Tag Archives: higher education

Social Interactions

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I was reading this article on Refinery 29 about imposter syndrome in the workplace, aptly titled Do I have imposter syndrome or am I just a working class woman? and it had a link to what I believe is a chapter from a book. The chapter is focused on social class differences in social interactions at university.

I picked out some quotes that I found especially interesting.

.. working-class students’ minority group status is more evident at university than in their prior educational settings, and this may lead them to feel out of place at university (Croizet, Austin, Goudeau, Marot, & Millet, 2019; Easterbrook, Hadden & Nieuwenhuis, 2019)

Additionally, universities are distinctly middle-class environments that include their own norms and cultural values that can clash with working class values (Rubin, Denson, Kilpatrick, Matthews, Stehlik, & Zyngier, 2014; see also Batruch, Autin & Batura, 2019). More specifically, universities embody a middle-class independent approach to learning and achievement, which is discordant with interdependent working-class values, making university more alien and difficult for working-class students (Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, Johnson, & Covarrubias, 2012)

I find this quote both interesting and confusing. Interesting because I think working class students being a minority in higher education isn’t necessarily more obvious than a student’s previous school. It all depends on where they went to school – did they get a scholarship to a private school where they were a minority? Or did they grow up in a LPN, where the majority of students were working class?
And confusing because nowhere did they define what these ‘working class values’ are. I couldn’t work out if they meant traditional, slightly old fashioned working class values or if there is a 21st century context to this phrase.

Finally, working-class students are often the first in their families to attend university. Consequently, working-class families have less experience with universities and are often unable to provide the same level of financial, informational, mentoring, and/or identity support as middle- class families do to their sons and daughters (Rubin, 2012b).

This particular quote reminds me of a conversation I had before I even started this research project. One of my friends who doesn’t study a creative subject was complaining that her family seem to think she’s too good for them now, and she was feeling out of her depth at home and at university. I think that this is a problem that a lot of working class students could experience – since starting at university now they don’t fit in with their family, or their peers at university. This could feel very isolating and a constant feeling of being an imposter.

Rubin and Wright (2015, 2017) found that (a) working- class students tended to be older than higher-class students, (b) older students tended to have more paid work and childcare commitments than younger students, (c) students with more of these commitments tended to spend less time on their university campus, and (d) students who spent less time on campus tended to be less socially integrated at university. Rubin and Wright also found that working-class students tended to be less satisfied with their finances, and that this social class difference in financial satisfaction helped to explain their lack of social integration.”

This mention of working class students tending to be older than higher-class students is very interesting to me. When I was looking at demographics of students at various arts universities, it was very hard to find out the ages, due to data not being disaggregated or being split into broad age groups eg 18-25, which personally I didn’t find very useful. The age difference between working class students and the rest of the student body could be a reason that a lot of working class students feel alone, simply because they don’t feel that they have anything in common or they feel at different stages in their lives.

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Going back to the Refinery 29 article, once again imposter syndrome is being gendered. I acknowledge that the author of the article is female so she is talking about her experience. However the other people she spoke to in her article are all female too. And yes, there is research that shows that women are more likely to have imposter syndrome in the workplace. But that isn’t to say that men don’t experience it too. And talking to some men or non-binary people would have created a more balanced article, in my opinion.

Rubin, M., Evans, O. and McGuffog, R. (2019). Social Class Differences in Social Integration at University: Implications for Academic Outcomes and Mental Health. The Social Psychology of Inequality, pp.87–102. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-28856-3_6.

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Environmental Stress

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With a short amount of time left, I decided that I couldn’t physically speak to everyone that I had already interviewed. So instead I sent emails with a one question survey, asking them to describe the environment at their university.

Not everyone responded, which I expected seeing as it’s a hectic time of year for everyone, and emails get lost in inboxes very easily. If I’d been able to speak to these people face to face I would have asked them to expand on these answers. But I think it says something that in short snappy responses, I didn’t get one outright positive answer. I suppose high pressure is more of a neutral answer, because it could be a good or bad thing, depending on attitude and how one copes under pressure.

Tutorial 14/11

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Last tutorial. I don’t know where the term has gone!

Aside from various troubleshooting questions, David said something that really stuck with me. He asked how I’ve kept my creativity alive, whilst studying this MA.

And to be completely honest, I haven’t. I’ve been so focused on doing well with the course that I’ve forgotten to create things just for me. My creative spark has kind of died recently and David asked how I’m going to get it back. The last time this happened I took self portraits every day for a year … and that got me thinking. It got me thinking about my BA dissertation on the use of self portraiture as a therapeutic tool, and maybe I can connect that to my project.
In thinking about the conclusion to my evaluative report and the research that I have conducted, I think there is an argument for using creative interventions to empower students. After all, my stakeholders are students in art schools! And what better use of creativity than to make people feel better and empowered. I know that I don’t have long left before my project is assessed but I think I can tie this into my project in time. Maybe one last intervention, testing whether this would work or not.

I also realised that I’ve been neglecting an element of my research – the arts education environments. I don’t know why I’ve forgotten to ask people about them so I’m going back to the people I’ve interviewed and asking about their experiences in arts based universities in the UK.

David and I spoke about my theory that art schools are weird – nowhere else in society will you be in a building full of thousands of creatives. There is an expectation of exploding out into the world when you graduate with a phone full of contacts and a successful career ahead of you. I think this expectation is even more when you’re a working class student – you’ve chosen to study a creative subject instead of the norm for people who are like you. So there is even more pressure to succeed and prove people wrong.

After the tutorial I took myself to a coffee shop and just tried to absorb everything that David and I had discussed. I realised how far I’ve come, even just in the last couple of months. And I realised that I’m far more capable that I ever would have imagined – I’ve taught myself video editing, and talked to people who scare me. I’ve put myself out there and been rejected. I’ve been vulnerable with my tutors and my stakeholders and I’ve not fallen apart. I’ve had failures and successes. But after everything, I’m still standing. And I’ve created a project that I’m proud of and one that I think has the potential to help a lot of people.

Action Points

  • Go back to people I’ve interviewed and ask about their experience of the art education environment that they studied in ✔️
  • Think about how creative interventions could be a solution moving forwards ✔️
  • Finish blog posts and actually publish them instead of keeping them in my drafts (sorry David, I know I said my blog would be up to date by now) ✔️
  • Rewrite evaluative report – finish it by Friday 25th November to leave time for last minute editing ✔️
  • Find my creative spark again

Trying Again

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I have interviewed almost as many male students as female now, and I’ve noticed that there is a big difference in responses. Female students are more likely to be completely open to talking about their feelings and have apparently nothing holding them back from being vulnerable in front of me. Male students have been closed off in person and for a while I couldn’t figure out why. I have male friends who open up to me about their emotions and at first I felt insulted that my male interviewees weren’t being honest with me. But after talking with David about this problem, I realised that a man I don’t know is hardly going to open up to me. Men are stereotypically bad at talking about feelings, especially feelings that are less than positive. How could I expect them to open up to me, a complete stranger? I think I was being naive and not thinking about this properly.

So I followed up from my interviews with a Likert scale survey – David suggested having an even number on the scale so that there is no truly neutral answer. I also switched up the ends that disagree and agree sit at, so that they didn’t just go down the survey clicking the same button every time (I know I’ve been guilty of doing this in the past, as have my friends). Not all of the male students that I interviewed responded to this survey, which I expected but around 30% of them did. I set a hard deadline for them to respond by, in order to analyse the results and write this blog post, however the majority of them missed the deadline. This means that the results aren’t a reflection of the feelings of all of the male participants in my research. Of course I will update the results if any more responses come in.

From these survey results, I think it is clear that my male interviewees were much more comfortable talking about their feelings when I wasn’t there, and they just had to click buttons on their phone or laptop. Taking a person out of the equation, who was asking potentially stupid or invasive questions definitely helped, as did the anonymity.

Do We Grow Out of Imposter Syndrome?

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The age group I’ve chosen for my stakeholders is 18-27, and I realised that I’ve never explained my reasoning behind this. At 18, you’re potentially away from home for the first time, studying in an unfamiliar environment. At 27, you’re considered a mature student. You’ve probably done your BA, left education to work and then come back to university to continue studying or you’re in higher education for the first time after working for a few years. There are different factors that could make students feel like an imposter at each age.

But is imposter syndrome something that can be grown out of?

Author Valerie Young, who is an expert on imposter syndrome says, “people can still have an imposter moment, but not an imposter life.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8028514/

I like this quote that I came across whilst reading an article by Sumina Mainali because to me it implies that imposter syndrome doesn’t have to take over your whole life and it doesn’t have to be a permanent condition.

“In the long run, many of us have grown out of the imposter syndrome and into our own
knowledge and skills—and humility. We embrace what we know and all that we do not know.” I saw this quote in the blurb for an article in Nurse Leader, 2011. Sadly the full article was hidden behind a paywall and I couldn’t access it. However I find this small tidbit very helpful, and connects with conversations I’ve had about imposter syndrome, where I’ve been told that people think imposter syndrome is something we grow out of because that’s what their parents have told them. This quote almost implies that once people embrace the things that they do know and make the most of their knowledge and skills, the feelings of being an imposter will become less significant.

Branching Out

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In my tutorial last week, David mentioned potentially including some male stakeholders. I had been conducting a few interviews with male working class students but it hadn’t really been my focus.

And then in class Zuleika gave us a refresher lesson on bias, and overcoming it. And I realised that although I had been conducting my research with the best of intentions, my bias had been showing. And it was holding me back, and potentially stunting my research. And whilst I doubt that many men will open up to me and admit to feeling any other way apart from confident, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t include them in my research.
The majority of academic papers on imposter syndrome talk about women, however a study in Quartz says that actually men are experiencing imposter syndrome more than women.

“I first learned about this two years ago, when my editor at the time asked me to write on the subject. Instead of feeling understood or validated, I felt defensive. It had never occurred to me to look around my male dominated industry and worry that I didn’t belong; the notion that I should relate to imposter syndrome seemed to imply that I deserved to feel like a fraud. As I started to report the article, I worried that not suffering from imposter syndrome would be interpreted as a sign of arrogance. This concern, it turns out, is well-founded. Contrary to stereotypes, research suggests women are as confident as men—they are just penalized rather than rewarded for the same self-assured behavior.“

The article goes on to mention something called the Imposter Phenomenon Scale. I find it interesting that it is named after the original name for imposter syndrome and this supports the argument to stop pathologising it and calling it a ‘syndrome’.

“Overall, women self-reported more imposter syndrome according to the scale. But the researchers found that men experienced more stress both when getting negative feedback and when told their results would be shared with the professor. “Collectively, our findings suggest that male IPs [imposters] fair worse when confronted with performance cues than do female impostors,” the authors wrote. “Male IPs experienced greater anxiety after receiving negative feedback and under conditions of high accountability than did female IPs, and exhibited less effort and poorer performance on a task when held accountable to a higher authority.

Conversation around imposter syndrome has always been gendered. But its balance has been slowly shifting over the past few decades. The condition was first identified in 1978 by two clinical psychologists, whose study only focused on women. In the years since, gender-related data on the subject have been mixed. Some have found that women do experience more imposter syndrome, while others have found no correlation.“

I find this paragraph particularly interesting – in the course of my research I have searched for imposter syndrome numerous times, both on Google Scholar, in the library and just regular Google search. Every time, the top results mention women. Therefore I don’t think I agree with the statement about the discussion around imposter syndrome becoming less gendered. Hypothetically, if a male student was searching for information on imposter syndrome, and saw that the first 10 results were about women overcoming imposter syndrome, he might feel even more alienated or alone. However, that isn’t to say that men don’t feel like imposters in education or the workplace.

I also think there is a problem with women telling other women that they are suffering from imposter syndrome. But how do they actually know? In a room full of women, they are all going to have different feelings. And yes, there might be a big proportion of them who feel like imposters but you can’t assume. At a lot of conferences targeted at women, there generally is a class or a talk about overcoming imposter syndrome. I’ve not seen anything similar at conferences I’ve found that are aimed at men.

https://qz.com/1296783/it-turns-out-men-not-women-suffer-more-from-imposter-syndrome

Tutorial 24/10 and a new question

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I went into today’s tutorial knowing that my question had to change. I didn’t know how but I knew it had to happen.

So how did I go from ‘how can arts universities better support female students from working class backgrounds?’ to ‘How can female working class students be empowered to overcome their imposter syndrome in an arts education environment?’

We started our tutorial with me asking if I should flip my original question around, so that female working class students came first. We then discussed if the responsibility to solve the problem I’ve identified is solely resting on the shoulders of arts university. Which it isn’t. There needs to be a compromise with students and universities meeting each other halfway. I used the term empowered when talking about asking for support and David said that was an important term and that I should include it in my new question.

David asked me what loneliness, feeling out of place and alone are symptoms of. Eventually I got the answer right – imposter syndrome. So that got added into the question. My research project is essentially the same, I’ve just pivoted somewhat and I’m very happy I did so. I think that my previous question was expecting too much from arts universities and that was unfair. It’s unethical for universities to target a specific group of students and single them out for what could be perceived as extra support and whilst I had discovered that from my research, I think I didn’t take it on board quickly enough. I also think that it’s unfair to expect support to rain down on people who aren’t asking for it.

I think that my question is moving beyond the predictable now – my original question almost felt comfortable. Well maybe not comfortable, but it felt safe. Imposter syndrome is something that I have felt (a lot) but I don’t know a lot about it when it comes to theory or other people’s experiences.

Action points:

  • Ask about imposter syndrome in my interviews going forwards. Find out how it manifests in different students and how it makes them feel. ✔️
  • Research theories around imposter syndrome – does everyone think it exists? Are there people who argue that it isn’t a thing? ✔️
  • Read Steven D. Brookfield book – Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher ✔️
  • Get blog up to date and email links to David
  • Write report draft and send it to David by 5pm on Thursday ✔️
  • Create another video from my interviews and hopefully have an in person event to show it

Uni Connect

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When I was last at my volunteering job, I got into conversation with a lady who works in the EDI department at Demontfort University in Leicester. I was telling her about my research and she suggested that I look at a scheme called Uni Connect that the other university in Leicester is part of.

There are currently 29 universities taking part in this scheme, spread all over England. None of the universities taking part specialise in the arts which I find interesting. Historically there has been a big push directing young people from underrepresented groups to STEM subjects and I have been unable to find any evidence of something similar for the arts. I am curious as to why there are no arts based universities on this list as diversity within the arts is something that is very topical.

I find it very interesting that there is targeted outreach as part of this scheme, as I have been told by multiple people that universities can’t target a specific group of people because it’s unethical. I suppose the difference is the context?

As you can see from this image, the funding amounts fluctuates. However the funding is dependent on how many learners are in each area so this difference in amounts of funding makes sense. I think it is important to note that in the majority of areas, the amount of funding being accessed has decreased in the last 2 years. Perhaps this is a knock on effect from Covid.

https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equal-opportunities/uni-connect/

IG Research

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I was mindlessly scrolling on Instagram and found myself flicking through the @ualmemes story where they had asked for the top three things people had learnt at UAL. Obviously all the submissions were anonymous but I found these two answers interesting in the context of my project.

It made me curious as to whether these two respondents would say the same things if they were asked this question face to face. There is an element of comfort in anonymity online, and according to a paper written by Kimberly M. Christopherson, “Individuals can use their anonymity to almost become a different person without fear of being identified and negatively evaluated by those they know. This factor may lead to an extreme sense of freedom for the individual and allow him or her to engage in behaviors typically disapproved of by others without fear of the consequences that may ensue as a result.”

Christopherson, K.M. (2007). The positive and negative implications of anonymity in Internet social interactions: ‘On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog’. Computers in Human Behavior, 23(6), pp.3038–3056. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2006.09.001.

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The Cost of Living Crisis

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I sent an email to a member of staff that Richard had pointed me in the direction of, and they suggested I look into how the cost of living crisis is going to affect working class students. I have to admit, I had not considered this as something that was relevant to my project, but after more research, I think that it is.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-11099735/Uni-students-deferring-places-cost-living-crisis-one-seven-fear-homeless.html

This article talks about a study conducted by Nationwide Building Society. The main bullet points of the article are:

  • 2/3 of students are struggling to afford their rent or have fallen behind in paying it
  • 22% of students know someone who has become homeless over the last year due to financial difficulties
  • 3/4 of students have had to borrow money from friends or family to afford rent and essentials like food
  • 4/10 students are reliant on their overdrafts
  • Whilst 4/5 A-Level students are applying to go to university, 15% of these are considering deferring their place because of the cost of living
  • Over 90% of A-Level students said that the cost of living crisis has affected how they feel about attending university this year
  • The cost of living has risen 9% this year and students are afraid it will rise even further
  • 3/5 students are worried about how they will afford their accommodation and 50% are worried about how they will afford nights out

This article is very confusing to me. I don’t know if it just the way that I digest statistics, but having them in a multitude of formats hurts my brain – I’d rather they were all fractions, or all percentages. However, that isn’t the important takeaway here. I think that these numbers are worrying – there was no information about the demographics of the participants in this study. But if we assume that there is a range of backgrounds amongst the participants, it is not only working class students who are worried about how the cost of living crisis is going to change things. And if someone who comes from what is considered to be a ‘comfortable’ background is concerned about money, then working class students must be very concerned.

This is just one study though so I think it’s important to look for corroboration or rebuttals against this.

Unite Students have an episode of their podcast Accommodation Matters about this particular issue. I found the whole thing interesting but this quote especially stuck out to me

Not only does this make the case for female students needing more money than their male counterparts, it talks about how they are suffering a lot more when it comes to mental health, sleep and even relationships. I have sent an email to the PR mentioned at the bottom of the survey they reference, to see if I can get a copy of the full survey.

https://www.unitegroup.com/articles/rising-cost-of-living-increases-pressure-on-parents-with-children-at-university-unite-students

https://www.unitegroup.com/articles/cost-of-living-crisis-students

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-11099735/Uni-students-deferring-places-cost-living-crisis-one-seven-fear-homeless.html