Problematizing Aspirations Among Marginalized Young Australians

• In Event: Alternative Notions of Student Access and Engagement in Universities in Postcolonial/Less-Developed Areas in China

Abstract

'Aspirations' has become a key education policy term worldwide, and in Australia post the 2008 Bradley Review that set targets for increased participation of ‘low SES’ students in the university sector and called for ‘raising aspirations’ through policy-driven programs and practices. Coinciding with the Global Financial Crisis, Bradley’s recommendations were not well funded at the time or since. More recently, policy discourses about ‘aspirations’ as a problem have become more confounded through new government priorities on marketising higher education and requiring young people to ‘learn or earn’ until 25 and reduce reliance on benefits. Consequently academic researchers, along with school staff, students and families, need to understand the shifting landscape in which young people—especially those categorised as ‘low SES’—are being problematised as ‘needing aspiration’.
This paper reports on classroom and interview materials from an Australian Research Council project studying aspirations among year 9 and 10 high school students from communities of a high poverty region. It explores how young people think about their futures, with a focus on two groups: 1) those students who read their world as requiring effort to stay at school and continue on to higher education, but with little expectation that they will do better than their parents, yet recognising that their doubts about their futures still required engagement with school and further education; and 2) significantly disengaged students who read their futures as not involving higher education, since they are clear about the disconnection of ‘pathways’ between jobs and credentials for significant numbers of young people. Drawing on Brown et al’s analysis of the ‘opportunity bargain’ represented by investment in school and the ‘opportunity trap’ resulting from attachment to belief in the link between credentials and work, this paper unpacks young people’s unstable yet sophisticated readings of their world, comparing their readings with teacher, school and parent messages about reasons for school engagement.

Authors

• Lew Zipin, Victoria University - Melbourne

• Marie T. Brennan, Victoria University, Melbourne