Towards a Capability for Higher Education Outreach: Exploring the Role of Faculty Members in Tackling Educational Inequalities in India
- Emily F. Henderson , Education Studies & Doctoral Education and Academia Research Centre (DEAR), University of Warwick, UK
- S. Arokia Mary, Education Studies & Doctoral Education and Academia Research Centre (DEAR), University of Warwick, UK
Authorship: Emily F. Henderson; Nidhi S. Sabharwal; Ann Stewart; S. Arokia Mary; Denisse Lillo Sierra; Ragini Khurana; Arushi Painuly
Higher education (HE) outreach has the potential to tackle enduring hidden inequalities in HE access across caste, class, ethnicity and gender, inequalities which are belied by enrolment statistics that point to HE massification and enhanced equality of access. In India, within the public sector there is currently little HE outreach activity happening in an official capacity, although there is a proven appetite for this work (Stewart et al., 2023). This talk builds on the notion of ‘public-good professionalism’ (Walker & McLean, 2015), to advance a capability for HE outreach, considering the potential of faculty members (FMs) in HE institutions (HEIs) to engage in outreach practices that enable prospective students from disadvantaged communities to become more informed about HE. The empirical base of the presentation is an in-depth case study of a government college (i.e. public-funded HEI) in Delhi that is nested within a four-year research project, ‘Widening Access to Higher Education in India: Institutional Approaches’ (www.warwick.ac.uk/wahei). The presentation goes on to show that, even in the absence of a formalised HE outreach culture in public HEIs in India, FMs are ‘exercising their professional capabilities as public-good functionings’ (Walker & McLean, 2015:63), by serving as sources of HE-related guidance and information in their local communities. This practice is supplementing the dearth of formal information and guidance on HE choices for young people in disadvantaged communities. There is therefore an argument for mapping FMs’ role in HE outreach using a capabilities lens, to consider the support and resources that are needed to develop FMs’ capability.
References
Stewart, A., Sabharwal, N. S., & Yadav, R. (2023). Building an outreach culture for fairer access to higher education in Haryana, India: A ‘bottom up’ contribution to policy implementation. Policy Futures in Education, 14782103231204098.
Walker, M., & McLean, M. (2015). Professionals and public good capabilities. Critical studies in Teaching and Learning, 3(2), 60-82.
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Professor Emily F. Henderson is Professor and Director of the ‘Doctoral Education and Academia Research Centre’ (DEAR), at the University of Warwick, and is located in Education Studies. She is also a Visiting Professor at Centre for Policy Research in Higher Education (CPRHE), National Institute for Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), India. Prof Henderson’s current research projects include a 4-year project on widening participation in India (‘WAHEI’ – ‘Widening Access to Higher Education in India, Institutional Approaches’), a project about the aims, nature and values of education-related research centres (‘The Heart of Research’), and a project on mitigating circumstances and reasonable adjustments in doctoral education (‘MADE’ – Mitigation and Adjustment for Doctoral Education). She is most recently co-author of Gendering the Massification Generation: Higher Education Access and Choice in India (Routledge, 2024), Making Sense of Academic Conferences (Routledge, 2023) and co-editor of Exploring Diary Methods in Higher Education Research (Routledge, 2021). She is co-editor of the academic blog Conference Inference and Co-Convenor of Diary Method Community, an online community of practice for diary researchers.
Ms S. Arokia Mary is currently an ESRC-UKRI funded PhD at the Department of Education Studies, University of Warwick, UK. She has been actively contributing to the Widening Access to Higher Education in India: Institutional Approaches Research Project, as a research assistant. Arokia is also an Assistant Professor at the School of Education, Central University of Kashmir since 2017, where she offered courses on gender and education, pedagogy of English language and other courses related to pedagogy and aspects related to education at undergraduate and postgraduate level students in Kashmir and India. She is a research methodology enthusiast and initiated a web-lecture series on qualitative methods spanning the course of 2020-2021. Her recent publications are Implementing the sexual harassment law within higher education: A qualitative enquiry (Routledge, 2024) and Structural Marginalisation of Transgender Students in Higher Education Institutions of India (Routledge, 2023).
