The ‘placetimemattering’ of aspiration in the Blacktown Learning Community

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore aspiration in contemporary urban locations in the context of almost universal policy initiatives to raise aspirations of young people to participate in higher education. The article is based on a study of how children’s career and further education aspirations are shaped over time in five schools in western Sydney, Australia. Creative methods were used to produce children’s artifacts in early and late primary school and early and late high school and parent and teacher focus groups were conducted in each school. This article focuses on data from a low Socio-Economic Status (SES) and a mid-high SES primary school. A quantitative analysis of the children’s artifacts identified that a marked differentiation occurs between low SES and high SES primary school children from kindergarten to Year 5. Storylines of Cartographic time, Money matters, and Vulnerable childhoods emerged from a qualitative analysis of the parent focus group from the low SES primary school. These storylines chart a different navigational route for their own, and their children’s, aspirations that acknowledges the significance of materiality in the way aspirations are shaped in the ‘placetimemattering’ of everyday life.

Keywords:

• aspiration
• low SES
• materiality
• place
• primary school
• time

Introduction

This article is based on data from a study of how children’s career and further education aspirations are shaped over time in two primary and three secondary schools in the Blacktown Learning Community¹ in western Sydney, Australia. The context of the study is almost the policy of universal initiatives of nation states to raise the aspirations of young people to attend university in order to achieve competitive advantage under conditions of globalization (e.g. Lee & Rojewski, 2012; Mateju & Smith, 2009; Reay, Crozier, & Clayton, 2010; Van Houtte & Stevens, 2010; Wu, 2009). The study used ‘a global sense of place’ (Massey, 2005) as a conceptual framework, and a creative methods approach, to bring new dimensions to researching equity in educational outcomes prompted by new policy directions. The emphasis on raising the aspirations of young people from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds produces new conditions of policy and practice as a key focus for educational researchers motivated by social justice outcomes (Bowden & Doughney, 2010; Gale, 2011; Prosser, McCallum, Milroy, Comber, & Nixon, 2008).

The Australian federal government Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) is an example of these new conditions of policy and practice. The HEPPP program was initiated in 2010 in response to the ‘Bradley’ Review of Higher Education (Bradley, Noonan, Nugent, & Scales, 2008). The Bradley Review found that university performance and participation in Australia were slipping relative to other OECD nations and that particular groups of people – Indigenous people, people of low SES,² and people from regional and remote areas – continue to be under-represented in Australian tertiary education. University enrolments from these groups were found to have remained static or had decreased through the previous decade.

From 1989 to 2007 in Australia there was only a 1 percentage point increase (from approximately 14% to approximately 15%) in tertiary participation of students from the lowest 25% of SES groups (Bradley et al., 2008, p. 28). The Report found that ‘a student from a high socio-economic background is about three times more likely to attend university than a student from a low socio-economic background’ (Bradley et al., 2008, p. 29). Data presented in the Bradley Review suggests that despite low access rates, the success rate of such students at university is almost equal (97%) to that of their peers from medium and high SES communities. In 2009, the Australian Federal Government adopted modified recommendations from the Bradley Review and set the following national targets: (1) that by 2025, 40% of the Australian population aged 25 to 34 years should be qualified with a bachelor level degree or above, and (2) that by 2020, at least 20% of the undergraduate student population nationally should be from low SES backgrounds. Aspiration to participate in higher education amongst the identified groups of students is an issue raised for particular attention in the Bradley Review.

The HEPPP scheme is designed to assist progress towards these targets by supporting projects that focus on increasing the participation and success of domestic students from low SES backgrounds in tertiary education. It encourages partnerships between universities and schools to raise the awareness, aspirations, and capacity of students from communities where articulation to universities has historically been low. These focus areas match the three precursors of increased tertiary participation identified in the Bradley Review: awareness of higher education, aspiration to participate, and educational attainment to allow participation (Bradley et al., 2008, p. 40).

The Student Trajectory Aspiration Research project on which this article is based is a partnership initiated by schools in the Blacktown Learning Community with the Centre for Educational Research, University of Western Sydney. It is directed towards aspiration as the second, and in some ways the most complex, of these prerequisites for participation. Aspiration to participate in higher education starts early and is entangled with awareness and attainment goals. It drives school choice, subject selection, and focus from primary through secondary school, and contributes to the goal setting and planning that are essential if young people are to secure a life trajectory that incorporates tertiary study.

Place

Western Sydney is the fastest growing urban region in Australia and the majority of new immigrants choose to settle in western Sydney. More than one third of the region’s population was born overseas, coming from more than 170 countries, and speaking over 100 different languages. The region is also home to the largest single community of Aboriginal Australians, two thirds of whom are descendants of the Darug peoples who have inhabited the Cumberland Plains of this region for tens of thousands of years. A further third of the Aboriginal population have relocated from other parts of the country, bringing with them the geographies of other places.

As well as the high cultural and linguistic diversity, the region is characterized by pockets of extreme disadvantage. According to the SEIFA (Socio-Economic Indexes of Areas), seven of the ten local government areas rated as having the highest levels of disadvantage are in the western Sydney region (ABS, 2013). Educational achievement in western Sydney reflects the low SES of many of its communities. The overall secondary school retention rates for years 7–12 in western Sydney are the lowest in the Sydney metropolitan area (69.5% compared to 95.2% in northern Sydney). In 2009, twice as many people in western Sydney aged 15 or older had not attended school at all compared to the rest of Sydney and NSW (ABS, 2013).

The location of this study, the Blacktown Local Government Area (LGA), is in the middle of the western Sydney region. Approximately 35 kilometres from the Sydney Central Business District, it has a population of 301,096 of which 113,213 people were born overseas and 19% arrived in Australia within the last five years. Blacktown LGA is rated at 972.8 indicating a level of disadvantage greater than the national average (1005.2) and the New South Wales average (1003.3) (Blacktown City Council, http://www.blacktown.nsw.gov.au/Home). It has higher levels of unemployment, higher levels of employment in unskilled occupations, and lower levels of educational qualifications when compared to Greater Sydney as a whole. Patterns of disadvantage are unevenly distributed across the different suburbs within the Blacktown LGA, however, and are shifting with incoming migration (Blacktown City Council Website, http://www.blacktown.nsw.gov.au/Home). The differential and changing patterns of disadvantage make this an ideal site for the study of how children’s aspirations are shaped over time in contemporary urban globalized locations.

A global sense of place

A focus on local places has been criticized for the limitations of a bounded, local, and parochial understanding of place (Appadurai, 1996). The fate of the local in the age of the global has emerged as a key theme of contemporary social science. Academic assertions are plentiful about both the ‘unbounded’ nature of the locality or region and about hybridized global networks in the formation of identities and communities (Amin, 2004). Yet many anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers have questioned such claims about the ‘discursive of erasure of place’ (Escobar, 2001, p. 141) and about a ‘dramatically delocalized world’ (Appadurai, 1995, p. 204). They have instead suggested that (shifting) geographies, boundaries, and multiple scales continue to matter ‘as expressions of social practice, discourse and power’ (Paasi, 2004, p. 541). They argue that abstract notions of globalisation, founded on globally networked forms of social life contain a danger of overlooking the complex ways in which people continue to live locally, albeit in altered ways (Appadurai, 1995; Escobar, 2001; Kenway, Kraack, & Hickey-Moody, 2006).

In For Space, Doreen Massey (2005) orients her argument from ‘the battles over globalisation, the politics of place, the question of regional inequality, engagements with ‘nature’ and the complexities of cities’ and suggests that we need to ‘think about space differently’ (Massey, 2005, p. 1). Throughout this text Massey develops an argument for ‘a global sense of place’: ‘This is an understanding of place as … woven together out of ongoing stories, as a moment within power-geometries, as a particular constellation within the wider topographies of space and as in process, as unfinished business’ (Massey, 2005, p. 131). Rather than conceptualize local place as fixed and bounded, we can understand ‘[p]laces not as points or areas on maps, but as integration of space and time; as spatio-temporal events’ (Massey, 2005, p. 130). Place is defined by the quality of ‘throwntogetherness’, ‘what is special about place is precisely that “throwntogetherness,” the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now (itself drawing on a history and a geography of then and theres)’ (Massey, 2005, p. 140).

Focussing on the ‘throwntogetherness’ of western Sydney as a spatial location is useful in thinking about the complexities of how aspiration is shaped over time for children in its communities. The notion of changing aspirations over time includes the histories of individuals, families, and communities, in particular, local places, and a focus on changing geographies over time. Within this context, the Blacktown Learning Community is an example of local community mobility and mobilization. It was formed in 1995 as an alliance of six state primary schools in the Blacktown area, in order to enhance capacity building across the schools. The Learning Community has expanded over time and now consists of 15 public schools in Blacktown.

Place in aspiration research

Analysing the literature of aspiration research reveals that place does not feature prominently as a methodological framing device. Place is typically used superficially to signify the geographical location of particular low SES communities, such as the location of black males in particular secondary schools in the United States (Strayhorn, 2009), or young men in specific towns in rural and regional Australia (Kenway & Hickey-Moody, 2011). Kenway and Hickey-Moody’s ethnographic study of how everyday knowledge inform the aspirations of young males in these locations, however, also deploys the concept of place beyond superficial notions of location. It uses de Certeau’s concept of ‘spatialized knowledges’ as a strategy of analysis in which ‘the map and the tour’ of the privileged is contrasted with the ‘less or unregulated knowledges that arise from below, through the intimacies of the immediate, the body, the street, the moment, the corporeal senses’ (Kenway & Hickey-Moody, 2011, p. 153). This distinctively material spatial analysis reveals the embodied nature of young men’s cultural ‘practices,’ including the cultural practice of aspiration (Appadurai, 2004).

For Arjun Appadurai, the practice of aspiration is understood in spatial terms as ‘a navigational capacity’ around a map that consists of a dense combination of nodes and pathways by which the wealthy better find their way between their needs and wants and the socially available ways of meeting them (Appadurai, 2004, p. 69). He describes aspirations as formed ‘in the thick of social life,’ a practice which ‘like any complex cultural capacity, thrives and survives on practice, repetition, exploration, conjecture and refutation’ (Appadurai, 2004, p. 69). Where opportunities for practice with regard to imagining a future are limited, it follows that the capacity to aspire is relatively undeveloped.

The practice of aspiration is fundamentally embodied and emplaced and linked to the key concept of ‘voice’ that ‘must be expressed in terms of actions and performances which have local cultural force’ (Appadurai, 2004, p. 67). For Appadurai, the performance of voice is ‘the only way in which the poor might find locally plausible ways to alter … the terms of recognition in any particular cultural regime’ (Appadurai, 2004, p. 66).

The Student Aspiration Trajectory (STAR) Project

A lead principal of the Blacktown Learning Community requested a partnership with the Centre for Educational Research at the University of Western Sydney in order to further build the capacity of the affiliated schools. The availability of funds through the Australian federal government funded HEPPP provided the opportunity to develop a collaborative project. The lead principals invited two primary and three high schools to participate in the project and a meeting was held with principals and key teachers from the participating schools and the larger project research team to formalize the project. Many issues of concern in relation to the aspirations of children in the participating schools were raised during the meeting. Teachers identified key times in children’s progression through school when some children become ‘future poor’ with regard to aspirations. Teachers agreed that children begin school ‘fresh and bright,’ but for a number of students, disengagement seems to begin as early as Years 3 or 4 (primary school children aged 8–9 years). Two key research questions were articulated to guide the project.

• How are children’s career and further education aspirations shaped over time in the Blacktown Learning Community?

• What are the enablers and barriers to their participation in further education?

A team of five researchers from the University collaborated with the teachers from the five participating schools with each researcher allocated to a single school to collaborate with classroom teachers. Two grade levels were selected at each of the five schools in early and late primary and early and late secondary. We identified creative arts-based approaches as potentially productive methods of investigating children’s aspirations as they would elicit more imaginative and deeper connections with a sense of self, they can be open-ended, and they are especially suitable for research with very young children. In all classes, students responded to a prompt that asked them to reflect on and represent ‘What I want to be when I grow up’. These artifacts included students’ audio-visual productions at secondary school level and draw-and-write representations in primary schools. All artifacts were collected by the teachers and only those artifacts produced by children who had parental consent to participate in the study were analysed. A focus group conversation was recorded at each school with teachers and another with parents to address the research questions.

The two primary schools in the study were identified as being of very different SES although only one suburb apart, due to incoming migration. The SES of the schools was determined by the Department of Education and Communities’ 2012 school assessments based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data. The following sections focus on a comparative analysis of quantitative data from the two primary school children’s artifacts in relation to a ‘storyline analysis’ of the parent focus group data from the one primary school designated as of low SES.

Summary analysis of primary school children’s artifacts

In the two primary schools, 144 Kindergarten and 87 Year 5 children produced drawings and text about what they wanted to be when they grew up. In reviewing the data from the two primary schools it was found to be useful to compare the data because of the marked differences in the SES of the two schools. While they are both medium-sized primary schools only one suburb apart, School 1 is classified as low SES and School 2 as medium to high SES.

At Kindergarten level, the children from both schools were much the same in the nature of their career aspirations. In School 1, 17% of children at Kindergarten level compared to 28% of children in School 2 aspired to a career requiring higher education. Twice as many children nominated careers requiring only on-the-job training in the mid to high SES school as in the low SES school and similar proportions in the other categories (Table 1).

Table 1. Career choice by education required, Kindergarten Schools 1 and 2.

Educational requirements for career choice	Kinder School 1 N = 54	Kinder School 2 N = 90
Higher education	9 (17%)	25 (28%)
Further education TAFE – (Diploma, Apprenticeship) or Training colleges	20 (37%)	29 (33%)
On-the-job training	11 (20%)	24 (26%)
Fantasy (Princess, Queen, Robot, Superhero)	14 (26%)	12 (13%)

By Year 5, a marked differentiation had occurred between children in these two schools.³ Only 40% of children in School 1 nominated careers requiring higher education compared to 76% of children in School 2. The picture was even more marked in the proportion of children nominating careers requiring only on-the-job training. By Year 5, the situation was dramatically reversed with three times as many children in School 1 (36%) nominating a career requiring no further education than in School 2 with only 12% nominating such a career. There is clear evidence from this analysis that a marked differentiation in aspiration occurs between children of different socio-economic backgrounds as they progress from Kindergarten to Year 5. For low SES children this is a trajectory towards careers requiring increasingly less education and for children classified as mid to high SES, it is a trajectory towards careers requiring more education and overwhelmingly towards those requiring higher education (Table 2).

Table 2. Career choice by education required, Year 5 Schools 1 and 2.

Educational requirements for career choice	Year 5 School 1 N = 45	Year 5 School 2 N = 42
Higher education	18 (40%)	32 (76%)
Further education TAFE – (Diploma, Apprenticeship) or Training college	11 (24%)	4 (9%)
On-the-job training	16 (36%)	5 (12%)
Fantasy (Princess, Queen, Robot, Superhero)		1 (2%)

This comparison is made possible by using the framework of place whereby schools situated in the same local government area have changing socio-economic realities that have powerful influences on the shaping of children’s aspirations. While it is not the focus of this article, it is important to note that the incoming migration of particular ethnic groups has changed the patterns of disadvantage with cumulative effects for both primary schools. As one becomes more advantaged, the other becomes less advantaged. Given the significance of the shaping of aspirations during these early ages it is important, therefore, to consider the data generated within the parent focus group from the low SES primary school to try to identify the processes that shape primary school children’s aspiration trajectories. An understanding of these processes could contribute to the development of pedagogies to explore the trajectory of aspiration for low SES children away from higher and further education.

Parent focus group analysis (School 1, low SES)

Six mothers constituted the parent focus group which was held at School 1. These mothers were familiar with the school, so in this sense they were a particular sub group of the larger population of parents. The focus group discussion was framed lightly around the question of what they thought their children’s aspirations might be, and what would be the enablers and barriers to their children choosing a career requiring further education. The discussion was semi-structured and after their initial turn-taking introductions, there was a great deal of energetic talk between the mothers about the questions we were addressing. The focus group generated a 38 page transcript which was analysed according to the storylines that emerged from the mothers’ talk: ‘A storyline is a condensed version of a naturalized and conventional cultural narrative, one that is often used as the explanatory framework of one’s own and other’s practices and sequences of action’ (Sondergaard, 2002, p. 191). The following is an analysis of the main storylines of Cartographic time, Money matters, and Vulnerable children that emerged from this focus group discussion.

Cartographic time

The literature of aspiration research is underpinned by a linear notion of time and causality, and the predominant naturalized view is that the horizons of one’s future are produced within the limits of the SES of parents passed on to their children. The concept of aspiration, therefore, is fundamentally linked to linear time, to the ability to frame and direct one’s hopes into a possible future. For these mothers, however, there was not a causal sequence from one generation to the next, and the logical progression of linear time was disrupted in their understanding of the shaping of their children’s, and their own, aspirations. In charting the ‘navigational pathway’ of the conversation itself, it appears as a map that moves over the surface of past, present, and future time bringing all their experience of aspiration into the place of the present.

Generations were mixed up through the wide age range of the children and grandchildren they cared for, ‘I’ve got five kids, as well. My eldest is 29 and this is his child, is 3, and then I’ve got a 23 year old, and a 20 year old, and a 12 year old here in year 6, and a 9 year old in year 3’. They equally considered their own experiences of aspiration in their families of origin as current and relevant in the present, ‘I’m from a family of 5, as well, I’m of 5 kids, and I’m the only one that went to year 12, so I was made to go to year 12,’ and ‘So, for years, you know, the next 15 years I had heaps of jobs and made a lot of money, which I quickly spent, but then at the age of 30 went and did a diploma in nursing at TAFE’. For them there was no simple causal link between generations, nor a linear notion of forward progress, except in relation to the Other, those parents who are ‘on the dole’: ‘I always worry that a lot of parents, it goes down from generation to generation, if you’ve got parents who are on the dole’. For themselves and their families, aspiration was something much more complex and less linear as they scanned the horizons of themselves, their parents, their siblings, and their children.

The trajectory of their children’s career choices was described as arbitrarily changing over time rather than purposefully heading, or being headed in a particular direction.

I have a daughter, Tamara, who is 8, and her career choices change depending on what she’s into at the time. She originally wanted to be a vet because she loves the animals, and now she’s learning to braid and she wants to be a hairdresser and, you know, next week it’ll possibly change depending on what she starts doing next week.

Their ideas about how aspiration is shaped over time are not developmental in any single story that these mothers told, and a closer inspection reveals that every story reverses the trajectory of aspiration: ‘two years ago she wanted to go to uni, but then she wanted to go to TAFE, but now she works, she just wants to work and make money’. They also described some of their children as having no aspiration at all, confirming the teacher’s observation that there are times when children can become ‘future poor’.

I have five children. The eldest is 18. He just finished year 12 last year. He still doesn’t know what he wants to do at the moment. He had no idea but now it’s just, no he doesn’t want to do anything, like at the moment he’s working at Coles, so he still has no idea what he wants to do. Then I have a 12 year old that’s going to high school next, I don’t know what she wants to do.

The apparent complete acceptance of their children’s choices, whatever they might be, and a staunch belief in providing unconditional support are common to all of these mothers. They offer many reasons and examples for why a linear notion of developmental time in the shaping of aspiration does not work for them. The storyline of cartographic time, however, needs to be further understood within the inextricable intertwining of place, time, and matter in these parents’ discussion of aspiration.

Money matters: the material conditions of everyday life

The most significant factor influencing their sense of possible futures that emerged in the conversations was money. These mothers unanimously agreed that ‘finance’ was the major barrier in their children choosing a career requiring higher education. A closer examination of the connection between money and aspiration reveals a complex story about the material conditions of everyday life and its relation to work and aspiration.

Denise, for example, said: ‘I’ve been out of work for 17 years now, and I’m trying to get back in the workforce and it’s really hard. Like I’ve done my year 12. Waste of time, it was a waste of time – it doesn’t matter any more’. Her experience of looking for work and the work she has done over the years has literally and metaphorically scarred her.

I’ve applied for everything, I’ve applied for cleaning, I’ve applied – because I’ve done all that and I’ve done – I’ve collected eggs, I’ve got scars on there from the roosters attacking me. I’ve done all that, sort of fitted in over the years with the kids, but you know that’s what I said, I don’t care what I do.

In this context, money matters. It is not the desire for immediate short term satisfaction over long term gain, but a desire for a basic level of financial security to provide for the necessary material conditions of daily life. Denise was the only child of six in her primary family to complete Year 12. In the light of her current experiences this remarkable educational achievement ‘doesn’t matter,’ it is canceled out by her struggle in the present to gain adequate employment. This mattering – the scars on her body from demeaning low paid work, the necessity to fit her work hours around the needs of her children because the cost of childcare is prohibitive, and the demoralizing frustration of being unable to get any work at all, lead to her not caring what she does, an expression of the same trajectory of becoming ‘future poor’ that she describes in her son who ‘doesn’t want to do anything’.

Another mother, Donna, describes her own struggles to maintain attendance at university because she has lost the part time work that enabled this choice: ‘this year I gave up the two other jobs that I had – I had three jobs at a time and gave those up to go to uni, thinking that Fairfax would get me through the next few years, and then got retrenched’. Donna asks ‘how do you support your kids and say to them, well yeah guys, you can go on and do this, when you’re going through all the crap yourself of not being able to?’ In the struggle to support herself and her five children as a single mother and continue her university studies, Donna finds that ‘it’s a vicious circle; they’re saying I don’t have to work because I’m at full time uni but, yes we’re putting you on New-start⁴ because you need to go and find a job. How so?’ She reports her conversation at Centrelink and thoughts about the possibility of getting financial support to continue her studies.

And, yes, I mean if I had another baby – that’s what I said to the woman at Centrelink the other day when she rang to tell me, we’re putting you on New Start – I said, ‘Well I’m better off having another baby.’ And she said, ‘Oh we’re going to be cutting the bonus.’ And I said, ‘It’s not about the bonus it’s just for the next 8 years I wouldn’t have the pressure on me to work, I’d be on the parenting payments … you’re cutting me back for the New Start, so it’d get me through uni’, and I said, ‘I can understand now why these people are having kids, because there’s no pressure on you to work’.

In these conversations, place resides in the bodies of these mothers, and the whole production of social space can be seen to proceed from the body (Lefebvre, 1991). The physical and metaphorical scars on the bodies of these mothers produced through the materiality of everyday life interact with time to limit the possibilities of a different future. Their reproductive capacity becomes a seductive marketable option when government policy offers a secure income for having more babies, influencing the life choices of those who have little choice. The materiality of these mothers’ lives affects the lives and choices of their children in the intricate imbrication of ‘spacetimemattering’ through the intra-actions of everyday life (Barad, 2010). Intra-action in this sense does not imply causality, or a fateful determinism from one generation to the next, but focuses on the ways that materiality and human subjects are co-produced in relation to their aspirations for the future.

Vulnerable childhoods

The third category arises from one of the women’s stories that stayed in my mind, haunting this article to frame the notion of vulnerable childhoods. The story is that as a 13 year old girl she used to wag school with her friends and sleep overnight on the trains. One night she and her girlfriend were on the train with three boys who were slightly older, and one of the boys assaulted her girlfriend because she ‘wouldn’t sleep with him’. Some time later, she said, these two boys were found guilty of the brutal murder and rape of a woman on her way home from work. For all of these women the spectre of vulnerable childhoods that emerges from this story is close at hand and is intimately tied to the question of their children’s aspirations for the future.

The women told several stories of their families of origin, or their own children running away from home, becoming involved in petty crime and the ever-present threat of children becoming disengaged from social life and educational opportunities.

The 23 year old drove us nuts. Ran away from home at the age of 14, she left home. She met some kids, ran away from home in year 9, put us through hell for 18 months, and then she sort of got her life back on track a bit, and tried to go back to school, but by then she just couldn’t. She met someone who went to Doonside and the principal was fantastic there, said, ‘Look we’re willing to give kids a go if she wants to come back’. But she only lasted about a month or so because she’d been out of the system and, you know, around the streets and everything like that, so it was too hard to get her back.

The story of children’s vulnerability to this sort of life trajectory was something that had long term implications for their children’s futures. One of the mothers described taking her children to Centrelink with her to teach them a lesson about the impact of these choices on people’s lives, ‘I was being a bit of a stereotype but I said, “these people don’t work, a lot of them take drugs, a lot of them are alcoholics”, and then I said, “This is why you want to go out and get yourself a job so you don’t stand here”’. The ever-present threat of their children’s vulnerability led to an acceptance of the loss of aspiration towards higher or further education because to see their children employed and earning money is better than the option of total social alienation: ‘She just graduated year 12 and she works at Subway. I go, “Alright, as long as you’re working and you’re not in some corner or some ditch with boys or whatever, drinking, I’m happy with that”’.

The acceptance of loss of aspiration towards further education appears to be related to the fact that for all of these mothers, the overriding consideration is for their children to be ‘happy’. The notion of happy in these stories refers to being safe from physical and emotional harm.

I want them to be happy, like that’s why I’m not forcing my son over it, like I can’t tell him what he wants to be, I want him to be happy. I don’t want him to work hard all his life, like in a hard job, so, like I’d like him to be, like because he wanted to be in computers and you know, that’s a hard easy job, I suppose. But, yeah, as long they’re happy, they can be what they want to be.

The ever-present threat of losing their children to ultimate alienation from society limits their capacity to imagine a future unfettered by their social and economic position. Their ability to negotiate a viable social position for themselves and their children is severely constrained by their children’s vulnerability. If we consider a place as requiring ‘the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now (Massey, 2005, p. 140), it is clear that any negotiation does not begin from equal positions of power. Aspiration is formed in the thick of social life and in Appadurai’s terms, the map for the poor has a smaller number of aspirational nodes and a thinner weaker sense of the pathways from concrete wants to intermediate contexts to general norms and back again’ (Appadurai, 2004, p. 69). At no time in the conversation did the women exhibit any constraint in voicing the materiality of their lives in this way. They performed this voicing, ‘in terms of actions and performances which have local cultural force’ as a way that ‘the poor might find locally plausible ways to alter … the terms of recognition in any particular cultural regime’ (Appadurai, 2004, p. 67). The power of voicing this collective conversation in the public space of the school library is significant in identifying possibilities for change.

Visualizing, voicing, and practising aspiration

It is in tracking the movement of the focus group conversation over time that something of the potential of voice can be discerned. The opportunity to give voice to their experiences of career and further education aspiration trajectories with the other mothers in the group led to tussles and collective insights that may not have been possible otherwise. One of the mothers summed up very succinctly the general feeling in the group about how to address the issues of materiality and vulnerability that they identified insofar as they impact on their children’s futures.

I have three things I say to my kids, whether they’re males or female, I’ve got two boys and three girls, and I say to them don’t do anything that’s going to bring the police to the door, be careful who you have kids with – you know, this is me with two failed marriages – and get an education, preferably get a trade because you’ll always have something to go back to.

These three pieces of advice are related to the material conditions of everyday life and the vulnerability of children to social alienation and poverty. There was strong support for trade qualifications from all the mothers as ‘something to fall back on,’ a safety net in the risky world of socio-economic vulnerability. They saw the education required to achieve trade qualifications as hands-on, experiential, and better suited for children who they described as less academically inclined, ‘Even my brother, he was always below average, but did his fitter and turners trade for four years, there’s still paperwork and he wanted to do that bookwork’. They said that children can begin to ‘visualize’ when they have something material to experience: ‘that’s what it is, some kids, and I know I was similar to it at school it was like, to do something on pen and paper didn’t compute, but to walk over and do it with a three dimensional – it all made sense’. Practical learning is described as a possible navigational pathway to bridge the preference for embodied experiential learning and the more abstract learning required for university study.

I don’t think I’m anyone special because I’m going to uni, because I think some of the courses, like I know with the uni, the anatomy and physiology I hate all that part and that’s quite difficult, whereas the other stuff, I think it’s helped me because I’ve done the practical side, I’ve been a nurse. So that has helped me, so I can apply it when we’re doing wound dressings, I could do it with my eyes closed because I’ve done all those aseptic things and all that type of stuff.

University for all of these mothers, even this one participant who is enroled in university, is foreign territory: ‘I know no one in my family has gone to university, not one. No not in my family either. Not one’. And yet, like the children who can begin to ‘visualize’ their learning, the women’s conversation moved along new navigational pathways as they struggled to voice the meaning of aspiration in their lives and the lives of their children in this public institutional space.

It is hard to trace the movement of a whole complex collective conversation but the following excerpt (numbered according to different speakers) in response to one mother’s suggestion to introduce the idea of future careers in primary schools contains something of this movement over the time of the focus group. The first mother to speak is resistant to this idea saying that her children forget things so it is no use to introduce such topics.

(1) And that’s what I’m saying though, because like I’ll say things to my girls and the next day, also they don’t even – oh what are you talking about – like, you know, I’m not really into that, like – do you know what I mean – it doesn’t stay there, and that’s what I’m thinking, like I don’t know if it’s just my girls.

(2) No, as I was saying, my kids – and sometimes, I mean, yeah you can go back and you can, if you tell the whole story they’ll kind of go, yeah – you know – and there’s a vague-

(1) And that’s what makes me say primary might be too early.

(3) But, yeah I just don’t know at what stage the memories- … (talking over) do you know what I mean – stay.

(1) They’re still our babies

(2) But it can’t hurt. You give them the idea it’s not like you’re going to be pushing, going right you have to choose something now you’re in year 3.

(3) Well maybe in Year 6. You could give them the idea, subjects, you know, like- … (talking over) like work experience, like bring all these things into the school or something.

(2) Yeah just start educating – okay this week we’re going to have teacher week and see what a teacher has to do, or this week, policeman, and this week, baker. It’s just that I think anything you can do with getting them thinking about later on it’s not like you’re banging it into them, but if you give them a bit of information now. It’s a fun way. That’s a game, but it’s got them thinking, do you know what I mean?

In this conversation the women struggled within themselves and with each other to give voice to the possibilities of introducing their children to a practice of aspiration for a different future, which included the possibility of imagining a different future for themselves. The conversation began with considerable resistance to the suggestion that their children should be able to experience and discuss different career pathways in primary school. The resistant response was protective of the innocence of vulnerable children, ‘they’re still babies,’ but gradually moved towards a position of affirming the notion of play, the exercise of imagination, ‘it’s a fun way … a game,’ through which their children could imagine themselves into different possible life pathways. The final words of the most resistant mother show the result of the movement where albeit hesitantly, she voices a different possibility for her children’s future.

I’ve got four girls and what can I have … I’ve got a lawyer, I’ve got a police officer and I’ve got a nurse, and it’s like, I don’t want them to be that but that’d be great, wouldn’t that be fantastic to have all that in your family. I haven’t put it in their head, that’s just something, oh that’s a great idea, you know.

Conclusion

This article examined a particular manifestation of aspiration within the context of the global trend in the western world for nation states to institute new policies to enlist students from low socio-economic backgrounds into higher education in order to achieve competitive advantage. These new policies present an opportunity to bring new research tools to questions of social justice associated with educational outcomes for low SES students. The HEPPP arising from the Review of Higher Education in Australia (Bradley et al., 2008) is an initiative of such policies and the highly globalized urban location of western Sydney is examined as an example of their local application. Funding through HEPPP enabled the partnership initiated by an alliance of schools in a designated low SES local government area in western Sydney to conduct collaborative research into the question of how aspirations are shaped over time and what might be the enablers and barriers to participating in higher education.

A global sense of place (Massey, 2005) was used as a conceptual framework for the study with preliminary investigations finding that patterns of disadvantage are shifting radically in western Sydney due to high levels of incoming migration and settlement. These shifting patterns resulted in two primary schools in the study area being assessed as low SES and mid-high SES when only a suburb apart. A comparison between the aspiration trajectories of children in these primary schools using a quantitative analysis of children’s artifacts identified a marked downward trajectory for low SES children from Kindergarten to Year 5 and the reverse trend for mid-high SES children. A qualitative storylines analysis of a parent focus group undertaken to shed light on this finding led to the emergence of the intertwined storylines of Cartographic time, Money matters, and Vulnerable children.

The interpenetration of these storylines is a key to understanding their meaning in the shaping of aspiration for low SES families. Time is not conceived in a linear, developmental way but understood as surface phenomena in which the parents ranged across past, present, and future generations’ aspirations simultaneously in a material present. This material present was constituted within the daily conditions of these parent’s lives in which the presence or absence of money is experienced through the body as a key site for the production and reproduction of power (Soja, 2000). Similarly intertwined, the ever-present threat of losing their children to total social alienation shapes their own and their children’s aspirations in the sense that their abiding hope is for their children to be safe from physical and emotional harm.

The opportunity for these mothers to voice the ‘placetimemattering’ of their own and their children’s aspirations is envisaged as a beginning point to a different ‘navigational pathway’. An extract from part of the conversation explored the shifting imagining of the future as these parents performed their voice in the public domain of the school. The power of the fact that the schools initiated and collaborated in the research, and that the parents were invited into the school to express their views was indicated by the energy of the parents’ participation. Some of the mothers were still standing outside the school in intense discussion an hour after the focus group finished. Important conversations have begun across the five schools that took part in the study which will continue to thicken the pathways of aspiration within the materialities of everyday life in this place.

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges Carol Reid, Tonia Gray, Loshini Naidoo, and Susanne Gannon and Project Officer Lin Brown as the researchers who made up the team of the Student Aspiration Trajectory Research (STAR) project, and the principals and teachers of the Blacktown Learning Community who participated in the study. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their very detailed and useful feedback on the first drafts of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margaret Somerville

Margaret Somerville is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Educational Research, University of Western Sydney. She is interested in the application of theoretical frameworks of space and place to bring new insights to intransigent educational problems.

Notes

1. 1. The Blacktown Learning Community is the actual name of the alliance of schools who elected to be identified in this study, the individual schools are not identified for ethical reasons.

2. 2. In the Bradley Review, low SES was determined by postcode and includes all those students whose permanent home address postcode falls within the lowest 25% of postcodes as coded by the ABS SEIFA Index of Education and Occupation (Census 2006).

3. 3. The study does not compare the same children as they progressed from Kindergarten to Year 5, but a more general comparison between the current group of children in Kindergarten and Year 5.

4. 4. Newstart allowance is ‘Financial help if you are looking for work. It supports you while you do activities that may increase your chances of finding a job, such as studying or training’ (Australian Government & Department of Human Services, 2013).