ABSTRACT
From barriers to capacities: rethinking aspiration-focused student equity
strategy
Dr Sam Sellar, University of South Australia
In recent times, aspiration has been a key site of intervention for widening participation
agendas in the UK and Australia. This paper compares two different strategies for engaging
with people’s aspirations in order to propose a new direction for thinking about student
equity in HE. The first strategy—raising aspiration—is premised on conceiving underrepresentation in terms of barriers to access and participation. This narrow approach has
been prevalent in HE policy and programs, which aim to remove motivational barriers by
stimulating a particular aspiration for the future. The second strategy—capacitating
aspiration—is premised on increasing people’s capacity to reflect on, articulate and pursue
different aspirations for the future. This open-ended approach engages with aspiration as a
process rather than a desire for a particular end and has been effectively employed in
community development work (Appadurai 2004, 2006). Where the strategy of raising
aspiration aims to increase participation in particular institutions, capacitating aspiration
aims to strengthen both participation in institutions broadly and, more importantly,
processes that shape these institutions. Through contrasting these two strategies this paper
develops three arguments in favour of the capacity-focused approach: (1) that it is a much
stronger strategy for pursuing social justice in education; (2) that it necessarily opens space
for debate over the desirability and value of HE in its
current forms; and (3) that this debate is beneficial for the robustness and quality of HE
itself.
Sam Sellar is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the National Centre for Student Equity in
Higher Education. His current research is focused on theorising a new approach to
aspiration-focused educational interventions in the context of globalisation. He has
forthcoming publications on this research in the Cambridge Journal of Education and
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.
Access Monash Seminar: “Navigating the Turbulent Seas of Equity and Excellence”, 25 March 2011
Monash University, Clayton Campus