Widening Participation in Higher Education: Lifelong Learning as Capability

This chapter seeks to contribute to theoretical frameworks and understandings of good practice for a social justice approach to lifelong learning. It specifically focuses on widening participation and higher education as a process of interwoven critical engagement with knowledge, of identity formation, and of agency development, key issues for learning which is lifelong and which enables us to make informed choices about our lives and the societies in which we live. I draw philosophically on the capability approach as developed in particular by Martha Nussbaum, for her emphasis on human flourishing and the ethical importance of each and very person as an end in themselves. But I draw also from Amartya Sen’s philosophical approach to capability as the freedom for diverse people to choose a life they have reason to value. Crucially, educational development should focus on what people are actually able to be and do, personally and in comparison to others. The capability approach therefore focuses on people’s own reflective, informed choice of ways of living that they deem important and valuable, and their self-determination of ends and values in life. This contrasts to human capital approaches which measure the value of higher education in terms of its national economic returns and impact on Gross Domestic Product. Agency is a central idea, closely connected to human well being. The capability approach contributes, in my view, to a conceptualisation and practice of justice in higher education and a robust challenge to dominant human capital approaches to lifelong learning. I seek to answer the question as to how we evaluate how well we are doing in widening participation in higher education as a project of lifelong learning.

I take as my example, England where working class students are currently only 20% of the cohort who enter higher education. How are they enabled to participate and succeed through the informal and informal learning opportunities and processes in higher education, given that social class is still a persistent determinant of preferences, choices and learner biographies educational opportunities, and winners and losers. Core to my concerns in this chapter is that experiences in higher education build over time into inter-subjective patterns and shape what kind of persons we recognise ourselves to be and what we believe ourselves able to do. Higher education, in particular, is a period when students ought to develop the maps, tools and resources, to navigate the journeys which follow. More than this, their preparations can directly shape the course of the subsequent journey. Maps direct travellers towards one set of paths rather than another. The point is made by Anthony Appiah that none of us makes a self in any way that we choose; we make up selves from a tool kit of options made available by our culture and society. We then have to ask of higher education as a cultural and social practice, what tool kit of options it is making available to all students to choose and to choose well.

At issue is how we evaluate equality achievements in relation to widening participation. For example, here is an apparently successful educational outcome. Two young women both complete a degree in English literature at the same English university. For one, from a middle class, reasonably affluent background and a good school, a major reason was her decision to experience university before entering her father’s business as a trainee manager. Thus an outstanding degree result was not required, although she coped well with the academic demands having been well prepared by her schooling and the advice of her graduate parents. She chose rather to spend her time socializing and pursuing her leisure interests of cycling and cooking. The second young woman from a working class background and a not very good state school, worked long hours in poorly paid part-time jobs to supplement her student loan, had very little spare money to socialize, lived in cheap accommodation and ate cheap food. Despite significant academic ability, she struggled to fit in and her lack of confidence meant she was reluctant to approach her tutors for help with work, for which her school had not prepared her well. Both students obtain second class passes. Can we then say that the inclusion goal has been met for the working class student, who apparently did as well as her middle class counterpart? Can we say that this example demonstrates equality; and if so, ‘equality of what’?

Working class students enter higher education as carriers of risk biographies; this will influence how they construct their learner identities over time. The degree of risk will certainly not be the same for all students and some will also bring identity capital in the form of supportive and aspirational parents and good experiences of learning and teaching at school. But non-traditional students are less likely to enter higher education equipped with the cultural and linguistic capital which higher education pedagogies assume, and less equipped to decode these pedagogic messages, as Bourdieu and Passeron have argued. We need always to keep in mind that a policy and institutional rhetoric about ‘inclusion’ and ‘learning’ in higher education mostly presupposes that students have the required linguistic and cultural capital to participate and succeed. Universities generally assume that students also the capacity to invest such capital profitably. The culturally marginal place of working class students in higher education might then result in self-evaluations of inadequacy that distort and confine what they believe themselves capable of, so that they come to locate the problem in themselves and the belief that they are not capable of thinking intelligently or that what they have to say is not important. As bell hooks has written, she found pedagogical processes during her college years in the USA valued only middle class norms and demeanour. To avoid estrangement students from working-class backgrounds like herself had to assimilate into the mainstream ways of talking and being. Students internalize the possibility of success or failure which then becomes transformed into individualized aspirations or expectations and come to be seen as an objective structure of chances in life. They are inducted into a higher education which is a hierarchy of power and valuing, contradicting the inclusion and justice claims of lifelong learning policy.

My argument in this chapter therefore turns on the claim that the capabilities approach enables us to address the real opportunities that influence the achievements of working class students, and that the capability of lifelong learning is a key component of a student’s opportunity set and their agency freedom and agency achievement. The chapter explores this in relation to formal and informal learning, and curriculum and pedagogy, and their identity effects for working class students’ learning in higher education. The argument is that the capability approach as a philosophical and practical framework promotes better and fairer outcomes, judged by social justice criteria, while also providing a critique of current higher education and social structures of inequality.