Mobility, aspiration, voice: a new structure of feeling for student equity in higher education

Abstract

There is a changed ‘structure of feeling’ emerging in higher education systems, particularly in OECD nations, in response to changed social, cultural and economic arrangements. Taking a student equity perspective, the paper names this change in terms of ‘mobility’, ‘aspiration’ and ‘voice’. It argues that (1) new kinds and degrees of mobility are now a significant factor in sustaining unequal access to and experience of higher education for different student groups, (2) despite government and institutional aspirations to expand higher education, students' desires for university are not a given among new target populations and (3) while universities are seeking to enroll different students in greater numbers, the challenge now is how to give greater voice to this difference. Drawing on these themes of mobility, aspiration and voice and taking recent changes to higher education policy in Australia as the case, the paper presents a new conceptual framework for thinking about student equity in HE. The framework extends from established approaches that focus on barriers to accessing higher education in order to focus on people's capacities in relation to higher education participation.

Keywords:

• Appadurai
• aspiration
• capabilities
• capacity building
• equity
• higher education
• mobility
• Sen
• Urry
• voice

Acknowledgements

This paper was produced as part of the work of the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education and with the financial support of the Australian Government through the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented as part of the Knowledge Works Public Lecture Series, Bradley Forum, Hawke Building, University of South Australia, June 3, 2010. See http://www.equity101.info/content/Knowledge-Works-Professorial-Lecture

2. In referring to HE we acknowledge its heterogeneity. We focus specifically on HE provided by universities due to limitations on the scope of the argument we are able to present in this paper. However, we acknowledge that further and vocational education institutions are increasingly providing higher education and, in some instances, share campus space with universities. Yet even within the university sector there is significant variation in HE provision.

3. In Australian HE, low-SES is defined in reference to the Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (specifically the Index of Education and Occupation), which are generated from Australian Bureau of Statistics national census data. People livening in areas classified in the lowest quartile of the Index of Education and Occupation are attributed low-SES for purposes of measuring rates of participation in HE.

4. This data was collected as part of the Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN) project. Led by a research team from the Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures (University of South Australia), RPiN was partly funded by the Australian Research Council (LP0454869) as a ‘linkage’ project with industry partners: the Northern Adelaide State Secondary Principals Network, the Australian Education Union (SA Branch) and the South Australian Social Inclusion Unit. Chief Investigators included Robert Hattam, Phillip Cormack, Barbara Comber, Marie Brennan, Lew Zipin, Alan Reid, Kathy Paige, David Lloyd, Helen Nixon, Bill Lucas, John Walsh, Faye McCallum and Brenton Prosser, with assistance from Kathy Brady, Philippa Milroy and Sam Sellar.

5. The authors’ thinking about interventions of this kind owes much to collaborative work and conversations with Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan.