'Miraculous exceptions': what can autobiography tell ...

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‘Miraculous exceptions’: what can autobiography tell us about why some disadvantaged students succeed in higher education? Tim Pitman

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Law School, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia Version of record first published: 01 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Tim Pitman (2013): ‘Miraculous exceptions’: what can autobiography tell us about why some disadvantaged students succeed in higher education?, Higher Education Research & Development, 32:1, 30-42 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2012.750278

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Higher Education Research & Development, 2013 Vol. 32, No. 1, 30–42, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2012.750278

‘Miraculous exceptions’: what can autobiography tell us about why some disadvantaged students succeed in higher education? Tim Pitman*

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Law School, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia This study examines the use of the autobiographical research method, where information is gathered from a participant’s largely unstructured construction of narrative. It considers the experiences of three ‘miraculous exceptions’: university graduates from low socio-economic backgrounds, who are people traditionally under-represented in higher education. The analysis adapts Bourdieuian notions of economic, cultural and social capital to examine the interrelationship between various factors contributing to educational success. Findings from this study suggest that although the relationship between structure, agency and capital is highly complex, there is greater potential for ongoing educational ‘outreach’ activities to inspire disadvantaged students – and their parents – to consider higher education as an aspiration. The focus of the concluding discussion is on the research method itself. Keywords: autobiography; Bourdieu; cultural capital; diversity; research methodologies; social inclusion

Introduction As the introduction to this special issue describes, contemporary education research is dominated by only a few methodological approaches. In one journal, more than 70% of articles published from 2000–2010 adopted interviews, surveys or multivariate analyses as a basis of data collection and/or analysis (Tight, 2011). By contrast, auto/ biographical methodologies underpinned only 4% of articles. One type of autobiographical research, which is the focus of this particular study, is where a person’s autobiography, or autobiographical extract, is used for the purposes of research. This approach is commonly employed by historical researchers and has found traction elsewhere. Social psychologist, Seymour Rosenberg, used his analysis of Thomas Wolfe’s semi-autobiographical accounts in his 1929 novel Look homeward, angel to aver that ‘literary materials, and particularly the characters within them, contain information about important, global aspects of the personality of the author’ (Rosenberg, 1989, p. 429). In the field of geography, Vera Chouinard (2012) conducted a thematic analysis of 11 autobiographies written by people living with bipolar disorder to argue that the condition is not only medical, but blurs boundaries between ‘self, body and environment’ (p. 150). In educational research, when the scope of autobiography methodologies are expanded (as they should be) to include diverse forms of narrative learning and biographical interviews, here, too, is an emerging tradition. For example, Wright (2011) interviewed 150 female graduates of a vocational childcare programme and used their *Email: [email protected] © 2013 HERDSA

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own words to investigate, amongst other issues, gendered labour and the professionalisation of the childcare employment sector. Universities themselves are a rich source of data, such as a study by Bron-Wojciechowska (1995), which used individuals’ life stories to examine the educational careers of men and women in Sweden, with a particular focus on the misrepresentation of women in academic careers. In devoting an entire book to the topic of biographical research, Merrill and West (2009) commence: … we are all, it seems, biographers now and want to tell our stories. … This is an age of biography, and telling stories seems ubiquitous. … Biographical methods have claimed an increasing place in academic research and are alive and well (if sometimes marginal and contested) in various academic disciplines such as literature, history, sociology, anthropology, social policy and education. (pp. 1–2)

Each of the above studies (and many more) differs: in how the data is collected, the extent to which the researcher intervenes or not and in the methodological, theoretical and ideological perspectives brought to bear on the final analysis. However, what they all share in common is an appreciation of the power of the personal voice in educational research and its ability to provide information that other approaches cannot. In order to contribute to this still under-utilised educational research method, this paper outlines a study that undertook a critical analysis of the autobiographical accounts of three university students who came from socially-disadvantaged backgrounds and, statistically, were not expected to aspire towards (let alone succeed in) university studies. Other studies with similar foci have been conducted. However, the research approach has been more traditional, employing interviews with closed or open-ended questions targeting the area of research interest (see, for example, Reay, Crozier, & Clayton, 2009). In contrast, the autobiographical approach requires the researcher to distance him/herself one stage further and allow the participant greater opportunity to create his or her own text. What can autobiography inform us about these ‘miraculous exceptions’ (Moi, 1991), their circumstances and their environment, that led them to succeed when most in similar situations did not? To examine critically autobiographical accounts, this study used Bourdieu’s concept of capital, to explore the role of multiple environmental and personal factors in explaining why, despite the (statistical) disadvantage they experienced, these students succeeded at university studies.

Research method In line with the purpose of this special HERD edition, the study informing this paper is used as a means to provide a methodological critique of the use of autobiography in research. Autobiography refers simultaneously to a type of data, a means of generating, then collecting data and a lens through which research findings can be described. For this study, autobiographical extracts of three university graduates (two men and one woman) were analysed. All three came from low socio-economic backgrounds, had parents with no post-secondary qualifications and were the first generation in their family to both attend and succeed in university. The final way in which all three students were similar was in their pathway to university. All three were accepted for admission based on their Year-12 exam scores and not utilising any equity or


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‘alternative’ admission options. Autobiographical data were collected via largely unstructured recordings, between August 2010 and April 2011. Students were encouraged to reflect on their own life experiences and offer, unprompted, defining events and key recollections of growing up, family life, schooling, community and so on. Where necessary, general prompts were used. For example, ‘tell me about your parents’ or ‘tell me about where you grew up’. The recordings were then transcribed verbatim. From the autobiographical texts, data relating to educational experiences or experiences affecting educational choices were prioritised for this particular study. In the case of this study, autobiography informed the data, its collection and, to an extent, its interpretation. As the term ‘methodology’ refers to the study of methods and the assumptions underlying the research process, all three aspects of autobiography will be drawn upon in the analysis and discussion sections of this paper. Three frameworks delineated the analysis: the research method framework (autobiography), the theoretical framework (Bourdieu) and the policy framework (equity and inclusion in higher education). Research method framework The methodological framework for this analysis was adopted from Goodson, Biesta, Tedder and Adair (2010), who identify five key dimensions of autobiography as useful foci. The first is intensity, which relates not so much to the length of the text, but more the amount of detail and ‘depth’ provided. The second dimension concerns whether the autobiographical story is predominantly descriptive or interpretive – in other words, whether the author talks mostly about the ‘what’ or the ‘why’ of his/her life. Third, the extent to which emplotment is used; that is, the attempt to order a series of experiences into an overriding meta-narrative. Fourth, whether the author recounts her/his life chronologically or thematically. Finally, the extent to which the autobiography attempts to provide some form of theory, of either life or self. Considering these elements helped the researcher assess the extent to which each student expressed their own agency; that is, whether internal or external factors drove their higher education success. For example, intensity and description helped assess the importance the student placed upon the event. Emplotment, chronology and theories of self might indicate a post facto attempt to create a ‘meta-narrative’ that explained or justified their life trajectory. Ultimately, however, whilst the above framework proved extremely useful in maintaining a systematic and rigorous approach to data analysis, a holistic approach guided the conclusions. Here, the author is in agreement with Cukier, Ngwenyama, Bauer and Middleton (2009), who observe, ‘while a strategy for understanding an argument is to parse it, the final judgement is made on the entire argument’ (p. 179). Theoretical framework The autobiographical method, like any other method, benefits from an alignment with wider theoretical frameworks of understanding – in this case, understandings of the sociology of educational opportunity. In turn, this offers greater potential for theoretical generalization, that is, insights that possess a sufficient degree of generality to argue for their applicability in other (comparable) situations or contexts (Sim, 1998). For this study, Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts of field, habitus and capital were utilised.



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Bourdieu argues that all individuals inhabit fields: structured social spaces with shared rules, hierarchies and relations. Each field has a system of dispositions or tendencies to act in a similar manner (Crozier, Reay, Clayton, Colliander, & Grinstead, 2008). Relevant for this study, therefore, were the fields of ‘higher education’ and the ‘working classes’. For Bourdieu, the extent to which an individual can enter into (and from there dominate) any given field is largely determined by the amount of capital he or she possesses. Capital can be economic, such as tangible resources or wealth, or cultural, that is, advantages inherited through parentage or social position (Bourdieu, 1986, 1996). Furthermore, one person’s capital can, potentially, be exploited by other members of the same group, in which case it becomes that person’s social capital. Social capital is thus ‘the [potentially mobilizable] sum … of all the forms of capital possessed by each of the members of the group’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 280). Success in both attending and succeeding at university rely heavily upon the ability of the individual to convert his or her social, economic and cultural capital into a specific form of cultural capital that resonates in the field of higher education; namely, academic capital (Marginson, 2007; Naidoo, 2004). Academic capital is displayed through titles, qualifications, academic language, the ‘ranking’ of a university and so on. The ability to convert social/economic/cultural capital into academic capital is dependent on the ‘conversion rates of the different forms of capital’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 277). For example, a student from a low socio-economic background, in possession of an amount of social capital might, theoretically, convert it into the academic capital more highly valued by the field of higher education. However, a student from an elite, private school, already possessing academic capital similar to that generated within the field of higher education, would find the conversion process far more straightforward and profitable. Since cultural capital is largely bequeathed to a child by his/her parents, life choices will be influenced by what he/she is told, reads or otherwise observes. Whilst a Bourdieuian framework is an ideal tool for the analysis of autobiography, it is not without limitations. Bourdieu prioritises the role of structure significantly above that of agency in determining an individual’s fate, or, as he puts it, ‘men and women make their own history but they do not make it through categories within their own choosing’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. xvii). Conversely, autobiographical accounts tend to focus very much on the individual’s sense of personal choice and control. How this innate tension plays out in autobiography is discussed in the concluding discussion of this paper. Policy framework Inclusion and democracy in higher education is a significant issue in contemporary Australian education policy. In 2008, the Australian Federal Government set universities a goal that, by 2020, at least 20% of enrolments in universities be students of low socio-economic status (SES) (Bradley, Noonan, Nugent, & Scales, 2008). However, a plethora of research confirms that parental socio-economic and educational backgrounds are key determinants in their children’s later educational success or failure. A recent study into participation and equity in the Australian higher education sector found that low-SES individuals were about one-third as likely as high-SES to participate in higher education, and this imbalance increased proportional to the students’ parents’ lack of education (James, 2008). These findings mirrored those from similar studies internationally (e.g. Liu, 2011). Clearly, policies of social inclusion

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need to be complemented by strategies to overcome the relative disadvantage experienced by the targeted demographic group. Specifically in respect to access to higher education, it has been noted that ‘the interrelationships and interactions between the multiple factors that underlie low SES under-representation are not clear … improving access to higher education involves working across the spectrum’ (James, 2008, p. 10). The autobiographical research method has potential to explore these interrelationships and interactions in great detail. Analysis of the autobiographical extracts The disclosure of identity through autobiography is, typically, a journey with many detours. Therefore, the case studies below offer insights into, rather than a holistic examination of, the role capital played in the educational success of these students. All three participants employed both chronological and thematic approaches in their disclosure of self. Similarly, explorations of capital were rarely compartmentalised neatly – indeed, it was through an exploration of the interrelationship between the various forms of capital where autobiography demonstrated its potential as a research method. This raises the first methodological consideration of autobiography, namely the role of the researcher. Textual interventions such as these naturally affect the interpretation of the data, especially as (in this case) notions of ‘capital’, ‘education’ and ‘learning’ intersect rather than converge. It could be said that autobiographical analyses give at the same time as they take away – the richness of the data suits, yet is somewhat restricted by, thematic parsing. Participant 1: Frank, male, aged 45–50, English graduate Frank was one of two children and grew up in a regional, low-socio economic suburb. Frank represented his life journey as a struggle against disadvantage and resistance to normative expectations. He profiled himself in the following way: I’m a middle-aged man, married, with two step-kids. I’m a public servant. I guess I’m middle class now [but I] struggled up to the middle class from the working class. I was born in England and grew up in a caravan. My dad was a motor mechanic and my mum worked in shops – a servant of other people.

Throughout his account, Frank represented his cultural capital as low. His family – particularly his father – provided him with no incentive to seek post-secondary qualifications. As he described: ‘because we were poor, I was encouraged to leave school at 15 and start contributing, financially, to the household’. Only one ‘cultural’ vision was driven. As Frank put it: ‘I never received any personal encouragement about studying, let alone going to university, from my parents. All my dad wanted me to do was play soccer professionally’. In Frank’s account, therefore, academic success could not be attributed to any acts of academic inculcation by his parents. After immigrating to Australia at a young age, Frank’s recollections of the state school system suggested a mix of good and bad cultural, economic and social capital. At the primary school level, he had mostly positive recollections. He recalled: I went to a good primary school. It was good because we moved into a new development with lots of other migrant families and everything was new. All the kids grew up together and we all bonded really well. The teachers were mostly good and encouraging.


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They really encouraged me in a literary and creative sense – at least that was my recollection.

The social and cultural capital aspects were relatively self-evident in this account: specifically, the positive teaching and peer relationships. However, economic capital might also have played a significant part, since the housing development he moved into was created for the immigrants and everything, including the educational infrastructure, was new. However, apparently this changed when Frank went to high school. As he described it, high school ‘was like a warzone. If the other kids didn’t get you, the teachers would. Teachers could hit you and even worse, they could psychologically attack you. It was straight out of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”’. However, here the benefits of an autobiographical approach to research became more evident. Taken in isolation, this observation suggested that Frank’s educational scaffolding was deficient throughout the secondary years. Yet later in his story, he suddenly provided, unprompted, the following admission: Not wanting to go to school certainly didn’t help my academic studies. But it’s not really an excuse because I wasn’t even there one year before I moved to [School B], and that was a much nicer school. So I can’t blame the school on my performance.

Until this point, Frank had frequently represented an adversarial nature to his schooling and community experiences. Clearly, this was an integral part of his persona and helped prioritise his own agency in growing up. The reality, however, was more complex. For example, while regularly contrasting his innate intellectual capacity (‘I was picked out as being a kid who had a high IQ’) against a grim institutional environment (‘my only aspiration in high school was to survive’), he later recalled: There was one teacher who saw something in me. He took me aside and said, ‘look you’re way too smart for this remedial English class. I’m going to recommend you be put up into the advanced class, but you have to back me up and really try’. It was great that he did that and it had a tremendous psychological effect on me because someone believed in me. I succeeded in the advanced class and never looked back after that.

By using autobiography as a post facto process of critical reflection, the researcher, and perhaps Frank himself, was able to move beyond the participant’s strongly established sense of identity, to reveal other factors that contributed to his educational success. Overall, Frank attributed his success to his own agency, variously expressed as ‘determination’, ‘working hard’ or ‘knowing [I] was never going to fail’. Yet at other times in his account, Frank consciously and unconsciously expressed various moments of the realisation of social, cultural and economic capital. In particular, two moments stood out. First, he left school at 16 to take up a trade, in line with the expectations of his habitus. This required him to attend trade school, which was funded through an apprenticeship. There Frank realised that ‘everyone in the class was thick [but] I cruised through it’. Second, after saving up some money, Frank spent a year travelling through Europe. This left him with an overwhelming sense of opportunity beyond his perceived normative constraints, as well as a reinforcement of his feeling that he did not belong in the habitus in which he had grown up. These events were integral to his decision to go to night school, in order to get the requisite grades for university. Notwithstanding any innate intellectual ability, the economic and cultural capital


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contained within both of these experiences certainly played a significant part in Frank’s eventual academic success. Methodologically, two issues were highlighted by the analysis of these extracts of Frank’s life. First, it was clear that the autobiographical approach to data generation inculcates a tendency towards ‘social scripting’ (Goodson et al., 2010). That is, individuals sometimes create a life story that conforms to broader expectations of narratives, rather than that which actually occurred. In Frank’s case, it appeared to be the desire to present himself as the protagonist fighting against a dystopian system, perhaps because this narrative foregrounded his own agency in being able to rise above his social/educational expectations. However – and second – the autobiographical approach to data collection allowed the researcher to move beyond authorial interpretations such as these by critically examining the stochastic relationship between the various structural and agentic influences on an individual’s life. Participant 2: Alison, female, aged 40–45, nursing graduate Alison was one of four children and grew up in a rural town. Unlike Frank, Alison was much more conscious, and appreciative, of the cultural capital accumulated in her childhood. Almost from the outset of her narrative journey, Alison focused on various representations of cultural capital: [Higher education] was an expectation in my family. It didn’t matter what we were going to do, but I knew very early on – in primary school – that I would be going to university. Our parents just instilled that as an expectation … in the sense that it was seen as the natural order of things. So by the end of high school, it wasn’t a case of ‘do you want to go’, but ‘what do you want to do and do you have the brains for it?’

This inculcated in her such a strong expectation of academic study that she later recalled her shock when one of her university peers withdrew from the course. Alison recalled: ‘I was so flabbergasted, I remember saying to her “but you have to complete the course, you’re almost finished.” I just could not understand why she could give it up.’ The cultural capital bequeathed to her by her parents was more than just expectation: Alison remembered, ‘I asked [my mother] questions all the time and her knowledge was amazing’. Furthermore, ‘she would always correct our English and wouldn’t tolerate swearing’. These home experiences offset ‘pretty casual, rural, schooling’ and the occasional counter-cultural effects of her social network (‘I dumbed down a bit in Year 8 and 9 because I thought it wasn’t cool to be smart’). At one level, economic capital was easy to discern and explicate. In Alison’s words: My parents financed all of our cost of living expenses while we were studying. We supplemented it by staying with friends for a while. Then my dad rented a house for us to live in. I worked as a nursing assistant, but that money was for me to go out with, socialising.

Government assistance also acted to increase the family’s own economic capital, since ‘if there had been tuition fees, I doubt I would have been able to go to university’. However, the lack of economic capital also worked, in some respects, in Alison’s favour. She strongly believed that she was culturally conditioned to go to university because her parents did not want her to struggle financially as they had. Her father was a builder and this required him and her mother to move frequently in the early years, to follow



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the work. This meant that Alison’s parents married relatively late in life, as it took them some time to accumulate enough economic capital in order to afford both children and a mortgage. There was evidence that the lack, or late accumulation, of economic capital by her parents also influenced her career choices. Alison remembered her parents as ‘very practical. They didn’t want us to do vague university courses, like arts, they wanted us to learn a profession or a trade’. It was quite possible, therefore, that her parents’ working-class background did not limit her cultural expectations in one respect (i.e., they encouraged her to aspire to university) but it did in another (i.e., it limited her consideration of what constituted a ‘good’ university degree). Social capital also influenced Alison’s educational outcomes. Her feeling of isolation throughout school was heightened by her peers’ reaction to her behaviour. At one point in her story, she said: I really liked the work, but I felt I was acting in an obvious way, when I answered the questions. I clearly recall the boy who said to me ‘you’re not like other girls, you’re a braniac’ and it wasn’t said in a mean way, but I wanted to fit in and so stopped answering so many questions in class.

Her behaviour was noted by a teacher who was also a close friend of the family. As Alison recalled, ‘he really gave me grief about it and from that moment I changed my life completely. I dropped my friends who were a bad influence, stayed at home and studied instead of playing’. In Alison’s own mind, her strong reaction to his admonition was because he was a family friend ‘and had my best interests at heart’. As with her parents, Alison was able to leverage the cultural capital of her extended network – in this case the normative values of her teacher/friend – to recalibrate her own behaviour. In this way, one person’s cultural capital became Alison’s own social capital. The evidence in Alison’s case suggested that the cultural capital of a few significant people in her life was enough to affect her personal habitus and, thus, overcome the broader habitus in which she was nurtured. This habitus was described as ‘ruralminded’, ‘working class – no doctors or lawyers in our neighbourhood’ and lowcapital schooling infrastructure (‘high school was purely a geographical choice – it was the catchment area’). The inter-generational transmission of this cultural capital was evident when she reflected on her own experiences of being a parent: I can’t think of a situation where my own children wouldn’t go to university. As parents, our expectation is that they will go to university. Even now, we’ve already started. We point out that their babysitters are going to uni. I guess if they were really passionate about a profession that didn’t require university studies then we’d say ‘OK, go for it, because you can always go back to university as a mature-age student.’

In some respects, Alison’s autobiographical account was the mirror opposite of Paul’s. Where his account foregrounded his personal agency, hers focused on the extrinsic benefits of having strong parental direction and teacher leadership. In Bourdieuian terms, whereas Paul perceived himself as using his agency to compensate for the lack of structural support, Alison subsumed her own agency within that of her parents and the corresponding structural support they provided. However, just as with Paul’s account, the method of data collection allowed the researcher to calibrate these messages and move beyond the subject’s tendency towards social scripting. What was even more apparent in this account was the desire by the individuals

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forming this study to provide a central thesis for their success and subsequently use it to, post facto, avoid deviating from a central narrative strand.


Participant 3: Peter, male, aged 50–55, law graduate, Oxbridge doctorate, Ivy League doctorate Peter was the son of an Italian immigrant family, one of three children and grew up in a rural farming town. As was the case with Frank, he consciously foregrounded his own agency when he considered the ‘successes’ of his life, including educational ones: There must be something in my makeup, because nothing ever seemed to stop me. I always tried hard. I remember sitting a music exam for a special scholarship to a school with a music program. I didn’t have any music ability, it was just that I wanted to go to the same school as this girl I liked!

More than the other two students, Peter expressed a disconnect between himself and his childhood habitus. Watching his older siblings he ‘just knew I never wanted to be a labourer. I couldn’t imagine doing such a boring job’. Identifying a trigger point, or points, for his fascination with university was much harder for him. It was a ‘nebulous thing’ that Peter frequently returned to, throughout his life story: For whatever reason, from a very early age I was always fascinated with going to university. There’s no reason why I should have, since I was never exposed to that at all. … I didn’t know a lot about universities, but I’d seen them on TV. They represented tradition to me. I think the shows I watched had the, you know, Oxbridge ones and I thought it looked fantastic. … Somehow I got hold of this brochure for [University X]. I took it home and read it over and over. I knew I was going to university …

Perhaps university appealed to Peter not because of what it was, but what it was not. In Peter’s own words, university represented ‘something completely foreign to my background that I found incredibly appealing. Nice surroundings, books, people talking about interesting things … yeah. All of that was so foreign to my background.’ Once the decision to go to university was made, it was clear that economic capital played a significant role in creating opportunities for Peter. As with the others, much of the economic capital came in the form of parental support. Again, financial support such as this functioned as both economic and social capital. Wages from part-time or casual employment represented mostly discretionary income for Peter. However, economic capital realised through part-time employment was valued not just for the income it generated, but also as evidence of personal character and self-reliance. Peter described with pride how he would ‘come home from university, go to footy training, go back home to have dinner, then go off to work night shifts at a supermarket’. Clearly, the personal accumulation of economic capital provided not only a structural aid for him, but also reinforced within him a sense of independence and a belief that he could surmount future obstacles. Unlike Alison, Peter never expressed any notion that his parents instilled in him any normative expectation of tertiary studies. He once remarked ‘there was no parental encouragement that stimulated me to go to university’. However, at another stage, he partly qualified this comment, observing ‘I knew they were proud of my [academic] achievements, but there was never any push for me to go to university. Above all, what they valued most was hard work’. Therefore, whilst Peter’s parents did not


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equip him with cultural capital directly relating to university aspirations, it could be argued that they did instil in him a work ethic that would be to his great advantage later in life. However, Peter did not necessarily see it that way:


I would have loved to have been brought up in a learned environment. My colleagues were mostly from middle-class educated backgrounds, whose parents were bright, or at least understood [the value of] education more [than my own]. I don’t know if that’s true, but I tend to think it is.

Interestingly, the process of reflection, inherent in the autobiographical approach, did cause Peter to eventually challenge his own narrative, as the following excerpts, arranged chronologically, reveal: Drive, determination and discipline. That’s why I succeeded. (Interview 1) There was no parental encouragement that stimulated me to go to university. (Interview 1) You know, earlier, when I said ‘no encouragement’, I shouldn’t overstate it. My family were passively supportive. They didn’t encourage me, but they supported me. (Interview 1) You know, what I said was wrong. My parents – my mum particularly – did always say that if I went to university, it would help me get a good job. So they were interested in me doing well at school. In that respect, I was short-changing them. (Interview 2) If I had had a dysfunctional family background, then I probably wouldn’t have gone to university. If I hadn’t been able to stay at home, then I probably wouldn’t have been able to afford it. (Interview 2)

As much as Peter believed – and as much as it might be true – that it was his innate qualities of determination and intellectual ability that were the primary reasons for his success, the autobiographical approach to data collection was instrumental in revealing the constant presence of economic, social and cultural capital in his life, their intersections and, ultimately, their effect on his life choices. This demonstrated one of the key strengths of autobiographical research – namely its power in creating a narrative learning experience as the life story is recounted and re-presented for consideration by the author him/herself. As Goodson and colleagues (2010) observe, ‘narrative learning … is not solely learning from the narrative, it is also the learning that goes on in the act of narration and in the ongoing construction of a life story’ (p. 132). Concluding discussion As this study has shown, autobiography is an excellent tool for exploring the stochastic uniqueness of personal opportunity, here explicated in Bourdieuian terms. Through the largely unmediated accounts of these three students, the research of autobiography illustrates how, in addition to their own innate qualities, various external forces act to shift the students’ own disposition away from the habitus of the working classes and towards that of higher education. It appears that this shift occurs at a relatively early stage in the individual’s life and is an ongoing process. One conclusion of this study could, therefore, be that Australian universities seeking to increase the proportion of students from low-SES backgrounds might enjoy greater success if they focused resources away from foundation or bridging programs (which generally target students who have already committed to higher education, just prior to their enrolment) and towards more holistic ‘outreach’ programs that systematically and regularly promote, throughout the primary and secondary school years, the benefits (habitus) of higher


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education. In Bourdieuian terms, this is an extension of ‘gradual familiarization [of cultural capital] in the bosom of the family’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 21). In addition to making admission processes more flexible, might universities benefit from engaging directly with disadvantaged communities to bequeath the specific cultural capital that will encourage students to attend university and prepare them accordingly? Even further, would universities find greater success if their outreach programmes targeted the parents of the children, rather than the children themselves? So what then are the wider methodological implications of autobiography in educational research? Rather than touch lightly on many issues, I would like to address more fully: (1) the role of the researcher in the process of data generation and the process of data analysis and (2) the reflexive relationship between the research subject and act of data generation. Methodologically, autobiography allows the researcher to situate him/herself as close or as far away from the research subject as desired. At one end of the continuum, we have the research of secondary data. This is in the tradition of literary or historical research, where a subject’s autobiography is post facto examined and analysed towards the researcher’s own goals. Absent as he/she is in the process of creation, the researcher cannot direct or control the generation of data, only the subsequent extrapolation of information. Towards the middle of the continuum we have studies (such as this one) where the researcher collects primary data and mostly controls the process, but attempts to do it in as unmediated a fashion as possible. At the opposite end of continuum, we have more tightly delineated studies that are perhaps only autobiographical in the sense that the research subject is encouraged to speak from personal experience. The argument could rightly be made that these should be excluded from the lexicon, yet I would argue that they contain sufficient elements of autobiography as to be included in the broader definition, especially when the issue of reflexivity (below) is considered. Furthermore, by tightly defining the research method (for example, by controlling the questions) the subject is given the opportunity to more fully understand the purpose of the study and become an engaged participant, offering his/her research approach to complement that of the researcher. Methodologically, this continuum is a spatial demonstration of how a researcher can use diverse autobiographical methods to achieve a desired goal. Common amongst all methodologies is the opportunity for the subject to express his/her voice and participate actively in the process of data generation. This highlights a key benefit of autobiographical research; namely the part played by reflexivity. Work undertaken by Mezirow (1981, 1990) has entrenched the concept of transformative learning in the epistemologies and practices of many educational researchers. Mezirow views informal learning (e.g. ‘life experience’) as a form of transformative learning in that the subject is helped, through post facto reflection, to focus on and examine the assumptions underlying his or her beliefs, feelings and actions and, in doing so, foster critical reflection of personal experiences. It is, as Mezirow (1990) observes, ‘the process of reflecting back on prior learning to determine whether what we have learned is justified under present circumstances’ (p. 5). This, I would argue, is equally true of any autobiographical research method, where the researcher and subject work together through the processes of data generation and analysis. Unlike many other educational research methods, the autobiographical approach not only takes from the research subject, it has significant potential to give back to them. For example, as this study has shown, there was a tendency for the subjects to generate a central thesis – in two cases foregrounding their own agency to overcome social



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disadvantage and in the other, highlighting the social, cultural and economic capital the individual was able to access to achieve the same end. In all three cases, however, the act of generating their own autobiography allowed not only the researcher but also, to varying degrees, each of the subjects the opportunity to question their own preconceptions about how they had become ‘miraculous exceptions’. The autobiographical approach to data collection and analysis is not a positivistic search for ‘truth’. Autobiography uses techniques of fiction and drama to shape personal experience into meaningful narrative (Goodwin, 1993). As such, autobiographies are ‘representations of lives, not lives as actually lived’ (Bruner, 1984, p. 17). However, these representations are not works of complete fiction – they are shaped by real experiences and events throughout a life course. The evidence from this study is that the intensity of the production of narrative itself is instrumental in allowing both the researcher and the participant to move beyond explicit understandings of the life course by exploring the ‘messiness’ of education policy, how it affects each individual and the consequences of the local interaction, intended or otherwise. It is here and in these ways that the autobiographical approach has the potential to greatly inform higher education research. Acknowledgements The author is grateful for the feedback received from the anonymous reviewers and the HERD editorial team.

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