Profitable portfolios: capital that counts in higher education

Under-representation in UK higher education of students from less privileged social backgrounds is an enduring problem. While there are examples of productive participation, the pattern of collective trajectories of this group differs sharply from that of traditional entrants (Reay 2006). The onus falls largely to students to adapt to established practices which remain strongly oriented towards traditional white middle-class populations (Read et al. 2003, Burke 2005).Bourdieu’s theory of practice informed the analysis of data emerging from a longitudinal case study and empirical insights are offered into how students with non-traditional academic backgrounds experienced and negotiated the demands of studying in one of the UK’s research-intensive universities. A new conceptual framework identifies academic, linguistic, social and professionally-oriented capital as underpinning the logic of practice of this sub-field of higher education, and their influence on the positional tendencies and trajectories of the students operating within it are highlighted

Creative methods: problematics for inquiry and pedagogy in health and social care

This article provides an overview of initial discussions emerging from the Creative Methods Network, an informal organisation concerned with the use of the creative arts in research, teaching and practice in health and social care. Key issues are presented and contextualised with regard to the current conditions in which health and social care research and education is practised. Our own discussions have come to question the seeming dominance of governance within professional education programmes in which there is a primary focus on developing technical skill and capacity. Such governance often extends itself to the measurement of the implementation of these technical skills and this is set against concerns about the absence of creativity and the humanities in the educational programmes of caring for human beings. Consequently, the article reflects a view that the use of the creative arts and humanities in the education of the human caring professions is being eroded away in favour of technical-rational reasoning. It is argued that this then presents an important problem manifested in an emphasis on established and quantifiable knowledge transfer which inhibits other forms of knowledge generation. For the purposes of this discussion we have viewed this problem through the lenses offered by Foucault and Bourdieu