Abstract
This research seeks to animate the voices of postgraduate students registered on a UK distance learning online Masters in Education or Childhood & Youth programme. Such a critical exploration is timely given the HE landscape is premised on its openness and accessibility. Our study reports on 33 interviews with postgraduate students using photo elicitation and unstructured interviews. We prioritise the perspectives of students whose experiences do not replicate the success stories which generally epitomize representations of HE study, favouring instead the voices of students who interrupted or in some cases terminated their studies. Our aim is to better understand the PG students’ personal, professional, and academic learning trajectories.In reading the data we produced four “manifesto” statements crafted from a series of dialogues between ourselves as researchers, our colleagues, the online experiences of adult postgraduate students and our reading of literatures surrounding withdrawal, persistence and retention. Interpretations gravitated towards four themes: identity, belonging, digital pedagogies and uncanny spaces and which point towards students’ perspectives about the interconnections between identity and belonging and how these concepts help develop understanding of “social presence”, what Bayne (2008) and Cartens (2016) assert as “uncanny” spaces. Our manifesto statements represent our reading of the data to stimulate further thinking around the HE digital pedagogy landscapes. The four statements have implications for how we understand, participate in and manage postgraduate adult students’ learning in digital spaces.
Highlights
The extraordinary events of 2020 pivoted post-16 teaching, learning and research into a series of discontinuities
COVID-19 and the imposition of social distancing and lockdown did not precipitate the shift to online pedagogy for Higher Education in the UK, that shift had been underway for some time (Rospigliosi 2020)
Interviews were conducted in Microsoft Teams, the preferred communicative platform for the University consistent with the social distancing conditions created by COVID-19
Summary
The extraordinary events of 2020 pivoted post-16 teaching, learning and research into a series of discontinuities. Our research participants were adults who, having returned to study often after a long break, interrupted or terminated their programme The lacuna seems to surround taught postgraduate, master’s students who are adults studying part time (Schroeder 2019) In her unpublished doctoral thesis Schroeder (2019) remarks on the low number of usable studies returned when conducting a search using the key terms “Master Student Persistence,” “Master Student Retention,” and “Master Student Progression.”. Moerman’s (1974) seminal advice about the limited value of questions which generate abstract accounts provided at the behest of an ethnographer, meant that throughout the interview we avoided asking—what’s it like doing and failing to complete postgraduate masters study with a distance learning university preferring when-, how-, and why-questions: time and action. In collecting and attempting to understand what these individual research participants tell us, we connect the intricate intimacy of a personal life to larger situational, organisational, cultural, and historical narratives
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