Introduction

The recent review of Australian higher education (‘HE’), Australian Universities Accord Final Report, (‘the Accord’) (DE, 2023) acknowledges that the HE system has failed to achieve parity of access and attainment for students of ‘equity cohorts’Footnote 1 despite over three decades of targetted policies and funding. Non-traditional students’ enrolments in university have increased over the past two decades, but their participation varies significantly across equity cohorts (DE, 2023) and they continue to experience less academic success and higher attrition rates compared to traditional students (DE, 2023; Naylor & Misfud, 2020; Walker-Gibbs et al., 2019).

University-based enabling programs (also known as Pathway, Foundational, or Access programs) have played a significant role in increasing participation and success of non-traditional students in HE by developing academic capabilities and acculturation to the HE environment (Agosti & Bernat, 2018; Hodges et al., 2013; Pitman et al., 2016). They are intended to be of a ‘transformational nature’ (NAEEA, 2019, p. 4), where ‘transformation’ and ‘transformative experiences’ are terms used within enabling education literature to describe development of the student identity, that is, the development of their academic capabilities and acculturation to the HE environment (Agosti & Bernat, 2018; Syme et al., 2022). While ‘transformation’ is central to descriptions of enabling program students’ successes, it is largely overlooked where they subsequently disengage from education. Their experiences tend to be examined in relation to ‘external objective factors’ tied to their disadvantage (for example, financial barriers, time pressures, travel time, age.) (Bennett et al., 2016; Morison & Cowley, 2017; Whannell & Whannell, 2014). Yet the research literature indicates that some students withdraw from their undergraduate studies in the face of these challenges, while others experiencing the same challenges will persist (Habel & Whitman, 2016; Lisciandro, 2022; Millman & McNamara, 2018; Whannell & Whannell, 2015).

Habel and Whitman (2016) examine enabling students’ experiences of university studies in relation to the notion of transformation. They also observe that although non-traditional students may ostensibly come to fit with organisational discourses around academic capability and acculturation, they may nonetheless have unanticipated unfavourable experiences of HE leading to reduced success, engagement, or withdrawal. They argue there is an ‘idealised vision of transformation’ informed by liberal education policy rhetoric of opportunity, social mobility, and an aspirational ‘knowledge economy optimism’ (p. 73) and conclude that the ‘normalised educational culture’ founded on and sustained by oppressive social relations is not easily navigated by this cohort, who may continue to be alienated or isolated despite academic transformation’ (p. 82).

This paper theorises Narrative Identity as a framework for conceptualising and critically analysing the relationships between HE institutional and organisational discourses, and non-traditional students’ identities and experiences of HE. I foreground the experiences of three former enabling program students, drawn from a narrative study involving 22 former enabling students who transitioned into HE at a South Australian  university. In tracking their return to and progress through education, ‘transformation’ emerged as a significant theme across all participants’ narratives. Notwithstanding their confidence, sense of belonging, demonstrated academic capability and mostly consistent academic performances throughout their studies, several experienced HE in ways at odds with their own expectations, impacting their engagement and success in their studies. Any of the original research participants could have been included in this discussion, however these case studies are selected because of their contrasting nature, demonstrating the potential of the Narrative Identity approach for understanding diverse student experiences.

Narrative Identity (‘NI’) methodologies are founded on the premise that people construct their identity through narrative, providing the researcher with insight into how individuals understand their experience and make decisions (Ricoeur, 1986; McAdams & McLean, 2013). I apply a social constructionist lens to theorise how non-traditional enabling students navigate the ‘strictly bounded cultural space’ (Habel & Whitman, 2016, p. 72) of Australia’s neoliberal HE environment regulated by discourses of aspiration and success. In so doing, I explore students’ construction of their ‘capable student’ identity and, also, what challenges the sustainability of their transformed identities.

Theorising Narrative Identity

Narrative Identity research literature is diverse and fragmented—a consequence of differing epistemological and ontological standpoints between and within academic disciplines about what identity is and how it is formed (Loseke, 2007; McAdams, 2018). Nonetheless, NI theories are founded on the propositions that individuals make sense of personal experiences through ‘emplotted’ stories (narratives), utilising cultural narratives or archetypes to communicate their understanding of their experiences and actions to an audience (here, the researcher) (Ricoeur, 1986; MacAdams & McLean, 2013). Identity narratives may be characterised by an overarching theme, for example, transformation, redemption, or contamination (McAdams, 2018) and can include selectively appropriated experiences that may or may not be factually complete or precise, varying in substance and form on occasions of telling (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; McAdams, 2018; Ricoeur, 1986).

A particular challenge of NI research is ‘the problem of whose narrative it is’ (Josselson, 2011, p. 37). The researcher must consider how the narrator may craft their accounts in anticipation of the researcher/interviewer’s aims (Moen, 2006), but also to what extent ‘(w)e, as researchers, ‘coproduce’ the worlds of our research’ (Josselson, 2011, p. 38).

A social constructionist NI framework is premised on the theory that social action is ‘only intelligible if we recognise that people are guided to act by the structural and cultural relationships in which they are embedded and by the stories through which they constitute their identities’ (Somers, 1994, p. 624). A social constructionist perspective sees identity as an effect of language (Burr, 2015), and I draw from Foucault to explore how structural and cultural discourses regulate what can or can’t be said. Bridging social-constructionism and post-structuralism, Foucault argues that identity stems from existing repertoires of discourse through which socio-political relations of power are realised (Foucault, 1988). Applying a Foucauldian lens in NI research asks how individuals come to (be able to) occupy a particular subject position as an effect of discursive practices and discourse-in-practice (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000).

For Foucault, discourse is both ‘an instrument and an effect of power’ (Foucault, 1998, p. 101), where discourse ‘puts words into action, constructs perceptions and formulates understanding’ (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000, p. 93). Foucault conceived of power as intertwined with knowledge (‘power/knowledge’) and, as such, the exercise of power depends on the knowledge that supports it (Hall, 1997). Power/knowledge defines ‘what is legitimate and not legitimate, normal and not normal’ (Christensen, 2016, p. 172) and operates through specific institutional apparatus and technologies, not only as linguistic and non-linguistic discourses of institutions, but in architectural arrangements, regulations, laws, administrative measures, morality, philanthropy, and so on. The use of this lens on NI, therefore, frames personal experience and action as the consequence of the relationality and reflexivity between personal, cultural, organisational and institutional discursive practices (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; Somers, 1994).

‘Discourse constitutes the realities that words are otherwise taken to reference and specify’ (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000, p. 93). For Foucault, discourse is not purely about language, but also about practices ‘that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 54). Foucault proposed that people are made subjects through: dividing practices that objectify difference between individuals in ways that accommodate institutional interests at social or spatial levels; scientific classification using institutionally determined categorisations of normal and abnormal behaviour; and subjectification where the subject is the author of her discourse (narratives, text, action) but within the limits of episteme—where the knowledge the subject possesses is subject to a particular regime of truth (Hall, 1996). Subjectivities, for Foucault, are constructed with ‘a reality ontologically distinct from the body’, constituted through social practices and taking different forms at different times (Kelly, 2013, p. 521).

In applying a social constructionist lens, locating individual experience in terms of relationships between personal and structural narratives requires a consistent discursive analytical approach to the data. Data sources are ‘broadly construed’ (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000, p. 104) and may include speech, video, interview transcripts, field notes, journal articles, texts, all or other. To understand (or describe) personal identity as a process of subjectification, analysis of personal narratives must consider the context of what was said, how it was said, and ‘why it is certain statements emerged to the exclusion of all others and what function they serve’ rather than the linguistic features of text (Bamberg et al., 2011; Graham, 2011, p. 667).

Research Context: Neoliberalism and Australian higher education, equity policy, and enabling education

The relationship between neoliberalism and (higher) education has been widely explored in the research literature and is not elaborated here (see, for example, Besley & Peters, 2007; Ball, 2012; Zepke, 2017). In summary, the central arguments drawn from the research literature, elaborated in the Findings and Discussion section below in relation to the students’ narratives, contend that neoliberal rationality shapes the conduct of HE institutions and their students through commodifying types of knowledge and determining their value based on their ability to sustain and enhance the free (global) market economy (Besley & Peters, 2007; Zepke, 2017). Funding formulae and reporting mechanisms are applied irrespective of the demographic make-up of a university’s student cohort, and this has a classificatory effect on universities and fashions learners in ‘certain generic ways’ (Zepke, 2017, p. 71) to meet neoliberal economic objectives that ‘what is to be learnt is practical and economically useful in the market place; that learning is about performing in certain ways in order to achieve specified outcomes; and that quality is assured by measurable accountability processes’ (Zepke, 2015, p. 695).

Australian HE equity policy has been underpinned by neoliberal discourses (Zepke, 2017; Burke et al., 2023). While equity objectives embrace an ethos of providing economic opportunity and social mobility (DET, 2015), they are framed by Australia’s broader economic objectives of increasing Australia’s ability to meet the knowledge and skill demands of a globalised economy (DE, 2023), placing the onus on individual students to adapt to suit HE culture and institutional practices (Naylor & Misfud, 2020; Burke et al., 2023).

Burke et al. (2023) argue equity policy success has been constrained by the entrenchment of ‘deficit’ in ‘the architecture of equity’ (p. 28). They point to complex interrelationships between neoliberal HE policy discourses, university practices, and how non-traditional students’ identities are conceptualised in policy that ‘misrecognise’ non-traditional students as ‘lacking aspirations, success, preparedness, or aptitude, and therefore requiring remedy’ (Burke et al., 2023, p. 30). As such, there is an implicit assumption in HE policy and its implementation that non-traditional students’ aspirations and cap/ability are, to some degree, antithetical to their actual social, cultural and/or economic capital.

University enabling programs deliver ‘remedial interventions’ (Burke et al., 2023, p. 11) for non-traditional students, providing highly scaffolded learning environments that are flexible and oriented to students’ diverse beliefs, knowledges and personal experiences (Agosti & Bernat, 2018; Bennett et al., 2016; Hodges et al., 2013). However, enabling programs are not yet standardised in terms of content, performance indicators and measurements of student performance, and nor does satisfactory completion of an enabling program result in a recognised credential. As such, they don’t provide a formally recognised ‘currency’ by which students will ultimately negotiate employment or, generally, transfer between education institutions. The funding of an enabling program is therefore contingent on increasing demand for degree places at the parent university, and in this way, enabling programs are held within their university’s orbit, subject to the same (neoliberal) priorities and, if indirectly, accountabilities despite their different organisational practices and socio-cultural attributes of their student cohorts.

Burke et al. (2023) also identify that deficit discourse ‘also percolates into research and evaluation design and methodology, findings and evidence; and then, inevitably, into policy-formation and practical strategies’ (p. 11). Within this feedback loop, neoliberal rationalities inform policy and research of non-traditional students’ experiences of disengagement or early departure according to essentialised conceptions of risk tied to their disadvantage (Walker-Gibbs et al., 2019), for example, financial barriers, time pressures, travel time, age. By aligning with a ‘data-driven performance culture’ (Nichols & Stahl, 2018, p. 1256), these understandings overlook the complex reality that non-traditional students often have to navigate multiple intersecting and cumulative disadvantages to participate in HE (Burke et al., 2023; Nicols & Stahl, 2018).

Research design

Approval was granted for the research project in 2016 by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of South Australia (‘UniSA’). The three case studies reported here are drawn from a study of twenty-two non-traditional students aged between 25 and 55 years who participated in recorded semi-structured interviews lasting 1.5–2.5 hours, producing individual narrative accounts framing their experiences of returning to education and proceeding into HE via an enabling program. Consent was obtained from participants for the publication of their autobiographical accounts under the conditions of anonymity.

In this research, the interviews were audio-recorded, and I made written observations on non-verbal exchanges, such as crying, laughter, vagueness, contradictions. The recorded interviews were transcribed and a thematic analysis manually conducted. Participants worked with me on one or more occasions to clarify or develop their autobiographical accounts of their experiences and my understanding of them. This approach was taken to enhance, as far as possible, a ‘mutual intersubjective understanding’ (Moens, 2006, p. 62) between the narrator (the participant) and audience (the researcher) of the participants’ narratives.

The interpretation of data is informed by Holstein and Gubrium’s (2007) ethnomethodological constructionist approach to interpretative practice, ‘analytic bracketing’, that ‘centres on the interplay, not synthesis, of situated discursive practice, discourse-in-practice, and discursive conditions’ (Gubrium & Holstein, 2007, p. 390). Influenced by Foucault, Gubrium and Holstein’s (2007) analytical approach goes to ‘how’ people methodically construct their experiences and their worlds, and to the ‘what’ of institutional and cultural discursive practices that are present in social interactions. Analysis of narratives focus on one component of the social construction process at a time, seeking to identify what the participants are ‘doing with words’, ‘unpacking the constitutive practices imbedded in the talk’ (2007, pp. 390, 391).

Introducing Theo, Aisla, and JakovFootnote 2

Theo left school at the beginning of Year 8 in 1999 following the emergence of a severe panic anxiety disorder. His anxiety prevented him from attending school (in person and online) and made extended social participation unfeasible. Theo described his younger self as creative and having a thirst for knowledge, being an avid watcher of television documentaries and an active seeker of information on the Internet. Supported by his parents, he began to manage his anxiety when he was around twenty. With his doctor’s encouragement, he began considering returning to education. He enrolled part-time in the UniSA enabling program, contemplating the possibility of studying either teaching or psychology if all went well.

Aisla was raised in a regional location in South Australia. Isolated at school, she left after Year 10 in 1976. Since school, Aisla worked in various semi-skilled positions while raising her children, eventually finding permanent government employment in land management. Aisla realised her job’s physical requirements would become too demanding as she got older and, in 2009, she undertook a Certificate III in Community Services because, ‘I had this thing in my head that I might like to work with young people.’ After identifying the need for a tertiary qualification, she enrolled in the enabling program through the university’s regional campus. On completion, Aisla enrolled in Social Sciences but realised late in her undergraduate studies that she would not qualify for the type of youth work she was envisaging. After completing her undergraduate studies, she enrolled in a postgraduate Social Work qualification.

Jakov identified himself as a low-SES student. None of his family studied at university, and he left school in Year 11 in 2001, twice attempting to complete high school afterwards. Unsuccessful in this, he explained, ‘I was immature and unwilling to accept their authority at school.’ For ten years after school, Jakov worked as an assistant tiler then started his own garden maintenance business. Striving against living his life according to others’ expectations, passionately inspired by medical genre TV shows and avowing a strong reverence for scientists and doctors, Jakov enrolled in the enabling program and proceeded from this into a medical science program.

Findings and discussion

Narrative Identity: Neoliberal discourse and the aspirational student

According to Foucault, neoliberal rationality translates to an orientation to the economic and to self-interest, manifest in the rhetoric of personal choice (aspirations), responsibility (behaviours and values) and a right to control one’s own destiny (needs and interests) (Rose & Miller, 1992; Zepke, 2017). Neoliberal rationality has shaped HE widening participation policies over the last decade, manifest in discourses of aspiration and capability (Southgate & Bennett, 2014). In locating social relations in the economic rationality of markets, individual responsibility becomes firmly directed towards society’s economic interests, positioning widening participation equity objectives within a neoliberal aspirational paradigm (Sellar & Gale, 2016).

Economic gain and social mobility have a common-sense appeal for many (Zepke, 2017), and this rationality was strongly signalled in Theo and Jakov’s reflections of why they wished to pursue a higher education. Theo wanted control over his life-limiting anxiety, choosing to return to education to ‘contribute more to the world than this’ and because ‘It would make sense that I would try and do something that’s going to lead to work and money, and all that sort of stuff.’

Jakov saw university as a way of taking control of his life. He discussed a future business venture in his field, but he was also enthusiastic about future social and professional networks:

You get to network with some of the future doctors and nurses in the world. Beforehand I wouldn’t have been networking with them. Also, you get to know the professors and teachers and stuff; they're admirable…. they give you something to look up to. (Jakov)

Aisla characterised her education and career aspirations more in terms of economic sustainability. As a mature woman living in a small regional town, her desire to return to education after thirty years was, partly, to be able to move on from a physically demanding job. She worked full-time through most of her studies, supporting herself and her youngest child, a young adult living elsewhere. Aisla was circumspect in her initial interviews and vague about her reasons for wanting to work with youth. Her sense of self and her aspirations were more obliquely articulated as something ‘other than’ what her fifteen years in land management had offered her: ‘I think I ticked the boxes for them, for a) being female, because it’s a male dominated job, and b) being older. So, it was kind of like… I think I was just like ‘the token’.’ When Aisla spoke of the benefits of a higher education, it was to laud having knowledge, the ability to think critically and understand social injustices. Her narrative appears to challenge policy discourses that privilege economic-oriented private benefits, but her abstention from discussing what influenced her aspiration to pursue youth work limited deeper analysis of what subjectivities informed her choices.

Narrative Identity: neoliberal discourse and performing the ‘capable student’ identity

Drawing on Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge to deconstruct hegemonic discourses of capability, Burke et al. (2015) examine capability discourses and how these intersect and interact with identity formation and personal discourses of experience. To be recognised by others, and by oneself, as a ‘capable student’, the individual must ‘both master and submit to the discourses of ‘capability’’ (Burke et al., 2015, p. 18). That is, the ‘capable student’ identity is performative, and the ‘capable student’ identity should be examined in relation to individual mastery of institutionally and organisationally determined content, and also the ways that personal discourses of capability are expressed at symbolic and emotional levels (Burke et al., 2015).

Neoliberal rationalities inform Australian HE policy discourses of education capability, narrowly conceiving it as knowledge, skills and competence (Gale & Molla, 2015). Within the research period, the participants satisfied institutional and organisational measurements of academic capability in their undergraduate studies, and each described themselves as capable students, having mastered the skills and knowledge broadly recognised as necessary for succeeding in university study. The participants’ perceptions of their competence and knowledge within the HE context was observable in their accounts of assisting traditional entry HE students with their academic difficulties. For both Theo and Jakov, helping other students reinforced their sense of capability. For Jakov, ‘(A)nyone who asked me; I would help anybody. But you know, even if I overhear two people talking, and I think I could definitely help them, I’ll just go and help them.’, and for Theo, ‘I know how to help them, and I feel like I’m good at it.’

Southgate and Bennett (2014) describe performing the ‘capable student’ in terms of playing to ‘feeling-rules’ (p. 26) that serve neoliberal rationality, and this was reflected in participants’ descriptions of how their student identities developed in terms of responsibility and competitiveness. Participants spoke of the pleasure of maturing as learners, taking pride in committing to hard work, and excitement about every achievement. There were also expressions of guilt when they didn’t achieve high grades, or disappointment when a high number of other students also achieved high grades. Describing his newfound abilities to commit to study and set goals, Jakov said,

I guess I’d describe myself as a little bit more aware, goal orientated, confident, curious, capable, intelligent. I have to say intelligent, now, because I feel intelligent…. I'd have to say that I was definitely eager, committed, curious and happy.

From enabling education to university: the transformation of the disadvantaged student

While enabling programs are subject to the same neoliberal priorities and, if indirectly, accountabilities of their parent university, there are very important differences between enabling programs and HE organisational narratives. Enabling pedagogical approaches explicitly seek to transform individual student identities from ‘not capable’ to ‘capable’. In order to inform and justify organisational procedures and services provided to enabling students and to the HE organisation, the enabling pedagogical approach must draw widely and deeply from structural, cultural and students’ personal narratives that historically have not beneficially intersected with HE narratives, including, for example, gender, culture, socio-economic status. (Agosti & Bernat, 2018; Burke et al., 2015). On the other hand, the starting point for students in HE undergraduate studies is being academically (cap)able. This is not to underestimate the significant and effective support universities offer students through flexible course options, innovative pedagogies, work and life experience course credits, support services, and so on. However, HE’s purpose, regarding students, is to affirm students’ (cap)ability by providing a pathway to graduation in a particular field and to be ‘job ready’ (DESE, 2020).

A social constructionist NI framework proposes that personal narratives are mediated through the structural narratives in which the actors are emplotted. Where structural narratives change—such as where a student moves between the enabling program and university—the personal narrative also changes (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). For Foucault, individuals will.

… effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault, 1988, p. 18).

This is powerfully reflected in the participants’ narrative plotting of life events as episodes of their transformation into the ‘capable (HE) student’ subject. Theo, Aisla, and Jakov discursively (re)constructed their transformation into the ‘capable (HE) student’ identity by reference to a prior ‘not-capable’ student identity. They interpreted their life experiences by employing widely circulating cultural narratives around educational disadvantage and equity (socio-economic disadvantage, traditional gendered and/or cultural roles, age, non-English speaking background, and personal adversity). They described their transformation by making meaningful connections between their life experiences and their identities as capable students, utilising one or multiple discursive binaries: the unmotivated student became motivated, ‘lacking in confidence’ became ‘confident’ (assertive/self-reliant), the school rebel became responsible, the secluded became worldly and critical. Theo described his experience in the enabling program as life changing:

I was helping them [traditional entry undergraduates] and that’s a big shift in such a short period of time – two years earlier having a Year 7 education to stepping into this degree and helping the students was a big – I mean I remember noticing that at the time and thinking, wow.

Jakov also described a conversion from his earlier rebellious school days’ identity to his confident and motivated HE student identity forged through the enabling program. His identification as a low socio-economic student was less overt in his reflections of his HE experiences, but he continued to describe his expectations of gaining status and security through his HE studies.

The participants’ narrative plotting of their experiences in terms of transformation highlights the relationship between becoming the ‘capable student’ and feelings of belonging in the academy. The participants’ use of a then/now binary had the effect of framing their pre-university identity, and the cultural discourses associated with that, in deficit terms. In becoming capable, the participants came to see themselves as ‘proper’ and ‘deserving’ HE students (Burke et al., 2015).

For the participants, ‘belonging’ in HE meant they no longer felt alienated by the academy, but it also disrupted aspects of the participants’ earlier identities: the ‘accessible carer’ became the ‘absent carer’, and the relatable person became distanced from others outside of HE. Unlike Theo and Jakov, Aisla worked full-time during her enabling studies and through much of her undergraduate studies, she managed a household and had commitments related to her adult children. Study, for Aisla, meant being ‘missing in action’, often unavailable to her family and, most of the time, to friends.

This discussion is intended to illustrate how the participants’ constructions of self strongly reflect the appropriate neoliberal mental dispositions (identifications and performativity) of becoming the ‘capable student’. Significantly, this has been achieved to some extent by subordinating their ‘Other’ socially and symbolically located ‘not-capable’ and ‘not-belonging’ subjectivities. This is elaborated on in the following sub-section.

Lost through transformation: narrating one self? Selective appropriation and de-problematising (the self in relation to) the other

Several of the research participants individually contacted me to withdraw or contribute additional information up to two years after their autobiographic narratives had been finalised. For example, one participant, by then only three semesters away from completing her degree and with a Grade Point Average (GPA) of 5.2 of a possible 7, was concerned that she came across in her narrative account as having been ‘stupid’ (sic). In providing her autobiographic narrative, she had drawn on formulaic cultural narratives socio-economic disadvantage to describe her school years followed by employment in a blue-collar occupation. Another participant, recently graduated with a double degree (GPA: 5.6), sought the removal of specific details as she no longer wished to completely story herself according to the traditional gender cultural narrative she had originally drawn from.

Perhaps it was unsurprising that participants had constructed their narrative identities by reference to formulaic cultural narratives around disadvantage and equity within the particular research environment: irrespective of whether, or in what way, participants individually identified as non-traditional students, interviews occurred on campus of the university that has a well-publicised commitment equity and diversity (UniSA, 2012); all had participated in an equity and access pathway (UniSA, 2020); the majority were close to completing their degrees and contemplating previously improbable careers; and I, the researcher, though not previously acquainted with the participants, represented the university. Yet, the participants’ acts of revision to exclude cultural narratives that were earlier central to their student identity represent identity shifts corresponding to their progress through HE and the attendant structural discourses.

Holstein and Gubrium (2000) describe the narrator (storyteller) as an editor who ‘constantly monitors, modifies, and revises themes and storylines’, attending to ‘perspective and to the ways they expect their accounts to be heard’ (p. 113). Narrative emplotment is not only a reflective process, but also a reflexive one intersecting with the narrator’s temporal, locational and relational contexts, requiring and enabling the selective appropriation of events for the construction of their narrative identities (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). According to Holstein and Gubrium (2000), the organisations in which individuals increasingly spend their time become the ‘purveyors of identity’, bringing it into line with institutional discourses. ‘The-self-according-to-this-agency’ (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000, p. 154) is reshaped as the individual moves between organisations, or as organisational discourse changes, though the individual continues to select or reject historical events to bolster claims about herself.

The examples above are raised here to illustrate how the HE undergraduate environment has had a disciplining effect on the enabling students’ identification, ‘characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 148). While their enabling student narrative identity may have been informed in part by educational disadvantage, their neoliberal HE student narrative identity moving forward to the labour market rests on skill competence and knowledge alongside their market-oriented aspirations, behaviours and interests. It suggests that, for them, adhering to discourses of disadvantage could undermine the appearance that they are appropriate candidates to participate in a competitive global economic environment, thus leaving intact the meritocratic structural narratives that sustain neoliberalism.

Jakov and Aisla also provided additional information a significant period after putatively finalising their autobiographical narratives. Their additional information illustrates the challenges for practitioners and researchers in understanding individual experiences of HE. After two years of studying biomedical science, Jakov transferred into an engineering program. It was a surprising shift considering the emphatic enthusiasm he’d demonstrated for the former. He emailed to update me:

I recently switched from [medical science program] to [engineering program]. This was due to me not being able to participate in placement due to past police record. I guess I should have considered that it would have been a problem. But honestly, I'm glad now; should have done engineering to start with.

Jakov had been a moderately successful biomedical science student, but despite his academic capability, he passed only one of three subjects in the engineering program before transferring, again, to a science program. Jakov withdrew from university before completing his first semester in science and has since made no further contact with me.

Jakov had identified his ‘becoming capable’ student identity through the lens of socio-economic disadvantage. He’d previously mentioned youthful experimenting with drugs, but not its consequences. A police record is a material disadvantage, if not complete barrier, in pursuing many occupations. That he hadn’t previously felt able to raise this experience with various staff he’d felt close to and supported by in the enabling program or with undergraduate program advisers is concerning, but it points to his perceptions of the limits of the suitability of including such information in his curated narrative.

Aisla contacted me more than six months after she had edited her final draft narrative. She had completed her postgraduate Social Work program, but she no longer wished to work with young people. Instead, her interest had shifted towards working with domestic violence survivors. However, she wished to complete her narrative account with previously undisclosed information:

I think I should share what brought me to this journey of study. My 14-year-old son suicided in 2006. I don't talk about what happened, but I feel the story needs to be accurate, and I am sure I am not the only one who has a sad story. It’s my understanding that people go into Social Work due to wanting to help others, and perhaps they have had their own personal challenges.

Aisla had returned to education with intersecting and compounding material demographic and equity considerations including age, financial obligations, educational disadvantage, as well as profound emotional trauma. She successfully completed her undergraduate degree and postgraduate studies, achievements used as organisational metrics of positive engagement with studies. Yet these metrics say nothing of the quality of experience as part of engagement. Aisla described her HE experiences as a ‘rollercoaster ride of ups and downs’, but depicted herself as ultimately more knowledgeable, assertive and with greater self-esteem. She had a ‘very positive experience’ in the enabling program, but her experiences in undergraduate studies were marked by her selection of an unsuitable undergraduate program, unsatisfactory work placements where she endured ‘demeaning’ experiences due to mismatched personal and HE program objectives, social isolation, being without university friends, and the pressures of full-time employment.

A significant difference between the enabling program and HE undergraduate studies for Aisla was the level of support and consideration of the practical difficulties she at times faced in meeting deadlines and attendance. The enabling program staff were proactive in supporting her, taking steps to make contact if she did not meet academic standards and by being understanding of the demands on her time due to family and work responsibilities. In contrast, Aisla reported, the undergraduate workload was on par with the enabling program, but ‘unless you were dying…it was none of that nice, nice, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll help you out’. It was just you’ve got to get in there and do it.’ The university has a considerably larger undergraduate student population and is not as tactical as the enabling education sector, but it does, and did then, provide services and procedures intended to support students having academic or personal difficulties. Navigating these can be challenging, but in Aisla’s case, not accessing services or other options appeared to be her choice.

It’s helpful to consider Jakov and Aisla’s university experiences from the perspective of identity ‘rupture’. Somers (1994) makes the point that ruptures in identity, such as despair, powerlessness and confusion, arise where certain life events can’t be accommodated by the available narratives (p. 46). Hall (1996) presents a model of identification that conceptualises what is happening when ruptures occur. He argues identities are more the product of difference and exclusion than a sign of unity. That is, identities are constructed in relation to the Other, ‘that which it is not’. ‘Identification’, therefore, is the capacity to exclude (‘render outside’) and, therefore, an identity always ‘has at its margin, an excess, something more’ which constantly destabilises it (pp. 17, 18). Hall (1996) describes the continuous construction of the subject as a process of articulation, a suturing, between the discourses that interpellate the subject and the processes which produce subjectivities. Because of this, he argues, identification is never a ‘proper fit’; identities are ‘constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses’ and from the place of the Other, ‘they can never be adequate—identical—to the subject processes which are invested in them’ (pp. 18, 19).

Whereas sensitive or traumatic life events may more likely be anticipated and accommodated within the enabling organisational narrative, Jakov and Aisla’s private experiences exceed the conceptual limits of HE organisational or institutional aspiration and capability discourses informed by neoliberal conceptions of social mobility, employability, enterprise and individual responsibility. Understandably, if individuals are silent about their life experiences, the organisational narrative will be less responsive and dynamic, but it is also unrealistic, if not unreasonable, to expect or encourage personal disclosures of life histories. Jakov’s police record and Aisla’s tragic loss did not exclude them from HE, but because such experiences are not qualitatively or quantitatively included or deliberated on within the network of discourses of aspiration, capability and, to some extent, of educational disadvantage, their experiences are points of instability in their identification as ‘capable student’ subjects that impacted their engagement in HE.

Theo, who disclosed during enrolment in the enabling program his experiences of debilitating anxiety and its impact on his education and life generally, was highly supported by enabling program staff who were ‘genuinely wanting you to succeed’. After completing his enabling program, Theo enrolled in Visual Arts. He described this as a ‘bizarre’ choice having only an amateur interest in photography and unaware of its existence as a university academic program until he saw it in the university prospectus. He described his decision as a contest between studying Teaching versus Visual Arts:

I’ve had to start thinking logically because most people who come to the [enabling program] want to do it to get a better career or to get more money to get all those practical things, and that’s probably what I should have been thinking about …. So my logical planning argument was I could do a four year teaching degree or I could do a three year visual arts degree and then two years Masters in teaching, so it’s only taking that one extra year again, but I get to do two different things and it’s something that I’m really passionate about.

Theo engaged positively in HE undergraduate studies, academically and in his enjoyment, and recently completed his doctorate in Visual Arts. Although he had framed what he ought to do as a responsible economic agent, he was not then pursuing a teaching qualification but persisting in a creative field where public recognition and/or economic success are far from guaranteed.

I am not suggesting here that a problem shared is a problem solved, ameliorating the disciplinary or regulatory effects of dominant discourses. Indeed, having ‘become capable’ and having consistently embraced neoliberal discourse, it is still possible that a rupture in Theo’s identity could arise in the future if forced to take up employment that doesn’t utilise his passions, skills and talents, or if he is pressured to undertake further study to gain employment.

Acts of narrative editing draw attention to the relationship between personal and structural discourses. If ‘transformation’ involves selecting and reproducing socially circulating discourses as a means of submission to or conformity with a dominant organisational narrative, the organisation is, by proxy, legitimated as arbiter of the meaning (and value) of the individual’s experiences (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; Somers, 1994). It is through organisational narratives, then, that student engagement could be better supported by conceptualising it as more than derivative of a properly aspirational and capable individual within a narrow neoliberal institutional discursive framework.

Final thoughts: the end of the story?

Theorising Narrative Identity is a powerful tool for exploring student experience. It is, of course, an interpretative approach mediated first by the narrative’s author (the student), then the reader (researcher), which raises questions around narrative authority. Josselson (2011) considers this possible ethical dilemma, but ultimately resolves participants ‘may not be conscious of social forces which operate in and through them, social forces which become apparent only when narratives are juxtaposed’ (p. 30). The role of the researcher, she argues, is to analyse individual narratives ‘in the quest of what may be generalisable’ (p. 39), writing to advance ‘our understanding of some conceptual or social phenomena’ (p. 40).

Within the social constructionist lens adopted in this paper, transformation to a ‘capable student’ is a tailored shift in the non-traditional student’s identity; one where understandings of self and experience are continuously (re)negotiated as the individual submits to dominant neoliberal discourses informing Australian HE practices. The sustainability of that identity, however, is determined by how well the student is able to negotiate new, sometimes antagonistic, structural discourses.

Reflections on Australian higher education equity policy

In recent years the range of equity groups prioritised in Australian widening participation policies has decreased. The national equity framework designed in the 1990s included students from a low socio-economic status background, Aboriginal students, students from regional areas and remote areas, women in non-traditional areas of study, students with disabilities, and students from a non-English speaking background, whereas in recent times the latter three occur less consistently in policy initiatives. The recent review of Australian HE, the Accord, acknowledges more contemporary understandings of equity exist, including emerging equity groups and in relation to intersectional disadvantage, but it falls short of expanding the priority categories, prioritising the first four equity groups listed above. In effect, the range of discourses of disadvantage validated through policy has been narrowed, and with a narrower discursive platform, the greater challenge non-traditional students experience in achieving a coherent sense of self as they reach for what might only be a ‘best fit’ identity, and which may be reflected in the quality of their engagement.

Pitman (2017) calls for more nuanced understandings of disadvantage and student identity in relation to widening participation policy. While acknowledging the complexity of mapping detailed personal understandings of disadvantage, he argues the individual is ‘best placed to identify the forms of disadvantage that have had an impact on his or her educational experience’ (p. 43), a proposition supported by this research. Ultimately, the factors influencing engagement and retention may be inextricably tied to the ‘unknowable’ of which personal experiences of disadvantage students will share (with whom and when). On the other hand, HE institutional and organisational discourses are more knowable and open to critical evaluation. Widening participation in HE and enhancing student experience may require rethinking current HE policy and organisational practices to accommodate more, including unvoiced, non-traditional student narratives. Qualitative enquiries about student experiences in HE are an essential element for achieving this, but universities could also benefit from greater collaboration with communities, community and social institutions, and other universities with the specific objective of identifying and understanding students’ lived-experiences and needs, and also to strengthen universities’ influence over HE policy development.