technology use that students see as notably unhelpful. Drawing on a survey of 1658 undergraduate students from two Australian universities, the paper highlights four distinct types of digital ‘downside’. These range from low-level annoyances and interruptions, to ways in which digital technologies are seen to diminish students’ scholarship and study. Against this background, the paper considers how discussions of digital technology might better balance enthusiasms for what we know might be achieved through technology-enabled learning, with the often unsatisfactory realities of students’ encounters with digital technology.     

Calling out ‘alternative facts’: curriculum to develop students’ capacity to engage critically with contradictory sources

ABSTRACT

Information discernment has become a much needed twenty-first century skill and an essential outcome for university education. Technology has enabled more organisations to gain access to effective mass media to disseminate both accurate information and disinformation. As information sources have proliferated, information users are confronted by a plethora of superficially credible, contradictory ‘facts’ and opinions. A curriculum redesign project at an Australian university provided an opportunity to embed information discernment into a first-year unit, and to strengthen students’ capacity to engage critically with contradictory sources and competing worldviews. The review found that: (1) it was necessary to explain the importance of information discernment, (2) a restriction of information sources was helpful to the initial development of discernment, (3) the purposes of (university) education required explicit discussion, (4) it was useful to discuss the relationship between research and personal experience, and (5) later modules must consolidate and extend information literacy learning.     

‘Never really had a good education you know,until I came in here’: educational life histories of young adult male prisoner learners

This article focuses on the educational life histories of nine prisoner learners aged between 18 and 21 years which were collated as part of doctoral work which sought to access the life histories of adult male prisoners who were attending a prison school while incarcerated in prison. The nine life histories of the young men were collated not only in two Dublin prison sites: St. Patrick's Institution (mainly) but also Mountjoy Prison and their educational life histories are explored in this article with the specific aim of offering insights into young adult male prisoner learners' experiences of education. Negative experiences of compulsory education were reported by the nine prisoner learners interviewed, none of whom had completed upper second level education. The average age of the young adults was 19 years. Two had no experience of secondary school education and six of the nine reported being expelled from school. The intergenerational impact of imprisonment and cycle of disadvantage was illustrated across many of the life history interviews. Prisoner learners reported having experienced stressful events in their childhood, events which included, inter alia, the separation of parents, being removed from parental care and witnessing alcohol and drug misuse and violence in the home. Two of the prisoner learners reported learning to read and write in the prison school and a profile of one prisoner learner, Nick, aged 20, is included in this article.     

‘If this was real … ’: researching student meaning making in a digital rolling role drama

ABSTRACT

This article explores the interplay of the ‘live’ experience of drama learning in the classroom and curated digital content on learner meaning making, collaborative creation and subjectivities. It examines a case study conducted in an inner-city secondary school in Sydney, Australia, as part of a larger innovative international collaborative drama exercise entitled ‘The Water Reckoning Project’ (http://www.water-reckoning.net) which focussed on sustainability education. Data collected and analysed included ethnographic observations, video documentation and digital curation of students’ creative work, focus groups, and pre- and post-surveys. Findings of this study reveal the importance of the aesthetically charged, embodied experience of drama as the key driver of learning when integrating drama with digital technologies. This unique project enabled students to critically and creatively engage with significant real and fictional contexts, as well as issues of local and global relevance.     

Crossing the boundaries of imagination: The role of a public library exhibition in global learning for student teachers and teacher educators

In this paper, we utilise the theoretical concept of ‘boundary crossing’ to explore how, as Australian university teacher educators, we worked with library curators and a class of student teachers to mount a public exhibition of their group work. We consider how the students crossed ‘boundaries of imagination’ in symbolic representation and critical analysis by creating artistic installations to express global education themes. We reflect on what we, the university educators, learned about crossing institutional and pedagogical boundaries to mutually facilitate new learning. We argue for the importance of shared public pedagogy as offering new avenues for teacher education and of connecting with local communities.     

The worldly space: the digital university in network time

Abstract

This article considers the effect of information technology upon teaching, learning and research in the ‘digital university’. In less than a generation the university has become a business like any other. It does so in the determining context of neoliberal globalisation and the computer revolution. The university develops through what we may now see as a disastrous ‘category error’. The article argues that humans are analogue creatures who have constructed analogue worlds that they recognise in large measure, in nature. Digital logic is nowhere recognised in nature, and is ultimately alien to us. The university is the key institution for enabling us to understand who and what we are, yet it is being undermined through the suffusion of the market logic and the digital technologies that drive it from a past we look to less, to a present we dwell in more, and a future we are less able to shape.     

The digital university and the shifting time–space of the campus

This paper explores the concept of translocality, of being ‘simultaneously situated’ in more than one place, in the context of ‘distance’ education in the digital university. The author works with the concept of critical time to propose an additional term, transtemporality, to also recognise the multiple times and temporalities engaged and interwoven in digitally connected spaces of work and study. The paper draws on interview material from an institutional case study of expansion in digital education, paying particular attention to student locations in time and space, arguing that recognising the shifting time–space of the campus is essential to supporting and teaching growing numbers of distance and part-time students. The author proposes that, rather than digital connections being viewed as a form of ‘reaching out’ from the university campus to the wider world, the digital university might be considered, in its translocal and transtemporal form, as an opening up of the idea of the university; embodied and imagined through strong connections across multiple locations, times and temporalities.     

Engineering work integrated learning placements: the influence of capitals on students’ access

ABSTRACT

Work Integrated Learning (WIL) is embraced in Australian higher education (HE) and is a feature of most Australian HE ‘entry to profession’ engineering education programs accredited by Engineers Australia. Accreditation guidelines articulate the need for curriculum-integrated engagement with professional practice (EPP) and encourage EPP in a separate workplace environment, e.g. WIL. This article reports on the analysis of semi-structured interviews with staff and student engineers from four Australian HE institutions with mandatory engineering WIL. Framed by a Bourdieusian theoretical perspective, the influence of capitals on student access to engineering WIL placements was investigated. The research found that students’ capitals influenced access to engineering WIL placements. Policy and educational practice recommendations are made.