Challenging discourses of aspiration: The role of expectations and attainment in access to higher education
Challenging discourses of aspiration: The role of expectations and attainment in access to higher education
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DOI：
10.1002/berj.3475
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发表时间：
2018-10-01
影响因子：
2.3
通讯作者：
Waller, Richard
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Harrison, Neil;Waller, Richard
自 20 世纪 90 年代末以来，提高来自弱势背景的年轻人接受高等教育的比例一直是英国历届政府的关键政策目标。通常，这被视为“他们的愿望”的问题，解决方案被视为提供“愿望提升”活动，以促进那些被认为有进步潜力的人接受高等教育。最近的大规模研究对这一假设提出了强烈的质疑，它们表明，愿望并不普遍低，不同的社会群体有相似的愿望水平，并且学校成绩几乎解释了社会群体之间参与率的所有差异。本文借鉴了一个国家项目的数据，该项目探索扩大英格兰两代从业者管理者的参与范围，重点关注他们对该领域的概念化以及他们对成功活动的构建。它使用“可能的自我”的镜头（马库斯和努里乌斯）认为，政策过多地强调了年轻人的愿望，而不是他们的学术成就或他们的期望，而后者是由周围成年人的规范期望塑造的。此外，十年前出现的扩大参与的更广泛的概念已经变得不那么常见，转向在机构招聘而不是社会转型中发挥明确作用的活动。文章最后提出了政策和实践的替代建议。
Raising the proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds progressing to higher education has been a key policy objective for successive governments in the UK since the late 1990s. Often this has been conceptualised as a problem with their aspirations', with the solution being seen as the provision of aspiration-raising' activities to promote higher education to those thought to have the potential to progress. Recent large-scale studies cast strong doubt on this hypothesis by demonstrating that aspirations are not generally low, that different social groups have similar levels of aspiration and that school attainment accounts for nearly all the differences in participation rates between social groups. This article draws on data from a national project exploring efforts to widen participation across two generations of practitioner-managers in England, focusing on their conceptualisations of the field and their constructions of successful' activities. It uses the lens of possible selves' (Markus & Nurius, ) to argue that too much policy emphasis has been placed on the aspirations of young people, rather than either their academic attainment or their expectations, which are shaped by the normative expectations of the adults surrounding them. In addition, the more expansive concepts of widening participation that were present a decade ago have become less common, with a shift towards activities with a clear role in institutional recruitment rather than social transformation. The article concludes with alternative suggestions for policy and practice.