Lives through the lens of a vulture’s eye: Interpreting learners’ talesRichard Waller and Jonathan Simmons,

Faculty of Education, UWE Bristol, UK.

Revised version of a paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual

Conference, University of Warwick, 6-9 September 2006

AbstractThis chapter discusses strategies for analysing biographical research data, raising issues about

how narrative accounts can ‘illuminate the social context of individual lives’ (Sparkes, 2003:3).

The best biographical researchers understand the need to take into account wider social forces

when considering individual’s ‘storied lives’ (Kehily, 1995). This technique of maintaining a focus

on both social structure and individual experience has been compared to looking through the eye

of a vulture (Whitty, 2002). The vulture’s lens can ‘zoom-in’ upon a tiny segment of its visual field,

whilst simultaneously maintaining a coherent panoramic vista of the wider surrounding area.

Using data from a longitudinal study of 20 adults returning to education via a British Access to

University course, we explore the shift from life story to life history (Goodson and Sikes, 2001).

Repeated semi-structured interviews over a two year period with each participant followed their

transition into the UK’s further then higher education systems.

We develop contextualised life histories of two mature students here, a 32 year old working class

British Asian man and a white middle class woman aged 56. Through their contrasting narrative

accounts we explore how social structures and individual agency inform accounts of their

experience of returning to study later in life, and consider the methodological implications of

biographical research processes.

IntroductionThis chapter attempts to answer the ‘so what?’ question levelled at much qualitative research. It

examines how we can best understand the wider context of individual’s lives to make sense of

their narrative accounts, and how such personal stories can themselves aid an understanding of

the broader context of social enquiry. In doing this we seek, as Sparkes (2003:3) recently put it, to

‘illuminate the social context of individual lives while also allowing space for individual stories to

be told’. Building upon this, we suggest to be best comprehended, accounts of social change

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require a narrative, and we use stories from two participants in a larger research study to

contextualise broader events shaping their lives and those of others. The two, who are from very

different structural positions in terms of social class, gender, ethnicity and age, are drawn from the

wider study to explore the methodological implications of biographical research. Our particular

focus here is on how analysing individual mature students’ re-engagement with formal education

allows us to explore the relationship between their agency – the individual’s negotiation of events

and wider experiences – and the social, political and institutional backdrop to their lives.

Access to higher educationAccess to higher education (HE) courses take place in the UK further education (FE) college

setting, aiming to redress educational exclusion amongst low participating groups – primarily

mature students from working-class and/or minority ethnic backgrounds (REF). They provide

adults with no or few formal qualifications a route into university that would otherwise be denied to

them (Parry 1996). They conventionally feature a curriculum concerned with preparation for HE,

with study skills, numeracy, literacy and communication skills at their core, in addition to subject

specific knowledge. There is an informal curriculum too, with the course aiming to raise the

confidence level of students, and to develop transferable generic ‘soft’ skills including time

management, handling work-related stress and effective group working (Peters, 1997). Access to

HE programmes have flourished since their inception in the mid-1970s (West, 1996), and attract

increasing numbers of mature students from a range of backgrounds (Reay et al, 2002; Ross,

2003).

The research studyAs part of a larger research project, semi-structured interviews were conducted five times with

each student, around the end of term times, over a two year period. The interviews, which with the

two respondents here each lasted on average about an hour, occurred on the college premises or

in the respondent’s home. They were tape-recorded and subsequently transcribed, and the lead

author of this chapter (RW) undertook them all. Similar questions were asked of each respondent

for a given set of interviews, and whilst some themes such as whether they considered

themselves a student were revisited, others only arose during one set of discussions. Informed

consent was gained at the start of the project and again before each interview, and individuals

were reminded they were free to withdraw from the study at any time.

The interviewees knew RW worked as an Access tutor at the college, and was involved in

educational research at a local university. At times it felt appropriate to point out that, in common

with most of them, he too was a mature student balancing academic studies with family

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responsibilities and part-time work commitments. This aided the development of rapport

necessary to produce the richly detailed qualitative data sought. No participant knew him before

the project commenced, and the only formal points of contact were the interviews from which

extracts are selected.

Methodological theoryOn the topic of generalisability, Silverman (2000) advises qualitative researchers against

pretending their results are generalizable, his reasoning being essentially that our data are rarely

from randomly chosen cases. We are more strident in suggesting that even if our sample is

‘random’ in construction, the results of qualitative enquiry are not necessarily applicable to

‘equivalent groups’. This term itself is also problematic – what would be an ‘equivalent group’ for

this study? Moreover, even if you were able to construct a more clearly ‘representative’ sample for

study, it would need to be so large as to preclude the kind of intensive analysis usually preferred

in qualitative research (Mason, 1996), like comedian Steven Wright’s ‘life-sized map of America’1.

In short, it would be beyond the scope of a study as modest as that from which this data is drawn.

We might ask if no generalisation is possible, what utility biographical research can offer. It is to

this question that we turn throughout the rest of the chapter.

However, rather than the construction of a ‘representative’ sample, from whom generalisations

can be made, the logic here is of ‘an intelligent choice of case’. As Becker (1998:52) suggests

every research site is a case of some general category, and so knowledge about it gives knowledge about a generalised phenomenon. We can pretend that it is just like all other cases, or at least is like them in all relevant ways, but only if we ignore all its local, peculiar characteristics (our emphasis).

The site for our study was chosen for particular reasons; it allowed ready access, which in turn led

to richer and more valuable data than would have otherwise been gathered. It had the additional

advantage of RW’s ‘insider’ knowledge, providing the ‘thicker description’ (Geertz, 1973)

necessary for the reader to be able to take their own meanings from this account.

The problems of social research and the data generatedEven a cursory examination of the research methods literature demonstrates there is no widely

accepted approach to social enquiry in terms of the value of the data expected and the ethical

dilemmas posed. This is unsurprising given the range of competing ontological and

epistemological positions or foundations upon which research is ultimately built. From the

supposedly ‘value-free’ positivistic approach, the issue is largely a tactical one of ‘interview

method’ (Duncombe and Marsden, 1996). The nub of the problem for positivists is to develop

1 US comedian Steven Wright tells a joke: ‘I have a map of America in my backyard…It’s life-size’. Only with a life-sized ‘map’ of the study site could we include every detail, a clearly impossible task.

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techniques affording access to the ‘truths’ of the research ‘object’, and to report them in a ‘bias-

free’ and comprehensible manner, with the researcher merely an impartial conduit for the

revelation and dissemination of that (unproblematic) ‘truth’.

As discussed above, our own position is inherently antagonistic to this approach. Our aim is to

understand the biographical narrative being developed, negotiated and (re)constructed before its

presentation to us. The account is not understood as being offered unproblematically, nor is it

accepted accordingly as it might be by a positivist researcher. Rather, it is produced through

interactions before, during and, to a lesser extent, after the interview process, as discussed

elsewhere in this chapter. One leading author on qualitative research referred to this underlying

dilemma as the ‘crisis of representation’ (Denzin, 1997). Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte

highlighted this conundrum in another area of social activity. By the seemingly nonsensical act of

writing ‘This is not a pipe’ beneath a clear picture of one in The Treachery of Images2, Magritte

highlighted how a representation of an object must not itself be confused with the object itself, nor

considered something tangible and real. The same principles apply to an account of someone’s

life here or in other studies.

In terms of social enquiry, Clough (2002) applied a similar analysis to Magritte when suggesting

that ‘the map is not the terrain’ (emphasis added). In short, the data taken from an interview with a

research participant is not the story of their life, but an interpretation of one account of selected

aspects of it. However, even this relatively complex philosophical conundrum is not the end of

possible confusion or potential misconstruing. As Goodson and Sikes (2001:17) highlighted, when

moving from one ‘interpretive layer’ - that is between research ‘subject’ and researcher - to two,

with the reader of the resultant text added to the existing pairing, the risk of ‘contamination’ of

meaning is increased by ‘the colonizing dangers of contextual commentary’, something we need

to consider when representing an account of our research. This notion is perhaps understood

more clearly in diagrammatical form:

X1 X2 X3 Interviewee Interviewer ReaderA mis-representation or breakdown in understanding can potentially occur at either of these

points, separated as they are by ‘interpretive layers’. Again, when we consider epistemological

concerns that social actor themselves may not have perfect understanding or recall of a given

situation, that they inevitably choose to highlight some memories above others, and that the

researcher perhaps failed to communicate their understanding clearly to the reader, the situation

becomes more problematic still. Whilst we have some sympathy with this position it does draw

upon a positivistic notion of the (singular) ‘truth’ being ‘out there’ somewhere, albeit at risk from 2 Magritte (1928-29)

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‘contaminating factors’ such as misinterpretation. We consider any ‘truth’ to be contingent,

negotiable and open to different interpretations.

Telling people’s stories For studies employing predominantly qualitative methodologies, the issue of what can justifiably

be claimed from the data – the outcomes of ‘biographical research’ (Roberts, 2003) – is crucial.

The experiences of the mature students in our study are not unique, but stand within the wider

social context, and must be represented accordingly. However, there is not just one

unambiguously ‘correct’ interpretation of the stories and lives introduced, which it is our

responsibility to reveal. Consequently we are caught between presenting a highly theorised

account of them, perhaps ‘rendering the complexity of the lives of (our) subjects less and less

visible’ (Hodkinson et al., 1996:158), and simply letting the accounts ‘speak for themselves’,

permitting the reader to construct their own understandings and meanings (Barone, 1995). This

latter approach, in extremis, would lead to the obvious ‘so what?’ question referred to in the

introduction to this chapter, and this account is not simply about telling life stories, but

understanding and explaining them. We have a responsibility to be analytical, not merely

descriptive. Consequently we have sought an accommodation between the two extremes of this

continuum and must therefore propose a framework for understanding social reasons behind and

effects of such changes upon the individuals concerned.

Exploring mature learners’ lives: Two student talesAs suggested in our introduction, the two participants highlighted in this chapter come from very

different structural locations in terms of class, gender, age and ethnicity. They were selected to

illustrate how employing the vulture’s eye can aid an interpretation of very different lives and

contexts. Our aim in this section is to offer a summary of the storied lives selected for particularly

close examination. Wherever possible we have tried to use their own words to tell their stories.

These individual life histories focus upon ideas of self and identity, the negotiation of risks,

changing personal relationships, and often a developing awareness of social issues including the

wider context of education (see Waller, 2005). The selected themes came from analysis of the

data, being prominent in the accounts of the cohort as a whole, and additionally chime with our

experiences from teaching on a range of adult education courses. They provide a basis for the

analysis, understanding and contextualisation of mature student experience.

The method of data analysis chosen is a time consuming but worthwhile approach. It involved

listening to the tape-recorded interviews several times, re-reading the abridged notes of interview

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and field notes before summarising the accounts for clarity and coherence3. Key themes and

experiences were identified within the personal narratives, and highlighted in the vignettes below.

Using the vulture’s eye approach we present the findings in ‘close-up’ first, zooming-in with our

focus, and avoid overly interpreting the accounts at this stage, making only passing reference to

their wider context. Instead we aim here to remain as close to the ‘personal’ version from the

participants as possible, seeking to highlight details of particular relevance from each person’s

narrative account. We then address the vulture’s panoramic vista – the wider social context in a

more theorised summary after the life story. This is the process of turning an individual life story

into a theorised and contextualised life history (Goodson and Sikes, 2001), something

biographical researchers must in tackle in addressing the ‘so what?’ question.

The telling of these accounts required a feeling of safety, security and trust for the research

participant, and that they would not be misrepresented. Meanwhile, understanding the learners’

tales requires, as West (1996) proposes, an ‘imaginative empathy’ rather than the ‘cool

detachment’ positivist researchers strive for. As discussed above the two accounts do not

produce stories, endings or generalisations applicable to whole populations of mature students,

but ‘a rich seam of narrative to work and connect with the lives of others’ (West, 1996:32). Rather

than offering generalisable conclusions the function of biographical research is to ‘flesh-out’ the

lived experiences behind hard statistics and resulting from social and legislative changes, and

making societal structures behind inequality visible (Reay et al., 2002) wherever possible.

Akhtar – focussing in on biographical detailsAkhtar is a 32 year old man who describes his cultural heritage as ‘Eurasian’. He has a ‘white

Scottish’ mother and a Pakistani father, and considers his socio economic background as ‘solidly

working class’ – his father had been a bus driver and his mother worked in a ‘corner shop’. Akhtar

had grown up in an ethnically diverse inner-city community, and attended the local school.

Although he did not always enjoy the experience – he described it in three words as ‘structured,

oppressive and selective’ – Akhtar had demonstrated considerable academic promise at school,

suggesting he was ‘always top of my class until my parents split up’ in his early teens. He had

won scholarships to two local fee-paying private schools, but chose not to take them up, as ‘none

of my friends were going to either school’. He reflected upon his schooling with a clear sense of

regret over a wasted opportunity (see Waller, 2004):

3 Bertaux (1981a:8) referred to the dilemma over whether to select the data to be presented, or show it all as ‘the irritating problem of having to choose between scientific honesty (publishing the raw materials…), and readability, which involves erasing questions, cutting, splicing etc’ (our emphasis).

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I enjoyed school, but never applied myself, and was never made to apply myself4…I'm angry with my teachers in a way, looking back on it. I knew I had the ability, but I wasn't able to take responsibility for myself, and they never made me either...they let me get away with so much because I was so good at rugby. As long as I was at school for rugby, they didn’t care.Akhtar, 1st interview, December 2001

Akhtar’s schooling was disrupted by his family moving to Scotland where his mother’s wider family

still lived. He was socially isolated there and experienced racially motivated bullying:

I had gone to one school for my first and second years, but then we moved to Scotland for a few years before returning to [home city]. I don’t suppose that helped my education, moving about, and I hated it in Scotland. I was bullied for two years. I was the only ethnic minority (sic) in the whole school. I was something to ‘stare at’, and that put me off.Akhtar, 1st interview, December 2001

Since joining the course Akhtar remained in regular contact with many childhood friends living

locally, and ex-colleagues from work. He prided himself on being able ‘to mix with people from all

walks of life’ and on maintaining a diverse range of friends and relationships:

If I go out with other friends that aren’t interested in the same sort of things that I am now, we’ll talk about other things. We’ve got a big enough friendship that there are enough things that we can talk about…Last Friday I went out with the guys that I used to work with, and I had one of the best days that I’d had in a long time, getting back to ‘base level’, just being, not ‘myself’ but just being ‘an idiot’, and doing what I normally used to do. And that was quite good to do for the day, but I woke up thinking ‘oh my god, I’ve still got to finish my independent study…with a hangover!’.Akhtar, 3rd interview, June 2002

As a younger man Akhtar had taken a very different approach to life. Although we had developed

a good relationship over the course of the repeated interviews, he only hinted at a ‘shady past’ as

a ‘football hooligan’ in our fifth and last meeting, and was, unusually for him, slightly less candid

about the facts:

As a younger man, I had quite a reputation as a fighter, things like that, and I hate that now. And I hate that I had that reputation. I’d spend lots of money on clothes just because they had a certain label. I wouldn’t do that anymore, I just don’t do it, all the violence that goes with it, football, that Stone Island rubbish5. But it worked for me at the time. Football always gave me a sense of belonging, but I don’t need that anymore. I think I’ve changed more than most people from the Access course, and I think that it’s all for the better6.Akhtar, 5th interview, July 2003

4 Within this chapter the italicised words within the interview extracts are our emphasis.5 A brand of clothing popular with young, usually working class, British men involved in casual violence, especially ‘football hooliganism’.6 Akhtar was not talking here about how he has changed during the course itself, but before coming on to it.

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Turning his back recently on his earlier way of life was not without its social costs though, as he

also acknowledged in that last interview:

A lot of people won’t speak to me anymore, from where I grew up, because of the way I am, because I said to myself ‘I’m not interested in that way of life anymore’, and a lot of them are still embroiled in it. And you have to make a decision and say ‘that’s not for me anymore’. But the ones who are my real friends don’t understand it, but they still accept it, because it makes me happy…I don’t drink as much as I used to, and I certainly don’t get violent. I feel a lot calmer because of it.Akhtar, 5th interview, July 2003

Akhtar had recently been separated from his ‘English’ wife and mother of his daughter, aged

nine7. He was living – ‘temporarily’ – with his own mother, near to the college, in accommodation

tied to her job. He described the relationship with his ex-wife as ‘very good’ she was for example

highly supportive of his decision to return to formal education, doing all she could to facilitate it.

Several close family members have had experience of university, including his younger brother,

then aged 22, and in his final year of a sociology degree at university. His uncle, now a social

worker locally, had gone to university as a mature student. Akhtar, who had been working as a

junior manager in a financial services company before the course, hoped to teach adults as a

career. Some of his closest friends had also been to university as mature students, and at the

time of our first meeting, one who had gone via an Access course was studying for a Masters’

degree. Akhtar had suggested these people had been positive role models for him, and he was

keen to replicate this relationship with his daughter, wanting her to receive inspiration from his

academic achievements. When he enrolled on the programme, Akhtar considered his lack of

study skills and ‘pressures from his wider life’ to be the biggest potential barriers to his success.

He had started an Access to Law course about a decade earlier, but left soon after since he had

‘not felt ready to study’. His highest qualifications upon joining the course were ‘O’ levels8,

although he had gained these after 16, since at school ‘I didn’t do any formal exams, because I

never went’. Akhtar originally enrolled on the Access to Teaching pathway, but decided against

teaching in schools and progressed from FE to a History degree at a local university.

Interpreting Akhtar’s story – the panoramic vistaAkhtar suggests his teachers were at least partially responsible for his lack of application at

school, a fairly common position amongst the mature students within the study. However, whilst

7 Recent separation from long-term partners immediately prior to or during the course was a common theme amongst the wider cohort of twenty. 8 Examinations usually undertaken by school leavers at the time when Akhtar concluded his compulsory education.

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frequent amongst stories of childhood educational experiences, such an account would not sit

comfortably with many popular theories of adult learning, for instance in the early work of Malcolm

Knowles (1980) or Alan Rogers (1980). The traditional discourse is of mature students taking

greater responsibility for their studies than school students, an assumption of the pedagogic

principles underpinning Access courses (eg Parry, 1996; Avis, 1997). Akhtar’s experience of

being permitted to take a lax approach to his studies ‘in exchange’ for exercising his sporting

prowess finds echoes in other educational research. For instance Connolly (1997) highlighted

pupils’ disruptive behaviour being tolerated by some teachers since they played for the school

football team. Akhtar thinks he was treated leniently to prevent him feeling alienated from school,

something he now regrets occurring. Suffering racially motivated bullying for two years further

distinguished his time in compulsory education.

As with all of us, school experiences inform Akhtar’s learner identity and resultant disposition

towards education as an adult, however, aspects of his differentiate him from Fiona (discussed

below) and other mature students in the wider study. Akhtar is more explicitly seeking to remedy

earlier academic failings and social injustices by re-engaging with formal learning than most,

nourishing his intense desire to succeed. And by ‘succeed’, in his terms he does not mean simply

passing his degree, he wanted to ‘shine’, to stand out from other, younger (middle class)

graduates, and to fulfil the academic potential he had demonstrated twenty years earlier. As he

suggested in one interview, ‘I want a first9, definitely’.

Akhtar reported sometimes feeling ‘out of place’ studying (Webb, 1997; Leathwood and

O’Connell, 2003) and that he occasionally considered himself as ‘an impostor’ at both college and

university (Mahoney and Zmroczek, 1997; Reay 1998a). He was never comfortable with the label

‘student’, suggesting in our third meeting ‘I call myself a mature student, and that one word makes

all the difference’ (Waller, 2005). Akhtar also denied he was himself middle class, which, despite

his social position ascribed from birth he objectively had achieved before the course. For Akhtar

class location was a key source of ‘othering’ or distancing himself from ‘the 18 year olds’ as he

rather disparagingly called the younger undergraduates at university. Burke (2002) found similarly

attitudes amongst some of her Access study group, and concluded that by rejecting the

identification with the process of studying many working class mature students demonstrate their

(classed) anti-intellectual disposition.

However, during one conversation Akhtar demonstrated a desire to immerse himself fully into ‘the

university experience’, much more than the other participants in the wider study:

9 A ‘first class degree’, the highest grade at university, usually 70% or higher.document.doc 09/05/2023 5:51 AM 9

Going to Freshers’ week10 at my age, with all the 18 year olds is going to be difficult. I'll do it, because I want to. I want to see what kind of clubs and associations there are. I want to be part of university life...I want to see what’s on offer, and I want to be part of it, I don’t want to say ‘I’m coming to this lecture then I’m going home’…I think I missed out on university life when I was 18. I know I’m not going to be able to enjoy it as much as if I had gone straight from school…because there is that whole culture, isn’t there, but I want to enjoy some of it.Akhtar, 2nd interview, March 2002

Shortly into his first year at university Akhtar attended the rugby trials and was selected to play for

the university’s 3rd team. This assisted his integration in to the wider university community, an

ironic contrast to his story of playing rugby previously almost as a way of escaping mainstream

school activities. Given his drive to succeed and subsequent efforts to engage fully in wider

university life, Akhtar epitomises McFadden’s (1995) ‘second chance education’ with adults

seeking to address perceived failings in childhood educational attainment well.

Fiona – focussing in on biographical details At 52 Fiona was the oldest of the whole larger cohort. With a Masters’ degree and postgraduate

professional credentials she was also the best qualified of the twenty by some distance. Fiona

was from a ‘white British’ upper middle class family - her father had been a doctor, as was his

father before him, whilst her mother worked as a receptionist and administrator in his General

Practitioner’s surgery. Fiona was the eldest of four children, all girls. Despite ‘doing reasonably

well’ at their fee-paying private school, Fiona had grown up without the expectation of going on to

university. Although all of the men in her family had been to university in the previous few

generations, she was the first woman to do so, but not until her late 20s:

I went to quite an academic school, but my parents didn’t push us at all academically, they didn’t really think that girls needed much in the way of education…I remember my father saying ‘OK, so you’re going to do ‘A’ Levels, but you don’t want to go to university, it’s (too pressured), so it took me quite a long time to get there. Fiona, 1st interview, December 2001

Fiona, who said she had ‘hated’ school, had dominant memories of ‘coercion, sarcasm and

ridicule’ from there. She blamed her parent’s negative attitudes towards education on the

prevalent values of the time over appropriate classed gender roles. She had left school in 1964,

and had apparently taken ‘A’ Levels against parental wishes, ‘just to be bloody-minded’. Her

youngest sister meanwhile left school in 1972 when expectations had changed a little due to the

impact of early feminism. Fiona’s third sister was educated just the other side of a significant

social cusp regarding patriarchal attitudes towards the changing role of women. As a

10 The induction process for new undergraduates studies, with an emphasis upon social rather than academic activities

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consequence of these changing social norms, Fiona’s youngest sister had been encouraged

academically far more than she had been herself, and had gone to university at 18.

Before the Access course Fiona had been a social worker ‘for about 25 years’, and living with a

lodger in a house she owned outright, its mortgage having been paid off. She loved independent

travel, and had recently taken unpaid leave from her job on a couple of occasions to visit different

parts of the world. Fiona wanted to be a marine biologist, a decision which had come to her ‘in a

flash’11 whilst diving in the Caribbean on one of her trips. Although she was single at the time of

our first meeting, Fiona’s mother and father were both still alive, and they were a source of worry,

responsibility and commitment to her:

I’ve got elderly parents and my father was seriously ill last year. They live 200 miles away, and I got ‘caught up’ being with them most of the time last summer. I decided I either had to move up there, or have something very definite going on in [home city] that would give me a ‘cast iron’ reason for being down here. Fiona, 1st interview, December 2001

There was a real tension apparent in Fiona’s mind as she discussed her family commitments.

Whilst she obviously cared about her ageing and increasingly frail parents, she did not want her

responsibilities to them dominating her life. She wanted to remain independent of them, but be

somewhere from where she could reach them quickly. They lived in the north of England and this

influenced her choice of institutions during the time of the university application cycle:

There were geographical factors to be taken into account. I’d be very surprised if my father will be around in a year’s time, and I don’t want to be too far away, so I had a line up the (motorway) which I was looking at.Fiona, 1st interview, December 2001

This restriction meant her initially rejecting potential sites for university studies, despite them

having an excellent reputation for her chosen subject of marine biology. The dilemma was again

rehearsed in a later meeting:

Liverpool is close to my parents, and there’s a bit of me that doesn’t want to get too close, but Bangor would be good because it’s just an hour and three quarters drive away, so it’s easy to do (from my parents), and I’ve got a couple of friends up near Bangor. But who do I want to be? Do I want to – do I feel I ought to be the ‘dutiful daughter’, keeping a bit of a closer eye on what’s happening, or is this completely for me? At the end of the day, the decision makes itself really.Fiona, 2nd interview, March 2002

Fiona eventually opted to study in the south west of England, at the university furthest from her

mother and father, but closest to her house and friends.

11 Barone (1995) talks of an epiphanic moment to describe such accounts.document.doc 09/05/2023 5:51 AM 11

Despite having parental demands made of her, Fiona considered herself fortunate in having

relatively few other calls upon her time. Comparing her own position to that of fellow Access

students, she suggested:

I’ve got an advantage, in two ways. I’m used to studying before…and I didn’t have family demands. In the last couple of months I’ve started a new relationship, and that’s got me thinking ‘it’s nice, but, I’m really glad this didn’t happen 6 months ago!’ A whole new level of ‘timetabling’ has to come in. It’s quite difficult, and I’m so full of admiration for people who’ve got children and do this – you can’t work in a block, you have to do the odd half hour here and there.Fiona, 3rd interview, July 2002

Much of the literature on women Access students cites the difficulties balancing study and family

commitments12. Despite the further progress of feminism since Fiona’s youngest sister went to

school in 1972, women still bear the brunt of organising contemporary family life, carrying around

a ‘map’ or ‘menu’ of household responsibilities. Their experiences and narrative accounts reflect

this continuing structural inequality.

Fiona’s closest friend on the Access course had been a younger woman with two small children,

whose mother had suddenly become seriously ill. Fiona reflected upon the fragility of anyone’s

ability to commit to such a demanding programme of study, and the impossibility of legislating for

all possible eventualities. As she suggested, ‘it only takes one thing like that, and the whole thing

comes down, like a deck of cards’. Her own subsequent experience illustrated this well. Just

before our final meeting at the end of her first year at university in July 2003, Fiona’s father and

partner of some 15 months both died. The first of these deaths had been anticipated, as

discussed above, but the second was unexpected and had really knocked her back.

Interpreting Fiona’s story – the panoramic vistaUnlike Akhtar, and in a small minority of those in the wider study and Access students generally,

Fiona had previously enjoyed a high degree of academic success throughout her compulsory

schooling and beyond. Given her prior level of qualifications, ascribed and achieved social class,

and to a lesser extent, age, Fiona is an atypical Access student.

As she explained during our first meeting, unlike many of the students on the programme, Fiona’s

place on the course had not been planned in advance:

The Access course was in a sense an accident, but a happy accident, because I planned to do ‘A’ Levels13. I rang up to ask about doing biology and environmental science ‘A’ Levels, in September, because I wanted to find out if a 25 year old grade 1 (sic) biology ‘O’ Level would be out of date…I spoke to somebody on the phone who just said ‘have you thought about doing an

12 For example Edwards (1993), Betts (1999), Burke (2002).13 Advanced level qualifications, the most common entry route into university.

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Access course, which you can do part-time or full-time?’, and there happened to be an Open Day that day, and I went along, had an interview a couple of days later and it started the following week. Fiona, 1st interview, December 2001

Following her epiphanic moment of insight regarding future plans, Fiona’s place on the Access to

Science course was more down to serendipity than long term planning, although it facilitated entry

into university faster than the part-time ‘A’ level course she envisaged taking would have. Had

Fiona known about Access courses before she would doubtless have planned accordingly.

Despite a few early challenges associated with learning to study new, hitherto unconsidered

subjects – she said during our first meeting for example ‘I’m finding Chemistry fascinating, but I

don’t have a ‘filing system’ in my brain that I can fit it into’ – Fiona fared extremely well. She

completed the course having acquired the maximum possible 28 credits at Level 3, whilst only

needing to achieve 16 to pass it. Apparently no one on the Access to Science programme had

ever managed this before. She was an ideal student, demonstrating what Avis (1997:83-4)

referred to as the ‘motivated and committed’ mature student, typical of ‘the preferred and

celebratory Access discourse’, albeit it from a highly unorthodox background for someone on that

programme. Fiona was able to employ her well-honed educational skills, strong learner identity

and cultural capital to good effect on the course.

As well as seeking to progress to university, Fiona was also a lifelong learner engaged in learning

for its own sake, that is, in liberal education, ‘where the process of learning is as important as the

outcomes’ (Brine and Waller, 2004:101). Given her change in academic direction, one of Fiona’s

friends has dubbed her ‘Renaissance Woman’, a tag she enjoyed. She relished the chance to

study new subjects, suggesting ‘I didn’t know things worked like that’, and considered herself

‘somebody who’s been told that the world is really round, when I know it’s flat’14. She concluded

during our third meeting at the end of the Access course ‘it seems very exciting coming back to

studying’. Her academic progress remained impressive during her initial year at university, and

she ended with a ‘border-line’ first class grade in her end of year examinations. This is despite

suffering the personal trauma of both her partner and father dying in the months preceding her

end of year examinations as explained above.

Fiona had no children of her own, but suggests current expectations within her wider family were

of both her nephews and nieces progressing to university, and all of them had. By contrast in the

mid-1960s, she had been expected to ‘leave school, marry the curate15 and raise a family’ by her

conservative-sounding parents. She said ‘there’s no question, if I had been a boy I would have

14 This is reminiscent of Thomas Kuhn’s (1996) notion of scientific paradigms.15 An Anglican Church minister.

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been pushed and pushed and pushed’, as her male cousins had been. Her experiences of

schooling were fairly typical of middle class girls at that time, a product of the wider social context.

Lives seen through the eye of a vultureHere we consider the strengths and weaknesses of the approach we have adopted: the extent to

which we have been able to see these lives through the eye of the vulture, zooming in on

individual lives while simultaneously maintaining a panoramic vista of the wider social, political

and institutional contexts.

By employing biographical research methods we sought to do two things contemporaneously.

Firstly in the telling of biographical stories we have aimed to contextualise those individual lives

within wider social settings. Secondly we sought to illustrate the role of social structure in

individual lives – the effects of class, ethnicity or gender positions – while accounting for the role

of agency that is, the ability of an individual actor being able to shape their own lives and/or

biographical trajectories (Giddens, 1991; Beck, 1992). This structure/agency dualism is not a new

conundrum for researchers, but an issue at the philosophical core of research into human activity,

testing the ontological and epistemological foundations of social enquiry.

We have raised issues about how to understand narrative accounts of lives and the

‘sociostructural relations’ (Bertaux 1981a; 1981b) underpinning people’s biographical trajectories.

We have challenged the idea that it is possible to aim for ‘representativity’ by researching until we

possess sufficient information to understand the pattern of ‘sociostructural relations’ making up

people’s lives as Bertaux commended, since individual’s biographical accounts are already

formulated using terminology expressive of social structures and individual action or agency. In

effect we have used this critical analysis of biographical research to consider how individual

actors carry wider histories and social contexts, including class, habitus and a range of

dispositions (e.g. Bourdieu, 1984)16. We argue that ‘the heuristic movement ‘back and forth’ from

biography to social system, from social system to biography’ (Ferrarotti, 1981:22) is already

contained within individual’s life narratives17. We propose that the ‘typicality’ of people in a given

situation that Pring urges us to remember – for instance, being a mature student returning to

formal education in this study – is already inscribed in the ‘storied lives’ (Kehily, 1995) given to us.

This feature is the very strength of biographical research and the reason it resonates amongst a

16 For Bourdieu we can never meaningfully study either the individual or the structure in isolation – they must always be considered together. Appreciating a habitus for example is to see the laying-down of positions, capitals and fields, and is a way of understanding these. This is close to what Bertaux means by ‘sociostructural relations’.

17 For instance, the lack of support for her continued schooling that Fiona enjoyed when young, or Akhtar’s experience of racially motivated bullying. document.doc 09/05/2023 5:51 AM 14

wider constituency, with the ‘audience’ recognising commonalities with ‘similar situations’ (Pring,

2000).

But philosophical worries concerning the nature of knowledge – claims to ‘truth’ for example –

persist. Making this argument assumes it is possible to discover and meaningfully represent

someone’s experiences. We recognise that epistemological questions remain over how meanings

are shared or conveyed – linguistic or semantic divergence being a real possibility, with the

listener not taking the same meaning as the speaker intends. Pring (2000) writes of an individual’s

‘private ontological position’ requiring ‘public property’ – words – for expression. This can be

further complicated by another step to the reader of the research account presented. However, if

we do not make these assumptions we can never even start the process of discovering and

meaningfully representing people’s experiences, whatever methodological tools we employ. And

for us, the dualism of micro and macro approaches to social enquiry, as epitomised by the

biographical methodologies, are most appropriate for much educational research. Moreover,

interpreting accounts as if looking through the eye of a vulture aid our understanding further and

force us to consider the social dimensions and structural influences upon individual’s lives.

References

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