Reflections on learning: widening capability and the student experience

Abstract

This paper argues for a more nuanced perspective on learning that takes account of the real and situated contexts of student experience. It is presented against a backdrop of the agenda to widen participation in higher education (HE) in the UK, which has led to a rise in students from non-traditional backgrounds entering into HE. Responding to this, an argument is made in favour of widening ‘capability’ in learning, to produce a more socially just pedagogy. Drawing on examples of the student learning experience a series of reflections is produced from an undergraduate programme of education studies. Such reflections, linking personal knowledge with wider social and cultural practices, are used to produce notions of ‘cultural wealth’ across informal and formal learning contexts. It is argued that by creating choice and freedoms in student learning the exclusivity of university education may be challenged and a more socially just pedagogy usefully considered.

Keywords:

• higher education
• learning
• widening participation
• curriculum
• policy
• Sen

Notes

1. The term ‘non-traditional’ background is used widely within the policy discourse and literature (see Bowl, 2006; David, 2010). Here it is used as a term to represent the experience of students of white ‘working class’ and ‘minority ethnic’ origin, whose personal biographies (disclosed through a learning log) convey a story of first-generation experience in higher education, often against a backdrop of difficult circumstances, both socially and economically, and where many have low self-confidence in learning.

2. The programme on which this paper draws is located in a post-1992 university in the northwest of England. All data derives from the recorded experiences of first year undergraduate students attending the unit ‘Learning and the nature of knowledge’ in the academic year 2006–2007, which was co-written and co-taught by the author and a former colleague.