Aspiration and its discontents

I have recently submitted a bid for a new research project with Peter Kraftl and David Harvie as part of a broader application to the Leverhulme Trust for a programme of research on A fair share or an accursed share? Generating a just common future. Our project, Aspiration and its discontents in modern Britain, if successful, will critically investigate the emergent ‘politics of aspiration’ in Britain over recent decades. It will trace how these individualised forms of aspiration superseded forms of social hope based upon collective experiences of hoping/planning for the future, and examine their implications for social justice. As well as examining these changing social policy discourses, our research will study groups whose aspirations for ‘fair shares’ differ from contemporary (individualistic) norms.

Public appearances

I’ve allowed this blog to sit fallow, without updating, for a little too long.  To get me back into the swing of posting here, I thought it would be useful to provide an update on what I’ve been doing over the last year or so.  The Place of Aspirations project has had a number of outings since I last posted.

In March 2010, I gave a paper entitled “The place of aspirations: targeting widening participation initiatives in policy and practice” at a workshop on Educational Diversity: difference matters and matters of difference organised by Yvette Taylor at the University of Newcastle-Upon_Tyne.  The day contained a fascinating range of papers addressing issues of gender, (dis)ability, class and ethnicity in education.  I found Sylvia Walby’s paper on “Intersectionality and the equality architecture” particularly fascinating and she provoked me to think further about the role of widening participation practitioners as key intermediaries in providing (some) working class students access to higher education and social mobility.

More recently, I was invited to present a research seminar in the School of Environment and Technology at the University of Brighton.  My paper was called “Orientating young people’s aspirations” and explored how work on young people’s aspirations attempts to orientate their lives along particular, socially valued life trajectories, but also how those young people who develop and are able to act on ‘high’ aspirations frequently have particular orientations to the world beyond their immediate home environments.

After the seminar

I’m pleased to say the ‘Place of Aspirations’ seminar on 14th May went really well. 

The event was attended by just under 20 people, including a trio from Malmo University in Sweden (more about them later…).  Many of the participants were directly involved in the delivery of widening participation projects and this led to some very fruitful discussions that were particularly focused on policy and practice.

Prof. John Storan from Continuum at the University of East London and Sumi Hollingworth from the Institute of Policy Studies in Education at London Metropolitan University both gave fascinating papers that really helped broaden the afternoon’s debates and put my own work within a broader context.

What I found particularly interesting about Sumi’s paper “Choice or Coercion? Policies and initiatives aimed at increasing urban pupils’ engagement and aspirations for post-16 participation“ was how similar the aspirations were of the young people we have worked with in our respective studies.  Sumi had mostly worked with young people attending six schools across London who were deemed to be at risk of leaving school and not engaging with education, employment or training.  In contrast, the teenagers I worked with in South-East London in 2007 were all relatively high-achieving students who were engaged with their studies. 

 

 

In full flow at the seminar

The seminar left me with several ideas to think about for the future, including some potential follow-up studies, and I’m sure I’ll post more about some of these over the summer.  But the most exciting conversations of the afternoon were with the delegation from Malmo, who are interested in researching the aspirations of young people in their city.  The potential for an international comparative study is tantalizing, as is the prospect of thinking about educational aspirations in a political culture where the language of  ‘aspiration’ has not saturated policy debates in recent years.

Emerging themes and findings

Now that I have had a chance to analyse much of the date collected through the various components of this research project, I am developing a clearer idea of the key themes that have emerged through this research.  For now, I want to flag up three of the main strands of my analysis.

1. Aspirations-talk and scale: there are clear differences in the tone of the language used by ministers (and in official Government publications) depending on the scale in relation to which they are discussing young people’s aspirations.  When young people’s aspirations are mobilised to talk about the potential for developing and maintaining the global competitiveness of the British economy in the decades to come, the language tends to be optimistic and highly ‘aspirational’ (if that’s not a tautology).  In contrast, more and more, when ministers talk about the aspirations of young people themselves (especially when they are deemed not to be high enough to meet the needs of the national economy), the tone is far more one of regulation and control.
2. Orienting young people’s aspirations.  There are two thread to this set of findings: the first relates to the different spatial metaphors enroled to talk about young people’s aspirations – whether the role of widening participation is to ‘raise aspirations’ or to ‘broaden [young people’s] horizons’.  The use of these two metaphors by ministers and Government agencies has varied over time, and to some degree between different bodies.  My findings suggest that these metaphors matter and they shape widening participation practitioners’ understandings of their work and the form that their professional practice takes.  The second thread here relates to the issues [discussed above, in relation to the recent Cabinet Office findings] about the extend to which young people’s orientation to the wider world shapes their aspirations and ambitions for adult life – and what the consequences of this might be for widening participation practice.
3. Emotional geographies of young people’s ambitions.  This strand of my work draws on an understanding of ‘aspiration’ (and ‘ambition’) as an emotional sensation, that is deeply entangled with a range of other emotions and affective states.  This analysis approaches young people’s ambitions (and the barriers to their realisation) as often being intimately linked to place (or a desire to escape certain places). Finally, this aspect of my analysis considers the various ways in which widening participation practice seeks to provoke particular emotional experiences for young people – whether that is through attempting to increase their confidence, self-esteem and resilience, or creating ‘wow!’ moments during widening participation events and interventions.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll share more thoughts about each of these issues.

Latest progress

The primary research for this project is now complete.  In addition to the interviews with widening participation policy makers, and the analysis of policy documents and ministerial speeches about widening participation and young people’s aspirations, I have also carried out a focus group with undergraduates from widening participation backgrounds.  These students were all active student ambassadors at their university – involved in the delivery of widening participation activities and serving as role models to young people identified by their schools as being able to benefit from widening participation schemes. 

I had hoped to hold focus groups with student ambassadors in London and the East Midlands, but in the end, only the East Midlands group came together – despite a lot of help and encouragement by former colleagues in London, I was unable to convene a group of students there within the timescale of the project.  Similarly, the focus groups with school students currently participating in WP activities could not be organised in time and will have to wait to form part of a future research project.  Luckily, I have some unpublished data from an earlier action research project with white working class teenagers in London (carried out in 2007) that I have re-analysed recently and which I hope to incorporate into some of the publications from this project.

The project was due to end on 31 March 2009, but I am grateful to the Royal Geographical Society for granting a short extension, until early June, to allow me to hold a dissemination event reporting my preliminary findings – more about that shortly.

Latest developments

Despite a heavy teaching load this semester, work on this research project seems to be developing well:

• All the interviews with WP practitioners have been completed and transcribed.  The transcription service I used JHTS (http://www.jhts.co.uk/) provided an excellent and highly efficient service – despite the obligatory small number of amusing mis-transcriptions (I will never quite be able to think the same way about one girls’ school in South London, mentioned by one interviewee, whose name got transcribed as ‘Lower Trade’).  I plan to start a full analysis of this data early in January.
• I am in the process of arranging focus groups with udnergraduates at universities in London and the East Midlands who participated in widening participation activities whilst at school.  In this neck of the woods I have received an exceptionally high level of interest from students and hope that the interest amongst London students will be similarly high.
• Finally, I am also working on arranging a focus group with Year 10 school students in the East Midlands who are currently engaged with Aimhigher initiatives, to hear their opinions about aspiration raising activities and how they feel about their ambitions for adult life.  As the project budget is beginning to look quite tight, I have decided not to organise a parallel focus group with school students in London, as I have unpublished data from a recent action research project that can be integrated into this research and serve as a comparison with the the views of teenagers from the East Midlands. 

Interviews: early thoughts

Today I conducted the last of the interviews with Widening Participation practitioners.  Soon the recordings will be sent off to the transcription service; and, once the transcripts return, I can begin the process of fully analysing this phase of the research.  Before then, I have a few observations to share on the interview material, albeit very impressionistic ones.

In total, I have interviewed twelve professionals working in the field of widening participation.  Six of them are based in London, and six in the East Midlands.  Eight of them are currently based in the higher education sector, three work for Aimhigher partnerships, and one works for a learned society.  Of those currently working in higher education, all but one work for mainstream, research-led universities (but two of the group have previous experience of providing WP work in the ‘new university’ sector).  If I get an opportunity to extend this research in the future, I hope to include a more balanced representation of professionals working across the full range of the higher education sector.

The dozen professions I interviewed had varied career routes that led them into widening participation work.  Six had previously worked in university administration in other capacities (either in admissions, student recruitment and related marketing activities, or in welfare advice roles).  Four had previously worked as secondary school teachers; with another having taught in adult education.  One had started her professional life as a careers adviser.  Two of the interviewees had worked as university academics, with one still being primarily employed in this role.  It is my impression that the analysis will reveal some subtle, yet (I think) significant, differences in approach to young people’s aspirations and life choices between those with a background in teaching and careers and those with greater experience of higher education.

I found it interesting, but not completely surprising, that almost all of these professionals – to my recollection, with only one exception – were keen to claim a ‘widening participation’ background for themselves.  Personal experience of being the first in family to attend higher education appears to be an important motivating factor for many working in this field.  Certainly, while Government ministers have tended to advocate widening participation in terms of the economic advantage it can offer individuals and the nation state, widening participation practitioners seem more likely to understand the importance of their work in terms of social justice and an equalities agenda.

All of the interviews have contained rich descriptions and explanations of how the places where young people grow up (and attend school) shape their aspirations and ambitions for adult life.  Although there are some commonalities in the evidence provided by WP practitioners working in London and the East Midlands, I also anticipate that a full analysis will indicate some significant variations between these two regions.  In part, this might be a measure of the complexity and diversity of the populations in inner London.  It may be that future research, comparing practice in more regional settings will reveal whether their is indeed a high degree of regional variation in the issues affecting young people, or whether this is a case of London’s exceptionalism.

What is perhaps hardest to gauge without thorough analysis of the interview transcript is how WP practitioners conceptualise young people’s ‘aspirations’.  Although all of the professionals had a clear conception of how they were trying to enable young people to make informed choices about their futures, and to expose them to new possibilities as part of that process, several of them found it quite difficult to explain what ‘aspirations’ actually are and how they can be ‘raised’ in practice.  Nevertheless, even those professionals who found it difficult to define the concept of ‘raising aspirations’ could identify those moments when they felt their interventions had made a real and lasting impact on individual young people, and identified the kinds of events and activities that they believed to be most effective in altering how young people thought about what might be possible in their lives.  Tied to this, I think many of the interviews contain really rich  explorations of the multiple ways in which ‘aspirations’ are bound up with a range of other emotions; and, how these are experienced through and in relation to place.

I’m looking forward to getting to grips with a full analysis of these interviews in the near future.

Progress

There are three strands to this project:

1. an analysis of policy documents, widening participation promotional material, and ministerial speeches examining how young people’s aspirations are discussed in relation to place, and how spatial metaphors are employed;
2. interviews with widening participation practitioners to examine how policy is put into practice, to understand how these educational professionals conceive of the work they do, and their beliefs about young people’s aspirations;
3. a small number of focus group workshops with young people from ‘widening participation’ backgrounds (both current school students and undergraduates who have participated in widening participation activities) to consider what it feels like to participate in these events, and the effect they have had in shaping young people’s ambitions for adult life.

Over the summer, I gathered a huge number of policy documents, promotional material and the texts of ministerial speeches, amongst other related documentation.  I presented some very preliminary thoughts on this analysis as a paper at the recent RGS-IBG conference, which seemed to go down well.  When I submitted my abstract for the paper way backat the start of the year (well before the grant was actually confirmed) I clearly thought I would have been able to progress the analysis further over the summer.  As it was, the tight deadline forced me to crack on with the project and to begin a process of interative analysis from the beginning.   I’ll post some of those preliminary thoughts on what I’ve read in these documents in the near future, but the main analysis still remains to be done during the autumn. 

In recent weeks I’ve interviewed nearly a dozen widening participation practitioners who either work in inner London or the East Midlands (and, in one case, a person who currently runs a project that operates nationally).  Earlier today I carried out what will probably be the penultimate interview, with a senior widening participation manager based in the East Midlands.  There is one more interview in the East Midlands already in the diary, and I am still trying to arrange an interview in London with someone I collaborated with on a number of events and activities when I used to run the Access to Medicine Project.  But, as time goes on, I am beginning to realise that there is a limit to how long I can delay sending the interview soundtracks off for transciption while I wait for that interview to be scheduled.  Again, I’ll post some initial reflections and observations on the interviews before too long.

Which really just leaves the focus groups with young people to organise.  I think I have now settled on a couple of schools in inner London and Leicester to approach for their involvement in this phase of the work.  I just need to make contact to see if it will be viable.  Luckily, arranging focus groups with current undergraduates should be less of a challenge.  I had, originally, hoped to organise focus groups with young people from the NEET (not in education, employment or training) cohort in both cities, but as I received a smaller grant that I applied for, and those focus groups could prove very time consuming to arrange, they will have to wait for a future project.