Shifting discourses about gender in higher education enrolments: retrieving marginalised voices

Abstract

In this paper the authors describe the ways poststructuralist discourses assisted us to read and reflect on data collected as part of a traditional survey-style research study. The study—generated in response to widespread concern about falling male enrolment rates at the authors' regional university—focused upon factors affecting rural male school-leavers' decisions about postschool destinations, and upon these students' attitudes to higher education. In the paper that follows, the authors contest the dominant discourses that are frequently drawn on to explain differences in male and female higher education enrolment trends. They then focus upon the features of two of the more dominant stories that students told to explain this ‘difference’: stories about ‘real men’, and stories about the value of the ‘practical’ over the ‘theoretical’. In addition, they present another story that draws upon girls' views of higher education. Together, these stories indicate not only how the students are positioned within discourses of rurality and ‘work’, but also how they draw on a highly gendered and hierarchical set of oppositions in storying their futures.

Notes

Pam Gilbert (1946–2002). My colleague, myfriend, my sisterly spirit.

School of Education, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld 4810, Australia. Email: [email protected].

School of Education, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld 4810, Australia. Email: [email protected].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nola Alloway

Pam Gilbert (1946–2002). My colleague, myfriend, my sisterly spirit. School of Education, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld 4810, Australia. Email: [email protected].