Past Event details

Ethical dilemmas in widening participation: issues of pedagogy and identity
Dr Jacqueline Stevenson, Leeds Metropolitan 

For more than a decade various governmental policy initiatives have been implemented in the UK to increase the number of students attending higher education. However, whilst these initiatives have been widely critiqued there has been almost no consideration as to the ethical implications of widening participation. This is a significant omission since both WP policy and practice give rise to serious ethical concerns, not least being whether we should continue to increase access to HE at all knowing that many widening participation students are more likely to drop out, get worse degrees, graduate with higher levels of debt and be less employable post-graduation than their peers. Drawing on issues of pedagogy, student support and both staff and student identities, this presentation will act as a ‘think-piece’ offering an opportunity to consider the implications of widening participation from both an ‘ethics of justice’ and ‘ethics of care’ perspective.

Widening Participation and the Capability Approach
Dr Michael F. Watts, University of Cambridge

This paper uses the capability approach to address the ethics of the widening participation agenda. The capability approach de-emphasises the significance of commodities (including educational commodities) in favour of the opportunities they enable in pursuit of the good life. It demands a context-based understanding of how the socio-cultural circumstances of young people influence the real opportunities they have to recognise the value of and engage with higher education. This more nuanced engagement with the concept of well-being recognises that the inevitability of human diversity generates different realisations of the good life. It also enables engagement with the adaptation of preferences that continue to bedevil attempts to increase access to higher education. The focus on freedom, illustrated here with reference to a number of empirical studies, frames a more just approach to widening participation that is concerned with what young people have rather than what they lack.