Speaker Abstract and Biography
Sue Clegg - Employability, social mobility, and epistemic access
The policy rationale for widening access regards higher education as a route to social mobility. There is, however, now considerable evidence which points to a break in the linkage between graduate employment and social mobility particularly among groups deemed to benefit from widening access policies. Perhaps more insidiously under the guise of employability curricula are undergoing changes designed to enhance the skills students are assumed to require in order to achieve this goal. Lisa Wheelahan is among a number of writers internationally who have highlighted the importance of social and epistemic access to high status ‘powerful knowledge’: ‘Powerful knowledge is powerful because of the access it provides to the natural and social worlds and to society’s conversation about what it should be like’ (Wheelahan 2010: 10). This seminar will explore therelationship between national and institutional policies, curriculum, and powerful knowledge in considering the implications for social and epistemic access. Struggles over curriculum and pedagogy, however, are not simply pre-determined for as McLean et al. in their study of social science education in England point out: ‘agents working within re-contextualising fields can contest or reinforce pedagogic discourse, so we might expect the hierarchical nature of the pedagogic device to be disrupted by the efforts of lecturers determined to produce and reproduce the discipline’ (McLean et al 2013: 273-274).
Professor Sue Clegg
Sue Clegg is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Research at Leeds Metropolitan University. Her work draws on critical realism and feminist theory. Her research spans close-to-practice investigations, often in collaboration with practitioners, and theoretical work on the social and pedagogical significance of the gendering of information technology, analyses of information technologies in learning and teaching, a critique of the debate about the nature of ‘evidence-based’ practice, and more recently work on temporality. She has written about the importance of critical distance and work which scrutinises higher education as well as serving it. In recent work she has interrogated seemingly mundane pedagogical practices, such as those involved in personal development planning, and explored how these are understood by staff and students and how they are reframed in policy discourse. She has taken a critical look at institutional practices designed to improve teaching, analysing the rhetorical repertoire of learning and teaching strategies and exploring how these strategies are mediated in practice. She has also explored issues of academic identity. Most recently she has been involved in theorising the nature of curriculum and researching extracurricular activity and the formation and recognition of social and cultural capital.
She is Editor of Teaching in Higher Education and sits on the Editorial Boards of Studies in Higher Education and Higher Education Quarterly. She plays a major role in the Society for Research into Higher Education and chairs their Publications Committee.