Educating Rina : a study of generation 1.5 in the Australian higher education system

Abstract

Australian higher education is undergoing changes reflective of broader societal shifts. The twin drivers of democratisation and marketisation have led to student populations that are more ethnically, linguistically, and socio-demographically diverse. Along with this diversity has come heightened concerns about students' general preparedness for tertiary study, as well as a perception of slipping literacy standards (Devlin 2010). To date, higher education scholarship and policy has tended to compartmentalise the issue of student academic literacy by focusing on the putative underpreparedness of low socioeconomic status students or the English language proficiency of international students. However, one particular student cohort, known as Generation 1.5, falling as they do between these existing demographic categories, are currently overlooked and poorly understood by the higher education system. Within an Australian context, Generation 1.5 refers to English as an Additional Language students who migrate to Australia during childhood and are therefore largely educated in the local school system, often attending metropolitan schools in relatively disadvantaged areas. As such, Generation 1.5 students' pathway to and through higher education is impacted by a coalescence of socioeconomic, linguistic, and educational factors, as well as complex patterns of identity and belonging. This study aims to illuminate this complexity through a thick description of 11 Generation 1.5 students' academic practices and dispositions and their varying experiences and outcomes in higher education. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, this study, conducted at one Australian university, draws together insights from survey responses, semi-structured interviews with students and staff, academic records and detailed linguistic analyses of student writing. Drawing on a critical perspective of Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and field and advocating a realist standpoint, this study argues that the educational trajectories of Generation 1.5 students can be better understood by reference to a discernable Generation 1.5 habitus in which cognitive, linguistic, educational, and affective factors are shaped by the experiences of early migration. Characterised by a fragile control of English and the incomplete acquisition of cognitive schemas that underlie academic work "" along with a distinct ambivalence for some "" this habitus is often at odds with the expectations of university study. However, inherent in this collective habitus is a plurality of dispositions, the result of not only the differing contexts in which their habitus was acquired, but also the varying social contexts or fields though which these students constantly move. Therefore, the notion of a collective Generation 1.5 habitus is explored in concert with the notion of multiple, complex, and often contradictory individual dispositions that produce differing investments and outcomes in higher education. This study also examines the field effects on Generation 1.5 students' trajectories, arguing that more open admission policies, the undervaluing and under-resourcing of teaching, and institutional misrecognition of the complex habitus of these students undermines the intention of higher education. Rather than a means of developing dispositions and capacities to facilitate participation in the labour market and social mobility, many of the Generation 1.5 students in this study instead progress through university with low-mobility forms of literacy while accruing high personal debt. This, then, is the story of students caught between a drive towards social participation and the exigencies of the academic marketplace.

Date of Award	2015
Original language	English