On the transition to undergraduate studies as experienced by working class students
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56433/3xyp9472Keywords:
working class, mentoring, widening participation, life event, habitusAbstract
The scholarship of transition to undergraduate studies offers substantial understanding and guidance to those that work with students in the curricular, co and extra-curricular spaces. However, students can still experience transition as a single event that has been crammed into a broader general programme of induction. The potential fragility of the process of transition is yet to be taken as seriously as it should be on campuses across the country. The particular experience of working-class students during this process of transition is often obscured due to the classed based assumptions of the social origin of the student population. This failure to critically engage with the working-class experience of transition has highly negative and impactful consequences on students and their institutions. Firstly, by ignoring hysteresis, we end up with the misdiagnosis of working-class student experience and outcomes. Rather than questioning institutional habitus and the role it plays in the inequitable structures of higher education, working class students are frequently cast as problematic. Secondly, by failing to properly acknowledge the ontological fractures initiated by habitus clivé, institutions run the risk of further isolating and marginalizing working-class students as they decided whether they are willing to shed their working-class origins in order to fit in and succeed. In the absence of an overhaul of institutional culture and behaviour, the applied academic responses to such circumstances are proposed as two-fold. Firstly, a peer mentoring programme rooted in Freirean hope and love – that through collective labour facilitates relationships of solidarity based upon senior working class students providing mentorship to new first year working class students. Secondly, the need for reflexive continual professional development for all staff. So as to develop an active compassionate understanding of the diversity of the student population and the reality of the various lived experiences.
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