4.4.4.-Estudios de lixiviación

This chapter explained Bourdieu’s thinking tools and discussed conceptual developments flowing from these tools. Warren & Webb (2007) argued that there has been a shift in educational research to draw on the work of

Bourdieu in order to account for structure as well as agency, to counter what they consider is the doxa (or “taken for granted” point of view) of individual learner responsibility played out in policy. This shift was implicitly evident in the literature about student success factors, which moved to include

recognition of the complexity of student withdrawal and success. The literature, which used Bourdieu’s thinking tools and which extended those concepts as a means of explaining inequality of access and experience in

higher education in the United Kingdom, added an holistic approach to the literature that focused on individual factors for success, by exploring the relationship between habitus and capital in the field of higher education. These studies were mostly qualitative with more of an individual focus than large scale quantitative studies.

The chapter discussed four theoretical extensions to Bourdieu’s toolkit. The first of these extensions is the concept of an educated habitus, which can explain why a student succeeds, but of itself falls short of explaining how that habitus was developed. The second is the concept of learning careers, which provides a link between the two areas of literature discussed in this chapter. It has its roots in the work of Bourdieu, but at the same time provides an

approach in which the types of individual factors identified in the literature can be recognised and considered holistically within the framework of the learning career. The remaining two concepts discussed were habitus tug and

interrupted trajectories. These can assist in exploring a student’s response to the factors encountered in their learning career. Taken together they provide a useful framework with which to consider experiences that contribute to

student success.

There is a thread running through the relatively limited New Zealand literature which identifies the importance of the fit between the student and the

institution, and what institutions can do to support a comfortable fit. This strand of literature alludes to the concept of habitus, but this is not explicitly addressed or explored. The argument by Zepke and Leach that institutions should move to adapt to students, rather than requiring assimilation by the student, was more explicitly based upon aspects of Bourdieu’s thinking tools, but in a theoretical rather than empirical way. Despite Strathdee and Engler's (2012) call for more studies that explore the role of capital in success in higher education, what is missing from the higher education literature in New

Zealand is the use of Bourdieu’s concepts, and the theoretical developments arising out of the concepts, in an empirical study that explores, in a holistic way, the complexity of individual student contexts and experiences, and the relationship of these to success.

This study addresses that gap in the literature in New Zealand by using concepts developed from Bourdieu’s toolkit to explore success in the New Zealand higher education context, and, in so doing, adding to our

understanding of student success. It complements the useful quantitative work already done at City University. It does so by using learning careers as a framework and adapting that concept by including the concepts of habitus tug and interrupted trajectories as a means to analyse transformations within a learning career and enabling a more direct focus on habitus as way of

explaining the success of the participants in this study in the Business degree at City University.

Chapter 3: Research Design

In this chapter I explain the rationale for my choice of methodology and the shaping of my research. The chapter is divided into six sections. The first section restates the aims of the research and restates the research questions. The second section outlines the rationale for my choice of a narrative

approach underpinned by hermeneutics. The third and fourth sections set out the research design and address ethics. The fifth section discusses the data analysis process and the final two sections address reflexivity and validity.

3.1 Research aim and questions

As a practitioner researcher in a managerial role, my aim through the research was to enhance practice at City University in respect of the

programme for which I had responsibility. Specifically, the aim of the research was to gain a better understanding of the educational experiences and life contexts of Business degree students and how those experiences and

contexts might contribute to success in their degree. As discussed in Chapter 1, the study had a focus on success rather than withdrawal, and this in turn encouraged a focus on the student experience and student voice rather than a managerial approach based on retention and withdrawal data (Yorke & Longden, 2004).

As noted in Chapter 1, this research was situated in the initiation phase of change, in that a need for change had been identified in order to support better retention rates. The research aimed to give greater clarity about how to address that need through a better understanding of the complexities at play, clarity about where change needed to occur and the practicalities that might be involved in such change. All these aspects need to be determined before change can be implemented (Fox, Martin, & Green, 2007).