Samuel Dent Tweet SRDent 89 SRHEEvents The Case

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents The Case of the Student Parent Policy Samuel Dent Samuel. R. Dent@Student. SHU. ac. uk Samuel. Dent. Wordpress. co. uk

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Why do universities create policies?

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Students who care for children “…in the context of the default construction of the university student as carefree, student parents often describe their experience of navigating academia as a struggle, in which time-related, financial, health and emotional problems prevail. However, the stories they tell also emphasise the benefits associated with their dual status. ” (Moreau & Kerner, 2013) “Nobody knows exactly how many student parents there are because institutions are not required to collect this information. ” (NUS 2009) “neo-liberalist individualisation within the UK has tended to erase the significance of structural inequalities, with the effect of making student-parents believe that any difficulties they face are a result primarily of personal failures. ” (Brooks 2012)

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Where dose policy exist? Ball (1993) argue “policies are representations which are encoded in complex ways” and therefore claims the polices as texts, and the discourses around them cannot be separated. While Lightfoot (2015) argues “policy is subject to compromise and contest and must take account of the changing power relationships within and outside of the institution” Lipseky (1983) argues street-level bureaucrats assume the “position as de facto policy makers …The sanctioned discretion they exercise means that to demonstrate their own ability and competence, managers are highly dependent …without being able to intervene extensively in the way work is performed. ”

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Policy & the student service industry Only some students are positioned as in need of support, which becomes ‘individualistic and problem focused in its orientation’ (Jacklin and Le Riche, 2009) “We distinguish kindness from ‘due care’ and acts that are required of professionals, and instead locate it philosophically in personal values…what is subversive in thinking about higher education practice through the lens of kindness is that it cannot be regulated or prescribed” (Clegg, 2010) “faced with inconsistencies at the local level and a lack of clear institutional policy, individuals fall back on their own repertoires of values and meaning making” (Stevenson 2010)

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #britsoc 16 Recognition - Nancy Fraser (2001) “To redress the injustice require a politics of recognition, to be sure, but this no longer means identity politics…rather it means a politics aimed at overcoming subordination by establishing the misrecognised party as a full member of society, capable of participating on a par with other members. ” “examine institutionalized patterns of cultural value for their effects on the relative standing of social actors. ” Recogniton Redistribution

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Care in Higher Education; Recognising Students Who Care For Children Aim; To illuminate and develop our understanding of the experiences of students with childcare commitments while studying within a Higher Education Institutional Ethnography featuring; 16 student, and 6 staff participants Across 2 academic years Traditional, research intensive university in northern England

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Institutional Ethnography • Dorothy E. Smith (2005, 2006, 2014) • Standpoint • Work • Activation of texts • Mapping of power relations • Extra-local decision making

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Activation of Texts Institutional ethnography focuses on how ‘texts’ are ‘activated’ within the experience of ‘standpoint’ participants and discarding ‘texts’ that are not activated within the standpoint experience, which pure textual analysis might over-represent. Texts in institutions are “read selectively for different purposes, articulated to various sequences of action, and it is these selective readings for which the text is constructed” (Smith, 2006) ‘Texts’ are important to this as they are understood as carrying meaning through institutional settings which can be used to map ‘extralocal’ power relations through institutions, power and decision making which may not be present in the immediate location of the standpoint experience.

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents The Student Parent Policy “The University is committed to being as flexible as possible, whilst, at the same time, making sure that any accommodations made for the student do not compromise academic standards. ” Avoiding less favourable treatment. Enabling informed choices. Taking a flexible approach. Demonstrating a non-judgmental and sensitive approach. “Whilst there are no restrictions on feeding (breastfeeding) at the University, there are currently no specific facilities available for these purposes. ” “…a further health and safety risk assessment should be considered. ”

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents “they obviously don’t kind of advertise it to pregnant women erm… you know it is something that I found by myself, so I guess their student kind of audience isn’t that big really. ” “I mean I guess, it kind of strikes me as a bit of a document for you know university staff, ” Elaine “know it was nice to know they had a policy so if anything went wrong, in terms of my supervisors reacted badly or something like that then I knew like I would have this behind me” “Well it has been quite a strange process really… I just sent like an e-mail to the department … and then you know a few weeks later they wrote back saying yes that is fine… But in terms of the finances I haven’t had any confirmation of how much I’m going to be getting, I have chased it up and they haven’t sent me it yet. And I don’t know exactly how much I am supposed to be working. I assumed I would be 50% of full time but then a friend of mine doing a part time Ph. D says it is 60% so, and yes basically nothing has been explained. ”

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Michaela “I got my placements - they were actually the most faraway regions possible. I started panicking, and I contacted the lady who had received all these forms and had started to do all the allocations, but received no reply…found it all quite bullying actually. I had to contact the head of year…he said to me that they can’t be seen to support students at the expense of the support for their administrative staff…And he said you need to apologise, even when you’re not in the wrong”

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Erica “I read through it, it was 15 pages outlining all the support, and that they support you, and make sure everything is ok for you. And I thought ok, yeah it sounds like a really good Uni, and that’s what made me choose it, most of all because of that policy” “I had to pick my son up from pre-school because he was ill…I ended up getting an official school level warning, and I had a meeting with this professor, and she kinda yelled at me about it and I said this was the situation, and [they said] can I give evidence to show that I had to pick him up ” “So based on these experiences I ended up having an abortion. Which had an awful lot of complications as well, and they just weren’t supportive of me at all, the whole time I had the operations. And they said that when I mentioned that I’m going through all this, they said that’s your own fault, that’s your own problem…. ”

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Staff Perseptives “As long as they keep in contact I can make the forms work for them – I’ve never had a mitigation request sent back…” (on extension requests and mitigation policies) “I would have a fairly different structure to degrees that much more of a Oxford Brooks kind of style of things …because there’s an inference that if you are doing something part time or that you have other responsibilities that you know you want to complete your MA over 2 -3 years say. But actually you might want to do it much more intensively over a very short time” “I think there’s a long held institutional set of norms… right…“this is how we do it” but there’s also considerable agency…. For a lot of people the status quo makes a lot of sense, and in lots of ways students who are parents…are the anomalies, they are the outliers, and so the whole system isn’t going to change to adopt practices which would suit them better” (on QA policies)

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Conclusion There is a disconnect between the written aims of these texts, and the process of activation which has the potential to perpetuate misrecognitions, and social inequalities for these students. Greater reflexivity, in both policy development and implementation, proffers the opportunity to reduce these misrecognitions. Supporting a more nuanced conceptualisation of university supports, invested with space for discretion and affect. Support Care Wellbeing

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Questions Samuel. R. Dent@Student. SHU. ac. uk Samuel. Dent. Wordpress. co. uk

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents References Ball, S. J. (1993) What is policy? Texts, trajectories and toolboxes. Discourse 13(2) 10– 17 Brooks, R. (2012). Student-parents and higher education: a cross-national comparison. Journal of education policy, 27 (3), 423 -439. Clegg, S. and S. Rowland (2010). "Kindness in pedagogical practice and academic life. " British Journal of Sociology of Education 31(6): 719 -735. Fraser, Nancy (2001). Recognition without ethics? Theory, culture & society, 18 (2 -3), 2142. Jacklin, A. & Le Riche, P. 2009. Reconceptualising student support: from ‘support’ to ‘supportive’. Studies in Higher Education, 34, 735 -749. Lightfoot, N. (2015). Chapter 9 In Exploring Education at Postgraduate Level: Policy, theory and practice. In: O’Grady, A. and Cottle, V. (eds. ). Taylor & Francis, Lipsky, M, (1983) Street-Level Bureaucracy: The Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service, Russell Sage, New York NUS (2009) Meet the parents, Online at: www. nus. org. uk/global/nus_sp_report_web. pdf/ Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: a sociology for people. Alta. Mira Press. Smith, D. E. (ed. ). Institutional ethnography as practice. Rowman & Littlefield, . Smith, D. E. and Turner, S. M. (2014). Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnographies University of Toronto Press.

Samuel Dent Tweet: @SRDent 89 #SRHEEvents Photo Credits; Slide 2: Manchester City Library; https: //flic. kr/p/9 gp. Pt. R Cas Filing Pile; https: //flic. kr/p/6 He 56 Z Simon Cousins Filing: https: //flic. kr/p/5 UFiwj Doug Waldran Filing: https: //flic. kr/p/2 pvb 2 T Ahmed Ammash Files: https: //flic. kr/p/w. TVPr. R Chris Smart Files: https: //flic. kr/p/7 Sdy. XR Slide 3: Sarit Fishbaine: http: //www. buzzfeed. com/rachelzarrell/professor-teaches-lifelessons#. ker 9 L 2 V 1 X Slides 8, 11, 12, 13 & 14: Francisco Osorio: University Life https: //www. flickr. com/photos/francisco_osorio/