Employability, social mobility, and epistemic access

1. Employability, social mobility, and epistemic access Professor Sue Clegg s.clegg@leedsmet.ac.uk

2. Structure • Policy agenda employability and mobility • Criticism of assumptions underlying policy • From Official Recontextualization Field to Pedagogic Recontextualization Field - curriculum • Powerful knowledge and epistemic access • Generic knowledge and recontextualization • Vocational areas, traditional science, and humanities • Access and equity • Coda feminist challenges to traditional knowledge

3. Employability • Policy agenda: employability and social mobility, knowledge economy and competitiveness • 2003 White paper The Future of Higher Education, 2010 Strategy Document Skills for Sustainable Growth, 2011 White paper Students at the Heart of the System • HE a private good and students should contribute • Narrative not unique to UK 2009 UNESCO report massification linked to social mobility - costs shifted from state to student and increase in private providers

4. Knowledge Rich Jobs? • Dominant narrative challenged by Brown Lauder and Ashton The Global Auction • Competitive logic of accumulation breaks jobs down and routinizes them • ‘Digital Taylorism’ profitability depends on asserting property rights and managing knowledge - transforming tacit personal knowledge into explicit codified knowledge • High tech companies ‘routine analytics’ done by graduates in Bulgaria and India where graduates a third of the cost of British ones

5. ‘The broken promises of education, jobs & incomes’ • High skills but low wages • Static or falling social mobility • Working and non-working poor are increasingly left behind –argument for higher education becomes even more compelling – high participation rates • Small highly mobile global elite • Jane Kenway’s work on elite formation – choose only a tiny number of elite universities • Not just of social access also epistemic access – need to look at curriculum

6. Curriculum • From Official Recontextualization Field (ORF)to Pedagogic Recontextualization Field (PRF) • Exhortation to improve employability – generic skills – ‘a mix of personal qualities and benefits, understanding, skilful practices and the ability to reflect productively on experience.'(Yorke, 2006) • Graduate attributes – a mixture of generic and academic - Barrie 2004 ‘the skills, knowledge and abilities of university graduates, beyond disciplinary content knowledge, which are applicable to a range of contexts’

7. What sort of knowledge • Common sense of ‘employability’ in PRF particularly at less prestigious institutions • Critics drawing on critical realist and Bernstein distinguish between ‘powerful’ and other sorts of knowledge • Powerful knowledge ‘Powerful knowledge is powerful because of the access it provides to the natural and social worlds and to society’s conversation about what it should be like’ (Wheelahan 2010: 10)

8. Generic knowledge • Semantic codes - semantic gravity - degree to which meaning is tied to context, and semantic density - the social condensation of meaning • Argue that high semantic gravity ties meaning to context cannot be generalised to other contexts in same way as powerful knowledge – an issue of epistemic access • Inequalities: Wheelahan vocational education • Shay historically technical universities in SA restricts epistemic access to higher levels

9. Recontextualization • Translation of generic employability skills • Re-visiting data from PDP research suggests that not straight forward • Generic employability embraced in curriculum areas already ‘regionalised’ generic projectional • Different recontextualization strategies in introjected singulars - strongly framed (boundaries) and classified (hierarchical) • Also distinguish knower codes and knowledge codes (Maton 2014)

10. PDP in ‘vocational’ areas • In our research egs Sport, Leisure and Engineering (can’t assume from course names) • Students in these generic versions of the PDP curriculum were encouraged to look at their own study patterns and to reflect on their own meta-cognitive processes. • Might appear to involve the development of abstract knowledge • In practice tended towards high semantic gravity that is knowledge which is tied to its social and symbolic context, in this case the narrow contexts of the student’s direct experiences.

11. PDP in traditional science • Traditional science curriculum are strongly famed, singulars with ‘their own intellectual field of texts, practices, rules of entry, examinations, license to practice, distribution of rewards and punishments’ (Bernstein 2000:52). • Maton (2014)strong knowledge codes that is strong commitments to knowledge and truth • Weak knower codes that is a concern with the ‘who’ of knowing • PDP re contextualized as abstract skills needed for the discipline - low semantic gravity

12. PDP in traditional humanities • ‘Knower-grammars refer to the strength of the classification and framing of subjects and their dispositions’(Maton 2014: 94) • Gaze trained gaze, cultivated gaze, social gaze, born gaze (from weaker to stronger knower grammars) • In PDP low semantic gravity cultivating right sort of knower and needs of the discipline • Suggests an elite code (interesting work in humanities Kathy Luckett and colleagues UCT)

13. Epistemic Access • Hypothesis – generic employability agenda stronger in less privileged parts of the sector (very difficult to get good data about PRF as can’t be read off simply from descriptions) • Do know that traditional disciplines and well established professions dominate in elite institutions • 70% of students from manual families go to new universities only 13% go to Russell Group institutions (Boliver 2013) • Issue becomes one of epistemic access to powerful knowledge among less privileged students

14. Social and Epistemic Access • Access and equity • Whelan concludes from her research in the Australian context: • ‘This professional/ occupational hierarchy reflects the class structure in society more broadly. The professions are dominated by the social elites, while at the other end, lower VET qualifications in new fields are dominated by students from low socio-economic backgrounds’ • VET - high semantic gravity and less access to powerful knowledge

15. Coda • A conservative defence of traditional disciplines? • Think not because feminist and other interventions involved making newer better knowledge claims • Reject strong voice epistemologies – and judgemental relativism but sociologically can show that newer participants challenged (some) existing disciplinary claims • But we should ask questions about semantic gravity and powerful knowledge in PRF • Curriculum and knowledge matter