Chapter 6: Aspiration and Education: Toward New Terms of Engagement for Marginalized Students

Aspiration has figured strongly in recent policies around the globe aimed at increasing education participation, particularly for students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds. This emphasis extends from aspiration’s prevalence in “third-way” policy strategies over the past two decades, where it has served to uneasily suture together social democratic impulses for broader distribution of resources and neoliberal impulses to stimulate social mobility through individual entrepreneurship in competitive markets. Such an approach has tended to elide the cultural dimensions of aspiration, often representing the desires of those from less powerful communities as deficit in relation to dominant cultural norms. This chapter examines three sets of data: (1) recent aspiration-focused higher education policy from the UK and Australia; (2) analyses of the demographic group often characterized as “aspirational”; and (3) group interviews with teachers working in disadvantaged communities on the urban fringe of an Australian city. Analysis of these data challenges deficit representations and evaluations of the aspirations of marginalized groups in policy and popular discourse and argues for the need to create dialogic spaces in education, where diverse imaginaries of the future can be heard and valued, and where these groups can speak back to the dominant normative contexts in which they are encouraged to aspire.