- Title
- Re/cognising the fr/Ames of university equity outreach: a cautionary tale of unintended consequences in Australian Equity and Widening Participation policy, practice and evaluation
- Creator
- Lumb, Matt
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This thesis presents a ‘cautionary tale’ of the unintended consequences of hegemonic methodologies constructing the policies, practices and evaluative projects of Australian university Equity and Widening Participation (EWP) outreach. The commencing context for the study is a mentoring program of university outreach that developed in partnership with school communities. The ‘cautionary’ dimension of the work (situated across two paradigmatically different phases) stems from a claim that the absence of optimistically critical spaces for theorising the value and impact of EWP projects from multiple and diverse perspectives tends to embed and reproduce prevailing and arguably problematic ‘commonsense’ middle class logics and assumptions. My work, often in collaboration, explores how equity and widening participation practitioners are commonly situated within policy and practice architectures that coerce embodied subjectivities toward sustaining regimes of symbolic violence that undermine social justice possibilities. The themes that connect and build across the chapters include: the ways in which EWP policy ‘colludes’ to position outreach practitioners in relation to targeted community members; the ways in which this collusion discursively constructs conditions for multiple misrecognitions across EWP (and outreach contexts in particular); the difficult importance of consistent efforts to identify and work through damaging deficit discourses in EWP, with a focus on outreach activity; and the need for praxis-based spaces and resources whereby we might apprehend (albeit always partially and imperfectly) the frames constructing edupolitical realities if EWP efforts are to have the opportunity fulfil their social justice promise. The study on which this thesis draws had two distinct phases, each involving different methodologies and methods. The first phase consisted of high volume surveys and short interviews with research participants ‘inside of’ or nearby a high school mentoring program. The second phase developed following a deeper engagement with critical feminist sociological literatures and Freirean commitments. This second phase involved close up reengagement with a subgroup of research participants in a series of workshops exploring sociological concepts, discussing and theorising from their perspectives, interrogating their own interview data from 18 months prior, and challenging the preliminary analysis of the researcher. The work advocates for policymakers, practitioners and evaluative projects to develop access to conceptual tools and methodological understandings via partnerships with researchers attuned to the contexts of the practice, and to paradigmatic, ontological and epistemological foundations. A consistent dimension of this thesis is an argument for the construction of spaces and resources that can facilitate generative unsettling dialogue regarding the methodologies underpinning EWP policy, practice and evaluative research. The thesis themes are developed over multiple lines of enquiry that constitute the chapters of this thesis. In chapter 4, I present myself as outreach practitioner casting about for ‘valid’ and ‘reliable’ psychological tools to measure the impact and build evidence of the effectiveness of an outreach program, working through to the realisation of being entangled in a system of practices demanding performances of educational and career orientation towards a ‘wicked future’. Foregrounding the challenges for practitioners in the field, chapter 5 explores in more depth the discursive policy framing that facilitates multiple misrecognitions in EWP practice; advocates the important of explicit methodological commitments in practice, research, evaluation and policymaking; and offers a pedagogical tool for discussing the problems of perspective. Chapter 6 follows Goffman, using the notions of frame and fabrication to make the provocative assertion that some methodologies can produce obscene consequences in ethically fraught fields, building on debates relating to the ways in which social program evaluation constructs what is understood to be ‘credible evidence’. In chapter 7, two recent higher education policy proposals are engaged to illuminate the ways in which policymaking efforts can paradoxically contradict the conditions required for effective equity-oriented programs as they misrecognise the situations and experiences of intended participants. Chapter 8, written in dialogue with my PhD supervisor, builds a conceptual foundation to reframe evaluation in EWP and promotes theory-driven and participatory methodologies for evaluation that can ethically identify the social dynamics producing program value. Chapter 9 sees a deep engagement with the notion of reflexive praxis with a schoolteacher-collaborator in the field of university outreach, to explore further the challenges and possibilities of this approach for practitioners positioned differently in the field. The chapters emerged as journal articles and book chapters via a PhD by publication format that developed gradually during part-time enrolment. This temporality inadvertently provided a deep appreciation for the benefits of iteration, uncertainty and reflective research practice. Ultimately, it has led to a commitment to sustained critical feminist praxis. The contribution to knowledge made by this thesis is purposefully situated and partial. I present methodological considerations for policymaking, research, evaluation and practice including the development of spaces and resources that might help to navigate our messy, open, social territories. The work develops arguments and pedagogical resources for sustaining ‘radical doubt’ across praxis–based projects so that we might apprehend the dominant historically produced frames that make durable the higher education status quo, not to suggest their simple removal, but to work on them as enabling constraints towards more socially just arrangements.
- Subject
- equity; widening participation; higher education; social justice; mentoring; praxis; thesis by publication
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1427629
- Identifier
- uon:38556
- Rights
- Copyright 2020 Matt Lumb
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 5 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |