Keywords

Introduction

Formal education has long been argued to be a force for good. Educated individuals tend to have more secure employment, better health outcomes, and are more tolerant of differences (Green & Janmaat, 2016; Masschelein & Simons, 2013; McMahon, 2009); educated societies tend to be better off economically, make better informed policy choices, and make advances in medical and social areas (OECD, 2010; Peters et al., 2010). Indeed, the whole premise of the World Worth Living In Project (www.monash.edu/education/wwli) is that education has the potential to make a powerful impact: to help us to live well and to create a world worth living in for all. And yet, not all educational experiences are created equal. We know that school can also potentially de-humanise students (Reimer & Longmuir, 2021), strip away language, culture, and identity (Knight, 2002; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), and perpetuate injustice and inequity (O’Brien & Nygreen, 2020; Wadhwa, 2010).

This chapter is an attempt to listen to and learn from mature-aged university students who have experienced schooling in the past as alienating and disempowering. The seven students featured in this chapter all entered university study through an alternative pathway—the Monash Access Program (MAP)—designed to equip mature-aged students, who had experienced educational disruption, with the confidence and skills necessary to participate fully in university life. Going to university, for these students, was never a ‘given’; for all, it was a very intentional choice and for many it ran counter to their own expectations and the expectations of those around them. As people who have given considerable thought to the role that formal education plays in their own lives and in the world, and as people who had both disempowering and empowering experiences of formal education, it is important that their voices inform our understanding of how education can help us to live better and to create a world more worth living in.

In this chapter, I bring together the theoretical concepts of educational praxis as conceived of by Kemmis and colleagues (2014) and sense of coherence (Antonovsky, 1979) to help articulate the fullness of the MAP student experiences and wisdom. Together, these theoretical threads provide insight into how morally informed educational action can assist people in thriving individually and collectively. Formal education, the MAP students reveal, can help us to experience life in ways that Antonovsky (1979) would call manageable, comprehensible, and meaningful.

Context: Monash Access Program

Monash University, located in Melbourne, Australia, is a high-ranking institution, a member of the Group of Eight, a coalition of Australia’s top research-intensive universities. The Monash Access Program (MAP) was first offered in 2014 as an alternative entry to university for students who had experienced some form of educational disadvantage and would otherwise not meet the standard admission requirements into a university program. Students who have experienced educational disadvantage cannot be described in any uniform way. In Australia, such students may be from low socioeconomic backgrounds; from rural and remote communities; from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds; part of Indigenous and Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander communities; people with disabilities; and/or who speak languages other than English (Bradley et al., 2008; James, 2007; Larsen & James, 2022; Molla, 2021; O’Shea, 2020). Students from these backgrounds have often been underserved and underprepared by Australia’s inequitable primary and secondary educational systems (Harwood et al., 2017) and thus are underrepresented in Australian universities; MAP is one of Monash University’s attempts to correct this discrepancy.

MAP is a tuition-free course—thus removing one financial barrier to university admission—that introduces students to academic skills and resources needed for university study. Completing MAP does not earn students a degree or diploma, but its completion provides students with full entry into a first-year university course. The program is quite intensive, as a small group of 15–25 students study together over seven months, in three core units. Since 2016, I have been the main point of contact for these students, teaching them two of their three units: the first, an introduction to university context; the second, an overview of academic writing. MAP is designed to iteratively step the students into the culture of the university, and begins with just one unit. After one month, another unit, on mathematical reasoning, taught by a different tutor, is added to the schedule. A few months later, students then select a first-year elective unit from participating faculties (arts, education, business, or information technology). They undertake their elective unit while still meeting as our MAP group—which begins to serve as a sort of ‘home room’ where students can support one another and wrestle with the challenges of university study. The iterative nature of the program is intentional; in a past study, former student JoshFootnote 1 explained it this way: “They are slowly taking their hand away from us, removing one floatyFootnote 2 from us and we are learning how to tread water with one hand rather than just being thrown straight in” (Reimer & Pardy, 2019, pp. 19–20). The program creates iterative experiences of academic achievements that allow students to feel more and more prepared for study.

With its focus on academic preparation, MAP joins other Australian university enabling programs designed to upskill underprepared students so that they transition successfully into undergraduate degree programs (James, 2016; Larsen & James, 2022). But, MAP is about more than academic skill preparation and experiences of academic successes. Possessing academic skills is only the base level requirement for successful participation in higher education. As has been pointed out in other studies, university culture is not always a welcoming one and underrepresented students can feel alienated, despite having the requisite skills and abilities, and are more likely to disengage and, potentially, drop out (Larsen & James, 2022; Pedler et al., 2022; Rose, 2007). As an antidote to this disengagement, it is crucial that institutions and educators help to develop within students a sense that they belong to the university community (Dunwoodie et al., 2020; Harwood et al., 2017; Larsen & James, 2022) and have both the ability and right to join the academic conversation (Rose, 2005).

MAP is unique amongst most Australian higher education enabling programs, in that, it is structured to actively co-create with students experiences of academic belonging. In a previous study conducted with the 24 students who were part of the 2017 MAP cohort, students identified how MAP contributed to their academic success: through pedagogies of belonging and pedagogies of becoming (Reimer & Pardy, 2019). These pedagogies involved the positioning of students as crucial members of a learning community in which they are the co-creators of knowledge. Each class involves participation in a learning circle in which students share their own experiences and make connections to one another and to the class content. In this way, students start to feel, deep in their sense of selves, that they have significant contributions to make socially, personally, and academically. As one student, Sally, in this previous study stated, MAP “prepared us to belong” (Reimer & Pardy, 2019, p. 19).

MAP is constrained by specific accreditation requirements and higher education frameworks (such as assessment policies), the same as other enabling programs; and yet MAP is small (and low-profile) enough to allow for MAP educators to be responsive to the actual strengths and needs of the individuals involved, putting people—rather than policy requirements—first. As such, MAP intentionally represents a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994; Ikpeze, 2016), bridging formal and informal educational discourses and practices. The knowledge and strengths that MAP students bring into university are honoured, at the same time as students are introduced to the particular ways of being and acting within the Australian higher education context. Expected educational skills and discourses are explained and practiced, but also critiqued.

As a co-developer of this program (with the founder, John Pardy) and as the current main organiser and educator, I am, of course, not neutral. In fact, I’m fiercely invested in MAP and in ensuring that it is a program that continually offers a balance of support and challenge to its students. The pedagogy I engage in MAP positions each person as inherently worthy and highlights their relationships to each other and to content; this occurs with every topic—from educational inequity to academic integrity to critical reading to imposter syndrome to finding resources in the library. I am committed to living out critical educational praxis through the choices I make as the MAP organiser and educator to sustain the social-emancipatory intent of this enabling program.

Theoretical Framework

Critical Educational Praxis

According to Mahon et al. (2019), praxis “is about acting in the world in a way that contributes positively and meaningfully to society, or acting in the interests of humankind” (p. 2). My understanding of educational praxis comes from Kemmis et al. (2014, p. 26) who write that it is both “educational action that is morally committed and informed by traditions in a field … and … as history-making educational action” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 26). Thus, educational praxis involves taking deliberate actions—in and out of the classroom—that seek to foster individual and collective wellbeing, for both those within the learning community and outside of it.

As such, it is more than simply aiming naively towards pleasant purposes and hoping for the best. Praxis involves action—clear-eyed action—that moves us towards our purpose. Mahon et al. (2019) make this focus more explicit by emphasising the critical edge of praxis in what they term critical educational praxis: “a kind of social-justice oriented, educational practice/praxis, with a focus on asking critical questions and creating conditions for positive change” (p. 2). In the context of enabling programs at universities, this means asking questions of and with the cohort of students that have experienced educational disadvantage: to identify disempowering and disadvantaging aspects of schooling; and to create conditions to address those aspects.

Education Versus Schooling

Although often used interchangeably, the terms education and schooling are distinct, and this distinction is important for critical educational praxis. Kemmis et al. (2014) provide a comprehensive definition of education as follows:

the process by which children, young people and adults are initiated into forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and the world, that foster (respectively) individual and collective self-expression, individual and collective self-development and individual and collective self-determination, and that are, in these senses, oriented towards the good for each person and the good for humankind. (p. 26)

This understanding of education as a complex initiation in which we develop individual and collective ways of being and acting align with Biesta’s sense that education “always implies a relationship: someone educating someone else and the person educating thus having a certain sense of what the purpose of his or her activities is” (2009, p. 39).

These definitions are intentionally broad and holistic—education can be both formal and informal, occurring in classrooms, on the street, in the bush, around a kitchen table, in the sports arena, on a smart phone or in a theatre. The definitions are also profoundly transformative and aspirational. Groundwater-Smith (2023) claims that practice is educative when it is collective participatory inquiry that embodies “new possibilities and alternative practices” (p.29).

Schooling, on the other hand, is the solidification of the practices of teaching and learning into one homogenised formal system. Schooling can be seen as an attempt to ensure that some form of education is efficient, effective and replicable for the majority. As Biesta (2009) points out, asking what makes education effective gets us to a very different place than asking what makes education good. The institutionalised system of schooling—the practices, policies, expectations, roles and relationships that we all can identify in our own particular contexts as making up ‘school’ occasionally do combine to create transformative experiences that orient us towards the individual and collective good. Education can be part of the schooling experience. Yet, more often, in practice, as Edwards-Groves et al. (2018) note, in a book about Stephen Kemmis’ 40 years of scholarship called ‘Education in an era of schooling’, “schooling may instead be profoundly anti-educational” (p. 3). Anti-educational schooling, it can be argued, is even more prominent for those who do not fit neatly into mainstream systems (Reimer & Longmuir, 2021), such as students in enabling programs.

The MAP students in this chapter have had both anti-educational and educational experiences within the formal system.

Sense of Coherence

As we focus on ensuring students experience ‘education in an era of schooling’, Biesta (2009) implores that we “keep the question of purpose—the question of what constitutes good education—central in our educational discussions” (p. 46). Understanding good education is the mandate of the World Worth Living In project; as an infinitely dense concept, using varied theories will loosen different parts for us to understand it more holistically.

In this chapter, I turn to Aaron Antonovsky for assistance in exploring the idea of good education. Antonovsky was an Israeli-American sociologist who was interested in the question of why some people, in the midst of stress, remain healthy. He studied groups of people with profound levels of ongoing stress, such as Holocaust survivors and those living in poverty, and radically, for the 1970s, moved the conversation away from what makes us ill towards what makes us healthy. He began studying the origins of health, salutogenesis.

Antonovsky’s work has been foundational for more current approaches to wellbeing such as relational wellness (Haswell et al., 2023; Powell et al., 2018; White, 2017) and “being well in the world” (Barrow, 2019, p. 31).

In his studies of health, Antonovsky (1979) found that people were able to thrive when they had what he termed a ‘sense of coherence’, defined as follows:

a global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that one’s internal and external environments are predictable and that there is a high probability that things will work out as well as can reasonably be expected. (p. 10, italics in original)

Thus, it is our ability, individually and collectively, to make sense of our lives, rather than our levels of stress, that determine our ability to thrive.

Later, Antonovsky would identify three important components of this sense of coherence: manageability, comprehensibility and meaningfulness (Antonovsky, 1987, 1993). For life to be manageable, we need to have access to resources to meet demands that are asked of us. For life to be comprehensible, the complexity of life must align with our general worldview. For life to be meaningful, we need to feel we can participate in life in valued ways. Having a strong sense of coherence means that all three of these components need to be experienced and developed.

Schools—and other institutions such as universities—can be powerful sites where this sense of coherence is developed (Reimer, 2020). As Antonovsky (1979) writes: “The real issue is whether the societies in which our children grow up and in which we live our daily lives facilitate or impede the development and maintenance of a strong sense of coherence” (p. 226). Thus, the onus is on our institutions and societies—not purely on the shoulders of individuals—to help to develop this sense of coherence.

Antonovsky’s sense of coherence provides insight into what makes for individual and collective thriving: seeing life as manageable, comprehensible, and meaningful. Applying this lens to formal educational experiences also helps to mobilise critical educational praxis. We can ask questions of if, why, and how schooling is impeding the development of a sense of coherence and move to create the conditions needed to develop a strong sense of coherence. MAP, in taking the non-deficit view that students are inherently worthy and enter university with strengths to draw upon, aligns with Antonovsky’s salutogenic perspective. Those of us involved in the leadership of MAP must therefore take responsibility to create conditions in which MAP students are able to co-develop a strong sense of coherence.

Methodology

This study fits with the tradition of practice-close research (Baumbusch, 2010; Lykkeslet & Gjengedal, 2007) in which the researcher is acknowledged as someone who interacts closely with the participants, rather than as an impartial observer. Used frequently in health science research, practice-close research is a qualitative methodology that focuses in on the experiences of those the researcher works closely with—and recognises the importance of focusing on practices to understand their experiences (Baumbusch, 2010; Lykkeslet & Gjengedal, 2007). In education, the British Educational Research Association (Wyse et al., 2018) called this ‘close-to-practice’ research, research exploring educational practices, so as to better understand or improve them.

As the main educator in MAP, I have worked closely with all the participants in past MAP classes. As an insider researcher, there are ethical factors and limitations to consider (Mercer, 2007), such as the sense of obligation students might feel to respond favourably to my questions; these factors were somewhat diminished since the participants were no longer current students of mine and questions were not focused solely on MAP but the role of education in general. There are also methodological benefits to fulfilling an insider role; the relational trust built in MAP was likely an important element in students responding to my call for participants for this study. I recruited through a MAP Facebook group that all MAP students have been invited to (since the 2018 cohort) and via email addresses that students had provided me with over the years. With some contact information no longer valid, the call went out to 50 of the potential 90 students who had gone through MAP between 2017 and 2021. Fifteen students indicated an interest in being part of the study; once we worked out logistics, seven students were able to make the suggested times.

The seven students—five male and two female—all completed MAP and have either graduated from their university program or are in the midst of their university studies. Thus, their experiences may not be representative of all MAP students, particularly the 26% of students who did not finish the program in the same years. See Table 12.1, for more information about participants. Their majors are not listed so as not to identify individuals, but majors include the following: philosophy, Japanese language, accounting, marketing, sociology, and communications.

Table 12.1 Participant information
Full size table

As part of this study, the students were invited to participate in a learning circle.

Learning circles (Reimer & McLean, 2015; Vedeler & Reimer, 2023) are a type of focus group and a practice that the students would be very familiar with from their MAP experience. In MAP, students participated in weekly learning circle discussions in which students were positioned as the experts of their own experiences and took on the responsibility of co-creating knowledge with their peers (Reimer & Pardy, 2019). Learning circles allow “access to relational knowledge and lived experience” (Vedeler & Reimer, 2023, p. 78) but also bring an immediacy to the conversation as participants both engage in and discuss a familiar educative practice.

Two learning circles were facilitated in the study—one in-person circle of four participants and one online circle of three participants. I served as the circle keeper or facilitator. In this role, I introduced the guidelines of the circle (maintaining a safe and respectful space in which one person speaks at a time while we all listen and make connections). I also opened rounds of conversation where I posed a question and space was passed from person to person to answer the question. At the end of each round, participants could speak more informally with one another, asking questions or adding to their own response.

Both circle conversations were audio recorded, transcribed, and then later analysed.

Transcripts were shared with participants. An initial thematic analysis took place where transcripts were coded inductively (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Then, those codes were brought together deductively to align with the theoretical frameworks of living well in a world worth living in for all (Kemmis et al., 2014; Reimer et al., 2023) and Antonovsky’s (1979) sense of coherence.

Findings

Experience of MAP

As mentioned, students enrolling in MAP had to have experienced some form of formal education disruption and/or disadvantage in their lives—something that made them ineligible for the usual entry into university study. The reasons are diverse: some did not finish high school for personal, family, or health reasons; others did not complete required classes or failed to get the grades needed for university admission; Raj, as a unique example, came from overseas and did not have his schooling credentials recognised. In the learning circles, most of the students shared stories of not seeing much value in schooling when they were younger. Min dropped out of high school when she was 14; Maria saw “education as a burden; it was not where I wanted to be and it was just something I was made to do”; and Adrian “never valued education during primary school and definitely not during high school” sharing that “there wasn’t really a teacher that I really did connect with nor did I give the teacher an opportunity to really connect with me.” Adrian’s comment is representative of many of the comments in that a shared responsibility for the lack of engagement in school is put forth—the students themselves disengaged but there was also usually little done to initially engage or to re-engage them by the schools.

The decision to attend university was a major one for all the students in this study. As Alex noted, “to apply to university and just walking up to class with a bunch of 18-year-olds is a bit of a yikes spot.” Entering MAP, most of the students felt underprepared. For Maria, it had been 20 years since high school; for Hector, it was more recent, but he left high school “not knowing how to study” and, for Ryan, “the last essay that I had written would have been with crayon”. MAP was seen as a program that could provide access to university, but more importantly, could also nurture the skills and confidence needed for university study.

As students talked about their MAP experience, they also discussed the role that they saw education—formal and informal—having in the creation of a good life. It is important to note that although I spent time disentangling the two terms—education and schooling—earlier in this chapter, MAP participants often used one term, ‘education’, to mean both experiences of schooling and experiences of education. It is clear, however, when they speak, that some experiences were anti-educational and some were profoundly educational.

Participants shared ideas about how transformative experiences of education help people to survive and to thrive. They also named how MAP, specifically, helped make their experience—at university and beyond—manageable, how it made it comprehensible, and how it made it meaningful.

Manageability

For life to be manageable, people need to feel that they are mostly able to meet challenges, either by themselves or with assistance. This sense of manageability is built, Antonovsky (1979, 1991) found, when there is a balance between an individual’s available resources and what is demanded of them. Life will have challenges and frustrations, but people need to have confidence that things are not constantly out of their control (Reimer, 2020).

How Education Makes Life Manageable

Students named education’s very practical role in helping people meet their basic needs and develop basic skills. Raj identified that people with formal education have access to higher paying employment and thus more material wealth; this is important because, as Raj said, “it allows you to look after health better, to go to a better doctor, to go to a dietician if you need, to be able to travel well, to be able to live in a comfortable spot.” Alex and Adrian both saw education as providing necessary communication and social skills needed to engage in life; Alex identified this development in his own life.

MAP: Experiences of Making Life Manageable

But in order to personally access the benefits of formal education, MAP students shared how university itself needed to become a manageable experience for them. Participants stated that they needed to be supported to access their own capabilities and to access resources within the institution in order to meet the demands being asked of them. MAP helped make university manageable, students noted, by teaching them necessary skills, nurturing their confidence, and easing them into university demands through an iterative process.

When discussing what MAP provided them with, students named very practical aspects: using reading notes templates, navigating the library and online resources, essay writing skills, and academic referencing. Those skills are ones that Adrian felt he was still using in his current (post-MAP) classes and were skills “I’ll absolutely use for the rest of when I’m at uniFootnote 3 and probably life as well, to be honest.” Learning academic skills was crucial for surviving university, but possessing those skills also opened other doors for the students: “Being taught how to write has fundamentally influenced my entire life” (Ryan). Hector said not only did he learn how to study through MAP but “I learnt how to learn.”

Many students noted that had they been able to go straight into a university degree, and without MAP, they would have probably dropped out. Maria named the building of her confidence as crucial to her continued success. Adrian discussed it this way: “it gives you that confidence that you belong, because I just felt like I probably wouldn’t have belonged because I didn’t get that high ATARFootnote 4 … so it gave me the skills to be comfortable and not stress too much through uni.” Students mentioned that the confidence built in MAP sustained them in later years of study. As Raj explained, “one of the best things about MAP was when difficulty arrived in a subject in any form, it never occurred to me that maybe higher education wasn’t for me. What occurred was, okay, maybe this subject isn’t for me.” Through achieving in MAP, students knew they were able to manage the demands of university.

Also key to making university manageable for students was how, in MAP, students were not expected to meet all the demands, all at once. Hector appreciated that students were eased into “the whole learning rhythm” and called it a “soft entry into university”. Min described the process as being “integrated into” higher education. Raj, too, named flexibility as integral to study being manageable since MAP staff were mindful that “these are not average students, they’re people who are in different circumstances, they’re mature students, they have other things going on.” Interestingly, Raj had attempted two other enabling courses before MAP but withdrew due to their unmanageability: they were fast paced and “not designed for people like us who have been away from proper education for a while.”

Meeting basic needs, fulfilling demands and making university manageable is one aspect, but students also named ways that education makes life comprehensible and how MAP allowed them to access that comprehensibility.

Comprehensibility

For life to be comprehensible, the experience needs to have a form and structure that fits with how students understand the world. The experience needs to be somewhat predictable; otherwise, as Antonovsky (1979) wrote, “if one never knows what is coming, one never knows how to organise one’s behaviour” (p. 140). Predictability does not mean simple but rather that life’s complexity fits with our general worldview.

How Education Makes Life Comprehensible

Students named education’s role in helping to form their worldview, analyse the world around them, and engage in socially satisfying ways. A few students mentioned education’s role in “opening minds”. Min focused on the role education plays in helping to “connect the dots to your own life.” For Maria, education has “opened up a whole new world, and to be open and critical is the best part of education. That you know you don’t know everything.” While being open to other views, students discussed how education provided them with the ability to “critically evaluate” perspectives (Adrian) and not “just take the first thing you hear or read as gospel” (Maria). Thus, the skills and values education instilled impacted on how students made sense of the world around them. Adrian discussed his experience working with children with special needs in schools. He saw an evolution in the children he worked with and felt that “education is obviously imperative to why they can express themselves and have different personalities and have their own thoughts and opinions and social aspect with each other.”

MAP: Experiences of Making Life Comprehensible

As a real-life example, participants shared how MAP helped them make sense of higher education. MAP provided them with consistent, safe experiences and respectful relationships in which people with shared goals engaged with one another and with study.

Students stated that they needed to know that university had the potential to become a safely familiar space. For Ryan, having consistency provided him with that feeling: “You engage with the same people and you can build relationships in a way that is very foreign to first-year subjects. So, for me, having those consistent connections is really important and really, like, sustaining.” This consistency helped to create what Alex called a “safe space for mature students”.

Safety was created through consistency, but also through the quality of the relationships built within that space. Respectful, mutually supportive relationships were built intentionally; Raj noted that I and the other teaching staff worked to create an environment in which there was an expectation of students “respecting others, respecting the diversity”. Ryan found it to be “so engaging, with other people who are so dedicated from students to teaching staff it was just like the whole eco system was just very conducive to making you want to keep going.” Ryan comprehending his university experience as an ‘eco system’ is significant; these were not, in his mind, isolated experiences that did not make sense.

Those relationships were also built through a focus on shared goals. Adrian recognised that while people were “from different walks of life … in the end we’re all in the same room together all striving for the same thing”. Maria put it this way:

We all felt like a fish out of water so we were all in the same boat, wanting the same goal and none of us judged each other. We weren’t critical. When we had to do the reading and just share it around, we’d make mistakes but no one cared. We were just all supportive of each other and that built our confidence so that when our degrees started we were, oh yeah, we can do this.

Beyond confidence in their skills, students felt they had created a learning community; one which they could rely on and start to understand the role that education played in their lives.

Meaningfulness

For an experience to help build a sense of coherence, it needs to be more than simply manageable and comprehensible; it also has to be meaningful. For something to be meaningful, Antonovsky (1991) suggested that people must feel they can contribute to and participate in valued ways in their worlds.

How Education Makes Life Meaningful

Students named education’s aspirational role in helping to make meaning, provide joy, and transform people. Hector identified the shared experience of learning—the act of engaging in education—as helping make life meaningful and joyful:

The fact that you get to do it with so many other people, you get to sort of bounce ideas off of them; they think in a different way; you speak about it and you have never thought about it before, and that helps you learn more and so I like the learning aspect of learning, but also the social aspect of learning where it’s like a collective group of people who you know you can all help each other out.

But, joy was also found in how their education set these students up for lifelong learning. Adrian talked about discovering at university that education is a “never-ending reflecting cycle that you just continuously reflect and learn more and continue to try and learn. So you never stop learning.” For many MAP students, embracing lifelong learning signified a significant transformation in their lives, an “opportunity to change” (Alex) since many students did not previously identify themselves as learners. Raj named education as allowing “us to redefine our frame of reference” and to “redefine what success is”.

Interestingly, Raj suggested that education was necessary to even ask the questions that allowed them to make meaning in the world:

What is living well? I think one needs some form of formal or informal education to ask that question. If you go through history, be it Buddha or Aristotle or anyone who has even merely pondered that question… Whereas that’s the question we as humans collectively still haven’t been able to answer, we’re still working on it. So I think education tells us how to ask that question … So education allows you to take a step back and ask that question, what is the purpose, why I’m here and am I living well?

MAP: Experiences of Making Life Meaningful

To experience university as meaningful, students shared that they needed to be able to participate actively in ways that were valued by others. For the MAP students, this meant having experiences of transformation, belonging, and joy.

Raj described MAP as a “life changing experience” for which he “will always be grateful”. The teaching and learning that happened in MAP reached Raj on what he called “a more profound level”. Hector, Ryan and Adrian all used the word “fun” to describe their learning experience. As Hector noted: “It was just fun. You know coming in and chatting with a bunch of people from all different backgrounds and all different ages as well. It was sort of like, yes, you are learning, but yes, you are having fun while doing it.” And Ryan noted the collective experience as part of the joy of learning: “So to have other people who are really like I’m here, I want to be here, it’s really fun, it’s so easy to just like pull on that energy when you are feeling like discouraged or overwhelmed.” The social aspect of MAP added to its meaningfulness for students.

The learning circles are the practice in which many students felt invited to most actively participate and contribute in MAP (Reimer & Pardy, 2019). It was not a practice that students were familiar with prior to MAP—being invited to sit in circle, to be present with one another, to share aloud connections they were making between their own lives and the class content—and it was not a practice most were comfortable with. Alex’s views were quite representative: “the learning circles. Like, it was really daunting at the start, but eventually you can start to be yourself and eventually yeah it became a very comfortable area.” Maria connected becoming comfortable in the circle with her own rising level of security in higher education: “But the fact that it was in MAP where you built our confidence was amazing. I remember the start of MAP and we would do a circle and we would have to introduce ourselves and I thought oh my god I hate doing this. I don’t want to talk about myself, I don’t want to talk in public.” For many students, it was in the circle that students started to feel part of the university community—and for that to “be fun and to have it be so engaging” (Ryan). Participating in the circle, for Min, “made us feel that we were just as important as people who had finished school or we had just as much ability to do this”. Far from learning detached and isolated academic skills, MAP—particularly through learning circles—provided students with experiences of feeling valued and making meaning.

Discussion: Education’s Role in Individual and Collective Thriving

MAP students’ ideas of what living well means might not be that qualitatively different from other students or from other people in their age and cohort. What was remarkable, however, given their prior negative and/or indifferent experiences of schooling, was that MAP students saw education as having a crucial role in helping people to live well.

Education, in the eyes of these MAP students, provided the means to meet basic needs (make life manageable), analyse the world around them (make life comprehensible) and engage in the world in profound ways (make life meaningful).

The experience of these students as part of MAP showed that formal education has the potential to develop within individuals a sense of coherence. Education can facilitate within people experiences of manageability—where we learn that we can meet demands by drawing on our own internal resources and external support; comprehensibility—where we learn that although life is complex we can work to understand it, particularly within trustworthy relationships; and of meaningfulness—where we learn that life is rewarding and engaging and we can make valued contributions to its meaning. Through these experiences, education starts to develop within individuals and within societies a sense of coherence. For Antonovsky (1979), a sense of coherence was not seen as a good in and of itself. Sense of coherence was only a good in that it was salutogenic, it moved us towards health and wellbeing. Thus education, in developing a sense of coherence, moves us towards a world where we thrive individually and collectively.

MAP students named the impact of education as occurring at a level of individual thriving—meeting basic needs and opening people’s minds—which then flowed into collective thriving—solving communal problems and equalising societies. For example, in further conversation about how to create a world worth living in, Adrian felt that education could provide children with different global perspectives so that they could develop a “more balanced view of how they deal with the world.” Hector discussed the importance of an informed electorate who understood policies before voting for a party so that a government focused on the greater good could move “the society as a whole towards a better future, whether it be climate change or just even mental health.” Min focused on gender divides and research that has shown how women with a formal education are able to “make a change to their family and gain independence. So when you give people education you are able to achieve a sense of equality.” Education was seen to provide the tools, the knowledge, the collective energy and the boldness needed to bring a world where everyone can thrive into being.

Returning to the idea of critical educational praxis, I am not arguing that every experience of formal education—in this case, higher education—will move us towards individual and collective thriving. Higher education, particularly given the neoliberal agendas driving many decisions in formal institutions, has the equal potential to focus students in on aspects that move us towards either maintaining the status quo or towards negative change—greed, competition, exclusiveness, division (Mahon et al., 2019; Mintz, 2021)—and to create experiences of incoherence for students. There is much that is anti-educational (Edwards-Groves et al., 2018) in higher education.

Instead, through the MAP student experience, I am pointing to the potential—when designed intentionally and deliberately as critical educational praxis (Mahon et al., 2019)—for formal higher education to strengthen our individual and collective sense of coherence. I recognise that MAP sits in a privileged space, as part of a formal educational institution but operating with enough autonomy so as to push back against the tendency to view the needs of institutions “as more important than the needs of the people they were meant to serve” (Elliott, 2011, p. 169) and, I would add, the world they were meant to serve (Kaukko et al., 2021). No matter how constraining and anti-educational formal education might be, we need to continually find the spaces where we can ask critical questions and create conditions for individual and collective thriving (Mahon et al., 2019; Reimer, 2020).

Conclusion

For students who had experienced educational disadvantage prior to their university experience, it is profound how centrally these MAP students view education in their current lives and in the creation of a future, better world. Education, for these students, is seen as integral in helping people to live well and in helping us to create a world where we can all thrive individually and collectively.

The intent of MAP—to be an educational approach that initiated students into ways of understanding, acting, and relating (Kemmis et al., 2014) that fostered individual and collective emancipation—seems to have been, at least partially, realised. Of course, there is no way of knowing how students would have thrived—in and out of university—without MAP; and there is no way of knowing how students might have discussed education’s role in living well in a world worth living in for all, without MAP. What is clear, however, is that MAP provided students with a way to develop a sense of coherence about their university experience. And that now, in discussions with these same students, they also saw education as playing a role in making life more generally manageable, comprehensible, and meaningful.

Near the end of our learning circles, MAP students offered a few ideas for changes to universities—in order to humanise and diversify university education. Alex felt that the “formality of university can be a detriment” and suggested that academic staff “present themselves as more human”. Hector and Ryan both felt that more diverse pathways would make university more accessible which would be “awesome; it got me to where I am today, and it would be great for more people to have that opportunity” (Ryan). And Min connected diversifying university with building a world worth living in: “The more that we can include different groups of people in demographics into education the more we can get different groups of people into a more equal society and then that ramps it up and then we see more equality happening in the world.”

I would agree. There is great wisdom offered by MAP students—these and others—about the power of education for individuals and for societies. These students understand how disempowering anti-educational schooling can be, as well as how freeing actual education is.

The final word on the power of education, according to MAP students, goes to Raj:

I think education can and does transport people … People often think education gives money. Yes, it does. It gives you a better lifestyle. Yes, it does. But mental health, the peace, the comfort, that which comes from education, that’s a lot more important because it gives you happiness.

Actual transformative education helps to make life manageable, comprehensible, and meaningful. It helps us nurture the origins of health, so that we can live well and create a world worth living in for all.