BERA Abstract Interrupted: Patient Knowledge – A Medical Taboo

What follows is an abstract which was accepted by the British Educational Research Association (BERA) for their 2021 conference however due to there not being any scholarship or widening participation provisions for gaining membership to BERA, I could not afford to present it. Whilst there are no provisions for supporting people without access to the necessary finance, this work is not simply ‘academic’ but is an ongoing project which is a result of years of study of exclusive institutional practices. Read more…

Informing Informal Education and Dancing Like Nobody Is Watching

When we hear the word ‘education’, most of us (consciously or unconsciously) reach for the ideas of formal education, classrooms, teachers, certificates and authority. These are the easy and obvious stereotypes because they are most prominent in our cultural context. These are the measurable forms, and the ones which gain most funding opportunities because of their familiarity. Read more…

Interview With An Educator: George Wilson

George Wilson has worked in higher education for the last 14 years. In Edinburgh and Lothians, in both paid and voluntary positions, he has been involved in formal education as well as community education. With a particularly interesting view on the questions which should be asked surrounding widening participation and who it is benefiting, here his challenge shifts the issue from inside the institutional space to considering wider participation from the external perspective. Read more…

Widening Participation: Power, Knowledge and Silence; A Digest

Critical theoretical frameworks are particularly helpful in developing a conceptual framework of widening participation which is capable of addressing the complexities, misrecognitions and exclusions that play out in educational fields such as colleges and universities. Continuities in wider participation have included struggles over access for particular social and cultural groups, notions of meritocracy and liberalism, concerns with fairness and social justice and attention to patterns of social exclusion and mobility. Read more…

The Right to Higher Education: A Context For Widening Participation; A Digest

A context is needed to get a sense of the ways in which contemporary discourses of Widening Participation have emerged and have in turn shaped the discourses over who has the right to higher education, and who does not. This has become increasingly associated with the acceptance of the inevitably large amounts of debt after graduation. Read more…