Researching Educational Aspirations: Contexts, Theories, Methods

• In Event: Investigating Trajectories of Student Aspiration in Low-Socioeconomic-Status Schools in Western Sydney

Abstract

The overarching concept of ‘trajectories of aspiration’ underpinning our project assumed that student aspirations change through time. Our objectives are to unpack the dimensions of these trajectories and the wider contexts within which students desires for particular futures are shaped, and to articulate the creative methodologies developed with school-based research partners. We did not follow particular individuals through time but mapped patterns across cohorts of students at four particular points in time: lower and upper years of primary school, and lower and upper years of secondary school. Selection of particular student groups to participate also provided insights into practices of selectivity and in-school streaming that increase as students progress through school, and suggest that in-school cultivation of tertiary aspiration may be unevenly distributed in low SES schools. We also critique assumptions about western Sydney broadly, and Blacktown in particular, as characterised by low social-economic status in relation to the larger city, state and nation.

Our methods of inquiry included focus group interviews with parents and teachers, and creative responses from students that incorporated images and text representing imagined futures. Multimodal artefacts enable insights into students’ individual and collective imaginings. In two of the secondary schools students engaged collaboratively in interviewing each other. At one school, students made images with costumes and props, wrote poetry, news articles and letters from the future from their imagined future selves to supplement extensive video interviews. We argue that this is a highly productive and flexible approach that can be implemented in other sites where students from low SES backgrounds are ambivalently positioned in relation to university access and participation.

Theoretical concepts around imagination and aspiration articulated by Appadurai (1996, 2004) assisted us to recognise that trajectories are both temporal and spatial. Family narratives deploy accounts of parental experiences elsewhere and in the past that are used to inform the present and imagined futures for their children; and as they create multimodal artefacts representing their imagined futures, students imagine themselves in other places and other times as they narrate their future selves into the present.

The scholarly significance of this approach lies in its variation from usual methodic practices in studies of aspiration and equity. These tend to be quantitative, and longitudinal (e.g. Gemici et al., 2013), or policy oriented (e.g. Sellar & Gale, 2011). Furthermore our approach shifts focus from universities into schools where desires for higher education are shaped, and, unusually, it tracks the formation of aspiration through to kindergarten years rather than remaining at the upper levels of schooling. This creative and qualitative approach provides an invaluable complement to more usual methods as it can yield insights into those ‘idiosyncratic’ school factors that cannot be explained by quantitative data (Gemici et al., 2013).

Authors

• Loshini Naidoo, University of Western Sydney

• Tonia Gray, University of Western Sydney

• Susanne Marie Gannon, University of Western Sydney

• Margaret Jean Somerville, University of Western Sydney

• Carol G. Reid, University of Western Sydney