Call for papers: Higher Education on Small Islands

A couple of weeks ago I was part of an SRHE webinar exploring Higher Education on Small Islands. Following this event Holly Henderson (University of Nottingham) and I have been working on a proposal for an edited book on the same topic. We are now looking for submissions for potential chapters that could be included in the publication.

A full call for papers is attached at the bottom of this blog. But broadly proposals should be for chapters of 6,000-7,000 words (including references and bibliography) and should be located in one of the four following broad topic areas:

1. Curriculum design in small island higher education
2. Higher education policy in small island higher education
3. Student or staff experiences of small island higher education
4. Conceptualising small island higher education

Chapter proposals should be submitted by Friday 28th May 2021 to the editors.

We very much hope to receive a good range of submissions on different aspects of higher education in small islands, and from different island contexts across the world, so that we can create a varied and interesting book. If you have questions prior to submission we are also happy to discuss. We look forward to reading your proposals!

Call for abstractsDownload

International vs Internal Student Mobilities

One of my colleagues at the University of the Highlands and Islands, Dr Philomena De Lima is doing some work at the moment to bring together scholarship on international migration and internal migration. Thinking about her work, I read the paper “Internal and International Migration: Bridging the Theoretical Divide”  (King, Skeldon and Vullnetari, 2008). Now, in my PhD I think about internal migration the whole time – how students and graduates move from their island locations, mostly to the Scottish Mainland. Most of my reading has been about internal migration and rural-urban migration specifically. Sometimes in conversations with others I am asked about how my work fits with current international interests in migration (say, for example, when I was last in Greece and the refugee crisis there was very visible). However I haven’t really thought a great deal about it, as most of the research into international migration doesn’t seem that relevant to me. I guess in many ways I have been stuck on the ‘internal’ side of the migration divide!

Refugee camp at Mytilini, Lesvos Island where I was at a conference last year (photo courtesy of Pixabay)

Reading King et al’s paper was very interesting though, because they highlight how the traditions of researching international and internal migration have indeed been quite separate (it’s not just me who has focused on one and not the other…). In their paper they suggest that we should be ‘bridging the theoretical divide’- partly to address the imbalance in scholarship (most scholarship is on the topic of international migration, but most migration is internal) and also because the boundaries between internal and international migration in practice can be very blurred. In particular they discuss the systems approach to migration as being a possible paradigm that can encompass both internal and international migration. Reading their paper has inspired me to not think so narrowly about migration but to consider how international and internal migration might be part of the same spectrum. In fact when reading their paper I was struck by reflecting on how often international migration came up in my interviews with participants as a future possibility (and an actual lived experience in a couple of cases).

What it also got me thinking about is practical implications from my research. So within the UK higher education setting a key emphasis in recent years in terms of graduate employment has been on internationalisation of students and graduates to enable them to access a global workplace (Diamond et al, 2011). However what has received a great deal less attention are issues around internal mobility of students and graduates. My research is showing that this is an important issue for students especially given that graduate jobs are not equally geographically distributed, with a strong centralisation in city regions, and in the UK particularly the South East (Ball, 2012).

What occurs to me is that perhaps universities and higher education policy has been particularly focused on international mobility without necessarily seeing a link to internal mobility. But, I would suggest, perhaps these two could be thought of as part of the same spectrum? And if universities are serious about increasing graduate choice, and increasing graduate access to employment then consideration should be given to internal mobility as well as international mobility.

It would be really interesting to explore further some of the approaches to internationalisation within Higher Education (not an area of specialism for me) and to identify whether similar approaches could be used in terms of internal mobility of students. Considering the mobilities of students generally (internal and international) may be beneficial for students and graduates from very rural and remote communities, but equally given increasing trends for students to study from home, mobility more generally may be an important issue for students all over the country.

References

Ball, C. (2012) ‘Regional Overview of Graduate Employment’, in HECSU, What do Graduates Do? Manchester; HECSU p.4

Diamond, Walkley, Forbes, Hughes and Sheen (2011) ‘Global Graduates: Global Graduates into Global Leaders’ Association of Graduate Recuiters

King, Skeldon and Vullnetari (2008) “Internal and International Migration: Bridging the Theoretical Divide”

 

Migration, education and employment: socio-cultural factors in shaping individual decisions in Orkney and Shetland

So, my latest paper has just been published in the Island Studies Journal. The paper is titled: Migration, education and employment: socio-cultural factors in shaping individual

decisions and economic outcomes in Orkney and Shetland. The paper unpacks some of the theoretical background to my research and discusses some of the initial findings from the first interviews in the project. I have summarised some of the key points from my paper below.

Front cover of the Island Studies Journal Vol. 11 No.1

So in terms of the background to the project I start by discussing the potential role of place in shaping individual decisions. In order to do this I draw on the theoretical framework of Bourdieu, who broadly looks at the way that our social environment can become internalised and influence the decisions that we make (the internalised social environment is our ‘habitus’). Through this use of Bourdieu I challenge rational models of decision making which tend to assume that career and migration decisions are made on a purely economic basis, and suggest that social and cultural aspects of our environment also impact on our decisions.

Looking at the findings of the research project so far I cover two areas: higher education destinations and graduate destinations. Analysing the interviews with higher education students from Orkney and Shetland, these are the main findings I discuss:

HE destinations

• “Proximity” is important in deciding where to study for university. This proximity is, however constructed in terms of social and cultural familiarity as well as simply geographical distance.
• Personal challenge is an important part of going to university. Students typically chose locations which had an element of challenge but which were ‘close enough’ to remain manageable.

Graduate destinations

• Graduates have typically developed more geographical confidence through being at university and at the point of graduation describe being able to live anywhere
• However graduates still lack professional confidence, and typically see the first years after graduation as a key period to build up their professional experience. For many graduates it is felt that this may be best done away from their home communities.
• There is a strong theme of wishing to return to the islands at some point in the future, this is often associated with having children and settling down, with the islands being identified in terms of familiarity, homeliness and comfort.
• Some graduates do return home immediately, either viewing this in terms of ‘settling down’ or in terms of having a break from their studies and recuperating at home before moving away again. However even the graduates who return home more permanently  typically do not rule out perhaps ‘going south’ again in the future.

I finish the paper with further discussion and indicate a few areas for further research. In particular I note that there is a potential interrelation of place-based habitus with other forms of habitus – including occupational and class habitus. Class in particular is something I’m becoming increasingly interested in (as you will have seen from my previous blog) so you can probably expect to see more from me on that particular topic in the not too distant future!

I hope you enjoy the paper and as always if you’d like to comment to let me know what you think that would be fabulous – your comments are fantastic for pushing my thinking on these issues!

 

Social Class, Rurality and Access to Higher Education

I’ve recently been reading about research into working class students and their experience of Higher Education. Wolfgang Lehmann has written quite extensively about the topic, and describes the challenges working class students may find when entering higher education, experiencing “a ‘‘foreign’’ environment in which they feel like cultural outsiders” (2013:2). The higher education environment is, Lehmann suggests, classed, and as working class students come into contact with higher education they develop new forms of social and cultural capital in keeping with their environment – such as changing tastes in music, dress sense and so on. This process is one of ‘transformation’ which can be a painful and difficult process for students, and may involve a distancing from their working class roots.

So initially this really interested me because it got me thinking about my own experience of leaving home for university, which I found very difficult. Thinking back to my first weeks at university two conversations stand out for me. One was being in a group of students where the conversation was about ‘which international airport has the best shopping?’ and the other was being in another group where a student (from London) said he had no patience for tourists to “his city” who didn’t know how to use the underground. Now these for me were quite profoundly alienating experiences. At the age of 18 I had only ever lived in rural North Cornwall,  flown on one domestic flight (from Aberdeen to Shetland), and I had only been to London once (for an event that I was invited to, where I was accompanied by my mum and we had got lost on the underground….). In the case of both conversations I felt what Lehmann would probably describe as a ‘dislocation’ – these were not people ‘like me’ and I felt alienated from the social context in which I found myself.

Bude: the town I grew up in (or at least the nearest town to the village I grew up in) – image courtesy of: scottcawley CC BY-NC 2.0

 

Now, to a certain extent you could say that these experiences were class related – although I would consider myself middle class (my father was a headteacher, my mother was a writer, and we had enough money to live relatively comfortably) I was studying at Oxford University and so many of my fellow students were significantly more privileged than me. However, I think the other aspect in these experiences relates to place  – we hadn’t flown very much as children partly because of the cost, but also partly because the closest international airport would have been almost a day’s drive away and similarly I was so unfamiliar with London because it was  a significant distance from North Cornwall. Indeed in my first few weeks at university while others were complaining about Oxford being ‘small’ I was confronted with a much larger place than I had ever lived, and was already feeling a physical ‘dislocation’ from the things I knew. In Oxford, for example, I  was confronted by lots of unfamiliar things about city living: using town bus services (how do people know when to get off the bus? our country bus just went from one village to another), using taxi ranks and ‘flagging down’ taxis (I still don’t really understand this, I have always booked taxis in the country), and using mainline train services (I grew up about an hour by car from the nearest train station, and that station was Bodmin – not exactly the hub of everything!). I was also getting used to having city shops on the doorstep (and not having to make a special ‘day trip’ to a city), having galleries and museums a short walk away (which I loved), and being able to go out to city pubs and clubs (I was convinced going out was much more dangerous than at home).

Oxford: where I went to university –  Image courtesy of das_sabrinchen CC BY-ND 2.0

Of course there were lots of parts of my experience which were exciting and enjoyable, but they were also profoundly challenging. Looking back now I can see that moving to a city was partly challenging because of physically being in a different place and having to manage new and unfamiliar experiences (thinking about it, mostly transport related!) but also about a different social and cultural context (managing city pubs and clubs, and going to museums). It was also about being in a place full of ‘city people’ who knew how to ‘be’ and what to ‘do’ in this unfamiliar place.

So, although I have written before about rurality being a widening access issue, reading about the experience of working class students has started to crystalise my thinking. Perhaps it is possible to think about the experience of rurality in a similar way to class – is rurality a similar challenge to entering higher education? And where for working class students, university can be a ‘transformation’ into a middle class milieu, is university a way for rural students to ‘transform’ and adapt to a more urban environment? Perhaps higher education as a predominantly urban, middle class experience ¹ is about producing urban middle class graduates? These are big questions, but in the meantime as it is a topic that I don’t think has received enough attention, I would be interested to hear other people’s stories of going to university from a rural place…. What was your experience? What are the things that stand out for you about your first few weeks at university?

Notes

1. I say ‘predominantly’ because of course increasingly there are higher education options in rural areas, through for example the University of the Highlands and Islands (in Scotland) and the Combined Universities in Cornwall (in Cornwall). The non-traditional experience of students studying in rural areas is also an area that I think deserves more attention but is outside the scope of this blog!

References

Lehmann, W. (2013) ‘Habitus Transformation and Hidden Injuries: Successful Working-class University Students’ Sociology of Education 87(1) 1–15

Stats busting: the Higher Education experiences of students from Orkney and Shetland

So, as part of my PhD I have been looking at the destinations of higher education graduates who were originally based in Orkney and Shetland. I have looked at data collected as part of the annual Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey over a five year period and some initial observations were published recently in the latest Graduate Market Trends.

Basically I make several observations:

1. In terms of which Higher Education Institutions students are graduating from we can see that institutions based in Aberdeen are very popular (accounting for about 25% of graduates). The University of Edinburgh is also popular, and the University of the Highlands and Islands (considering its size) is also very popular – accounting for the same sort of proportion of graduates as institutions such as Glasgow and Strathclyde which are significantly larger institutions. The results can be seen in the graph below:

2. Some subjects seem to be relatively more popular with students from the islands than among their Scottish counterparts (e.g. creative arts and design, and education) and some less popular (e.g. business and computing). The results are shown below:

3. A surprisingly high number stay in or return to the islands after graduation, with almost 40% of those whose location is known six months after graduation being back in the islands. This suggests a more complex migration picture than a simple ‘brain drain’ from the islands.

4. There is a marked difference between the proportion  of men and women progressing to higher education, with approximately 63% of graduates from the islands being women. Women also appear more likely to move back to / stay in the islands after graduation.

Now, given that the numbers in this sample group are very small it is difficult to draw firm conclusions from these observations. It is also important to note that in order to get a big enough sample size I have used historical data from the last five years, and so the experiences of students now may have moved on slightly from when this data was gathered. However these findings do give an indication of some interesting areas that may merit further research….

Cornwall to Orkney: was it destiny….?!

“Positive image is vital for the West” my prize winning schoolgirl essay published In the Western Morning News, May 24th 1997

Tidying up, I just found an essay I wrote when I was 16 which was published in the Western Morning News after it was placed second in the Western Morning News – South West Enterprise Limited Business Essay competition in 1997. This is the opening of the essay, I think you’ll see why it made me laugh….!

“As a whole the Westcountry has a poor economy, characterised by high levels of unemployment and migration, and decreasing levels of industry. To improve the economy these processes have to be reversed.

To do this the area has to develop a policy committed to improving further education facilities and communications, particularly in the form of information technology and Internet links.”

I go on to argue:

‘One of the major reasons that talented young people leave the region is the lack of further education facilities. The universities in Plymouth and Exeter offer good opportunities, but are still somewhat distant for students in the far north or south of the region. So further education facilities should be made more available within the Westcountry.

To do this a branch of an existing university could be built to service the remoter students, perhaps on the north coast around Barnstaple…. Universities in the Westcountry could also develop intern[et] links allowing students to participate in further education while  at home…. In Scotland the University of the Highlands is developing this method of computer links, which it uses with some success…’

See why I found this funny?! Apparently regional development and  the role of the university sector has been of significant interest since  I was in my teens. What surprises me looking at this is that my comments preceded the development of the Combined Universities in Cornwall initiative and looked to the University of the Highlands and Islands as a model. Who would have thought that seventeen years later I would be working for the University of the Highlands and Islands, working on practical delivery of careers guidance through web technologies, and studying a PhD in higher education and migration in a rural community…?! Who would also have thought that Combined Universities in Cornwall would have taken off, and that now I look to them as an alternative model of education delivery in a rural area….? What I am struck by is how my perspectives on these issues have changed very little, even if my writing style and acacdemic rigour have (hopefully) improved somewhat!

Me and the other prize winner at the awards ceremony…. Don’t we look young!

Within the essay my other main argument is the need to stimulate new businesses, and particularly skills based industries in the region. I state that skills based industries ‘will employ highly skilled labourers, who generally prefer to live in an attractive rural than urban environment’ and I ‘discourage extra road building as this will lead to a deterioration of the environment, which, if anything would discourage the skilled industries’. These are interesting ideas, and I suspect come from a projection of my own desire to live in a rural environment. From my perspective now I wouldn’t agree with my younger self, instead I believe that some people will want to live in rural environments and some people would prefer to live in urban environments. However, it did remind me of some debates about how to quantify the value of natural resources and to account for this in calculations of the value of infrastructure development. The role of image, culture, and place making which is almost the subtext to my essay is also very much part of debates on how to attract migrants to areas.

I had one other argument in my essay too – which was about extending and diversifying the tourist base for the westcountry. As part of this argument I suggested extending the tourist season and thought that ‘a high profile advertising strategy could be employed, such as that used to attract tourists to the Scottish Highlands in  Autumn’. Which again made me smile: sitting, as I am in my home in the Scottish islands looking out over a rather dreich autum / winter afternoon. Ever felt that somehow your destiny is mapped out for you….?!

Participation in Higher Education by region (in England): a picture of rural disadvantage

Well, this is interesting, today I came across a report from HEFCE: ‘trends in young participation in higher education’ which looks at participation rates in Higher Education across England. The research finds that “Areas where young people are least likely to go into HE are located along the coast, in many former industrial towns in the Midlands and the North, and in rural parts of the South West, the East Midlands and the East of England.” Although my research focuses on the very remote and rural areas of the far north of Scotland and specifically Orkney, this HEFCE report shows how issues of rurality may also be significant in terms of higher education in England.

Where I’ve talked before about the draw of London to new graduates, the map accompanying the HEFCE report shows how London may also be very well represented in terms of young people accessing Higher Education. In this way rural young people may be doubly disadvantaged – first in terms of accessing higher education, with lower levels of young people going into higher education from remote and rural areas, and in terms of accessing graduate jobs, because graduate jobs may be underrepresented in rural areas and focused in the ‘escalator region’ of London.

Orkney school leavers (2010-11) – the impact of gender

The dive into statistics continues…. Today I have been looking at the School Leaver Destinations for Orkney, compiled by Skills Development Scotland. I have been focusing on the 2010-11 cohort, as many of these people will graduate in 2015 and will be part of the sample I interview in the future. Here is what I have found:

• The percentage of leavers entering higher education was low at 30.5% compared to a national average of 35.8%.
• The proportion entering further education was also lower than the national average (20.6% compared to 27.1%).
• The proportion entering employment was significantly higher than in the rest of Scotland (33.8% compared to 19.3%)

So far, quite interesting, although not earth shattering – with employment levels relatively high in Orkney, it could be predicted that more leavers would enter employment than elsewhere in the country.

Here is what I found surprising: the gender split in those entering higher education and employment. For school leavers in 2010-11 73% of those in employment were male, and 27% were female. In contrast 31% of those going on to Higher Education were male, and 69% female. Now, I had expected a gender split (in the same year, nationally, 54.5% of Higher Education entrants were female) but nothing quite so acute.

I had previously read about more acute gender divisions in school leavers in rural communities – particularly in Corbett’s study of a remote community in Canada from 1963-1998 where he found that women were consistently about twice as likely to complete secondary school as men, and also more likely to move away for further education (p.94). Corbett links this to the nature of the economy – with the dominance of the fishing industry which ”presents a gendered structure of opportunity” (p.89). In terms of Orkney, the labour market may play a role in the gendered choices of school leavers, with the SLDR report showing that the construction industry was the most common employment destination for male leavers (36%) but also showing that no girls found employment in the construction industry.

However, understanding the interrelation of migration, education and gender is likely to be a lot more complex than talking about the ‘structure of the labour market’ may suggest. After all, it is not so much the opportunities themselves that create a gender division than the social and cultural expectations that deem some jobs ‘male’ and some ‘female’. And with such an acute difference between male and female choices in the 2010-11 cohort of school leavers from Orkney, it seems that this may bear further research….