Last post I explained my latest publication, number 4! Now I’m going to talk about my first one. The idea came out of my honours thesis. I looked at the Department of Education’s statistics for Low Socio-Economic Status (LSES) and regional or remote students at 6 regional universities. I talked about enrolment rates, success rates and retention rates. But in the process I couldn’t avoid reading a lot around neoliberalism, social justice and widening participation and how at time neoliberalism clashed with social justice values.

I found one UK article which beautifully divided the different viewpoints, calling them philosophies. Then I found another article that did something similar, but with different terminology and then another article again! So I blended these 3 articles and defined 3 different discourses on social equity in higher education. Then I applied these discourses to the statistics to show that the “success” of the universities in widening participation really does depend on one’s point of view.

My supervisor talked about writing an article from my honours thesis about how the multiple ways that we measure LSES and rurality complicates things. I suggested we do something on the discourses as well and he agreed. Sadly he had about 12 staff and an enabling program to manage and never found the time to write it with me. He was encouraging of research and publication, just not as much with the sessional staff like me that did not have output targets in our workload. So after about a year, and many mentions of the article to him I gave up.

I was moved from one campus to another and got to know more of the staff in the School of Education. Their offices were all lined up down one corridor. So I started at one and and knocked on doors! Well just door really because Dr. Sue Emmett was the first one and I didn’t have to go any further. I told her I had the concept for the article and I’d already done most of the reading I needed to. I just needed to write it and have someone help me edit it and get it up to publication standard (and I didn’t really know where that bar was). Of course I also needed help with the whole publication process too.

Sue is the sort of person who loves helping others and she is not competitive at all, she wants everyone to succeed. We had some very excellent conversations as we slowly put together a discussion piece. More reading was done and the original 3 discourses was broken into 4; neoliberalsim (economist), transformative (human potential), social justice and meritocracy.

So we started writing in about October 2019, just after my mother passed away, and submitted a 2000 word discussion piece to the journal of Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning in May 2020. I could write a 2000 word essay in 3 days but apparently it takes longer when it’s for a journal!

Of course in that time the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world. Sue, very wisely pondered how the pandemic might affect the discourses we had defined. Before I knew it our one discussion piece had turned into 3 journal articles and a book chapter! The second article focuses on the pandemic and the discourses. It’s the 5th publication on the whiteboard, submitted. We have also submitted another discussion piece which names the 4 discourses as a typology and discusses why that is useful in more detail. The book chapter came through what they call a Research Focus Area in the School of Education at FedUni. It’s called SJIDE (sa-jyde- E) Social Justice, Inclusion and Diversity in Education.

Anyway SJIDE were putting together an edited book so Sue and I put in a chapter which goes over the discourses again and talks a bit about the pandemic as well. That is publication #2 on the whiteboard, just waiting for the timeline from Springer!

There is one more planned publication with Sue and that is a content analysis of the latest UNESCO report to see if we can identify one or more of our discourses. We are chipping away at this in weekly sessions. Stay tuned for more information on that one (in the top right of the whiteboard).

Somewhere in this whole process Sue asked me to be a part of a TAFE project too… but that’s going to be a whole separate post!