The “Placetimemattering” of Aspiration in the Blacktown Learning Community

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

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to explore how children’s career and further education aspirations are shaped over time in contemporary urban locations in the context of almost universal initiatives to raise the aspirations of young people to attend university in order for nation states to achieve competitive advantage under conditions of globalisation. The paper uses the theoretical framework of ‘a global sense of place’ (Massey, 2005) in which place is understood as ‘woven together out of ongoing stories, as a moment within power-geometries, as a particular constellation within the wider topographies of space and as in process, as unfinished business’ (Massey, 2005, p. 131). The focus of this paper is on data collected from two primary schools only a suburb apart which reveal changing patterns of advantage and disadvantage with one school categorised by the state education department as low SES and the other as mid-high SES. Creative methods were used and children from Kindergarten and Grade 5 were asked to draw and write about what they wanted to be when they grow up. A semi-structured focus group was held with parents and another with teachers.

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of children’s changing career aspirations over time from these two primary schools which identified that a marked differentiation occurs between low SES and high SES children from kindergarten to Year 5. A qualitative analysis of the parent focus group from the low SES school is undertaken in relation to this finding, in order to better understand the seemingly inevitable downward trajectory for low SES children. This qualitative storylines analysis (Sondergaard, 2002) finds that for low SES parents there is not a simple causal relationship and linear timeline from generation to generation as proposed in much of the literature, but a complex assemblage of ‘spacetimemattering’ (Barad, 2010). In this assemblage ‘the body is the most significant site’ in the production and reproduction of power (Soja, 2000) and storylines of Money matters, Vulnerable childhoods, and Visualising, voicing and practising aspiration emerge from the parents’ talk.

In considering the deep mattering of money in the conditions of everyday life, and the ever-present threat for these parents of losing their children to complete social alienation, these storylines chart a different navigational route for their own and their children’s aspirations (Appadurai, 2004). This different pathway does not follow the binary lines of inquiry between a deficit- or a strengths-based model typical of research in this field but acknowledges the significance of materiality in the ways that aspiration is shaped in the ‘thick of social life’ (Appadurai, 2004). By tracing this trajectory between binary options, a tentative argument is made for the power of visualising through body-knowing and the exercise-of-voice ‘in terms of actions and performances which have local cultural force’ (Appadurai, 2004, p. 67). The theoretical framing, the creative methods, and the material-relational processes of analysis constitute a new contribution to the scholarly literature in a field where disadvantage has become a focus of policy across the western world.

Author

• Margaret Jean Somerville, University of Western Sydney