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The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation

‘The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation: developing the professional (philosophical?) case’ or ‘ Cultural context, student diversity and the work of the academic: thinking towards an ‘academic benefits’ (and ‘benefits for the academic’) model of widening participation’.

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The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation

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  1. ‘The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation: developing the professional (philosophical?) case’or‘Cultural context, student diversity and the work of the academic: thinking towards an ‘academic benefits’ (and ‘benefits for the academic’) model of widening participation’

  2. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation

  3. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation • A truism: Academic work interacts with society (and is shaped by it) • And another: There are many modes of interaction • And yet another: The academic-student relationship is one such mode (the most crucial?)

  4. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation • A proposition: academic work can be enhanced by an openness to the social and cultural currents of the day • And another: ‘Student mix’ is of vital importance to the scholarly community of which the academic is a part • And yet another: The scholarly community is an area of strategy for: 1. student recruitment and 2. pedagogy • And just one more: A close understanding of how society and academic disciplines interact is vital to widening participation

  5. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation • The problem: [the] spaces and shapes of the university are locked tight. It is difficult for them to be prised open, and new spaces found or formed … It may be that a wide variety of relationships between key activities of the university may be feasible, and even new activities or existing ones reshaped so as to open new spaces, new configurations. (Hughes 2005)

  6. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation • So … academic work interacts with society • But what does this really mean … • For the humanities? • For the natural sciences?

  7. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation Society and the humanities: detachment versus engagement

  8. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation • Contributions from outside the academy In common with historian contemporaries such as Edward Thompson, Thomas Hodgkin, Henry Collins, Royden Harrison, and J. F. C. Harrison, who helped shape the emergence of social history … he [Raymond Williams] spent the first half of his career in adult education, on the fringes of the academic world proper, only receiving his first university appointment, at Cambridge, in 1961. (Eley 2005: 20)

  9. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation • Sociology as a ‘reaction’ to society Britain … lacking – unlike fin-de-siècle Germany, France or Italy – the spur of an insurgent socialism, missed the moment of a Weber, Durkheim or Pareto; and never knew the Marxist reprise of a Lukacs, Sartre or Gramsci. (Anderson 1992)

  10. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation • Positivism in the social sciences Positivism adheres to the bourgeois idea of presuppositionless, pure theory, in which the absence of “ethical neutrality” or the commitment of taking a position signifies delinquency in rigor. (Marcuse: 1968)

  11. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation Society and the natural sciences: the suspicion of culture

  12. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation • Science as ‘abstracted’ from society Physics, by contrast, stands, along with mathematics and logic, right at the other end of this spectrum. It is not just an immensely abstract enquiry but one which directs its abstraction specifically to shut out the peculiarities of personal experience. That is what makes it remote from ordinary thought. (Midgely 2001: 188)

  13. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation • Science has two aspects (at least): • 1. procedure (method) • 2. Inspiration (hypotheses and theorisation)

  14. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation • The idiomatic nature of systematic thought Permanent relationships are described in an impermanent idiom, which reflects both the age’s climate of thought and the individual philosopher’s personal style. (Strawson 1959)

  15. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation What Critical Pedagogy can offer (seeing students as ‘active bearers’ of their culture, not merely its inhabitants)

  16. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with students, who in turn while being taught also teaches. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. (Freire 2000: 79-80)

  17. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation What about strategy? (teaching and learning, recruitment, constructing the scholarly community etc.)

  18. The Academic Benefits of Widening Participation

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