‘Teaching’ the path towards university: understanding student access through storied-futures and meritocratic grand narratives |
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| Authors: | Neil Anthony Buddel |
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| Institution: | Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada |
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| Abstract: | The notion that the stories of our lives shape dispositions towards imagined futures is another lens through which university underrepresentation should be viewed. A storied lens attends to how futures, like university attendance, are storied during childhood to the extent that some youth imagine, and therefore plan, these futures as natural progression. Such was the case for study participants, indicating that childhood stories contain answers for mitigating social reproduction connected to parental education and cultural forces within the home. Examining social mobility through the underexplored storied-futures grand narrative presents unique solutions that lay hidden within the dominant meritocratic grand narrative. |
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| Keywords: | Higher education university student success and access equity narrative early childhood education |
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