Tag Archives: working class students

Fifth Intervention

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After my last tutorial with David, I switched tack and actually changed my upcoming intervention that was meant to happen the next day. Awful timing, I am aware. But I didn’t want to create an intervention that actually didn’t feel like the right thing to do. Chatting with David about how I find my creative spark whenever I lose it got me thinking about how my methods could help others. After all, my stakeholders are all studying something creative, so harnessing that creativity and using it makes sense.

For someone who hates being in front of the camera, I feel most empowered when I am taking self portraits. And I think it is safe to infer that creative people feel their happiest when they are creating something. I thought back to my BA dissertation about self portraiture as a form of therapy, and found a lot of inspiration.

I decided to create a 10 day challenge. I would have liked to do it for 30 days but there’s a time constraint at play here and I don’t have quite enough time for that. I have shared the link to the challenge on my personal and photography Instagram accounts, as well as on my Facebook page. I also told previous participants in my research about it in case they wanted to take part, although I am hoping to engage with a wider range of stakeholders for this intervention.

I don’t necessarily want to see the artwork – that’s not the important thing here. I know that might sound weird so let me explain. When I create self portraits, or any photography that is just for me, I don’t want to show it anyone. If I show it to people, they’ll invariably have an opinion and the way I feel about the photograph will change. So for this intervention, I want the artwork to stay with the person creating it. And of course they can show it to people if they wish, but I don’t feel comfortable demanding that they send it to me to be displayed on my blog for anyone to see. However, I do want to hear if it changes the participants mindsets and if it has any affect on their feelings of being an imposter.

I realised after setting this challenge that people could just lie to me, however I have aimed to counter this by making the people who have said they are taking part sign something that promises they’re actually going to. It could also feel intrusive to read what they’ve actually written so I plan on asking for feedback both through a survey and through written/spoken feedback.

Imposter Syndrome – Robbin Chapman PhD

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Robbin Chapman, PhD who is the Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging in the Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the Harvard Kennedy school, published a presentation about imposter syndrome. Whilst I would love to share every page of it here, I’ve screenshotted the slides that resonated the most with me and that I think are the most relevant to my research.

(Complete side note, I really like the name of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. It somehow sounds more friendly and welcoming than Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.)

Almost all of these describe the environment at arts based education institutions. And other places too, of course. From conversations I’ve had, art schools are some of the most competitive and exclusive places that people can choose to study. I have also heard that whilst there might not be ‘systems of oppression’, the environment itself can feel oppressive.

These might all be amazing and helpful tips, but I think they are easier said than done. I also think that normalising self doubt is a scale – there is a certain level of self doubt that isn’t normal, and can prevent people from functioning to the best of their abilities in an education environment and in the workplace.

I would add ‘create’ to this list for the group of students I am focusing on for my project. They are all creative students and making art is a valid way of expressing how you feel, or just a way to release any pent up frustration, anger or disappointment.

This self assessment tool was thought up by one of the women who first coined the term ‘imposter phenomenon’. I like the idea of self assessment but I do think it would be easy to cheat, and downplay how you are feeling. Sometimes when people fill in things like this, they still give the answers that they are expected to give, even if they are not showing the results to anyone. However, if this chart was filled in with 100% honesty, I can see it being a very helpful tool in the realisation of how much or how little you are experiencing imposter phenomenon.

Something about this that I find quite odd however, is that the self assessment tool at the end of the presentation has had its name changed. Originally it was called the Imposter Test or the IP (meaning imposter phenomenon) by Pauline Rose Clance when she wrote it – as seen here on her website. https://paulineroseclance.com/pdf/IPTestandscoring.pdf
I think this is a great presentation and very helpful for students in higher education, but I do have to question why it was necessary to change the name of this self assessment tool. Was it just to create a more cohesive presentation? Or was it because imposter syndrome is the more commonly accepted name for this feeling?
When I first saw this presentation about imposter phenomenon, I thought that maybe it is something that arts based universities should display on their websites, or around campus. But I am unconvinced about how many people would pay attention. I know that personally I ignore most posters that I see on the walls at CSM, simply because I don’t have the time to stand and read a long poster. (I’d also probably be in the way, based on where they are usually hung)

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/hks-communications-program/files/pp_robbin_chapman_041119_impostor_syndrome.pdf

Creative Interventions as Empowerment

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For my BA Photography dissertation, I wrote 2000 words on photography as a therapeutic tool. From an outside perspective, self portraiture can be seen as narcissistic and vain. Studies have shown that self portraits allow people to get in touch with aspects of themselves that are yet unexplored, and can aid in the process of healing from trauma. There is a reason that art therapy is used a lot by therapists and in prisons.

The practice of the self-portrait can be incredibly empowering. It means using photography to look inside ourselves. To work on our inner world as a way of opening or deepening our unique creative process, which can be developed with any form of artistic expression, or even life itself. To start a dialogue between our thinking mind and our ‘gut’ to draw from an inexhaustible source of meanings which must be expressed. (Nunez, 2009)

In the midst of struggling in my third year of my BA, I created a photo series documenting my journey through 30 days of a depressive episode (see images below).

Today I Left The House For an Hour
I Hate My Body
Felicity – 0 Brain – 1

I am not saying that every working class student who is struggling with imposter syndrome should take self portraits and then they’ll feel better. That would be a rather sweeping and naive statement. But I think that there is a way for universities who specialise in art, to use art to empower their students who come from less represented groups. Maybe that manifests itself in a monthly theme to create work to respond to, or maybe that’s just the invitation to start a personal 30 day challenge accompanied by daily thoughts that are written down.

Nuñez, C. (2009). The self portrait, a powerful tool for self-therapy. European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 11(1), pp.51–61. doi:10.1080/13642530902723157.

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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.

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.

“Empowered”

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After changing my question and adding ’empowered’ into it, I decided to do some research into what being empowered means.

This screenshot from Cambridge Dictionary online gives two definitions and uses. I find it interesting that the example sentence for the first meaning talks about girls being empowered. Why not just people in general? Does this imply that it’s only women who need to work on feeling empowered?

I decided that this warranted some further research in the hopes of answering my questions but also gaining further insight into how empowerment is viewed.

The main part of the word is ‘power’ – Liz Kelly (1992) observed “I suspect it is ‘power to’ that the term empowerment refers to, and it is achieved by increasing one’s ability to resist and challenge power over”. Using this meaning, my question would essentially mean ‘how can female working class students have (or find?) the power to overcome their feelings of imposter syndrome in an arts education environment?’

According to an article written in 1995 by Jo Rowlands, there are three types of empowerment:

Personal : where empowerment is about developing a sense of self and individual confidence and capacity, and undoing the effects of internalised oppression.

Close relationships : where empowerment is about developing the ability to negotiate and influence the nature of the relationship and decisions made within it.

Collective : where individuals work together to achieve a more extensive impact than each could have alone. This includes involvement in political structures, but might also cover collective action based on cooperation rather than competition. Collective action may be locally focused for example, at village or neighbourhood level or institutional, such as national networks or the United Nations.

For my project I am talking about maybe the first and third types of empowerment more particularly. Unless students consider themselves to be in a relationship of sorts with their university, which doesn’t seem likely.

From searching for articles about empowerment in journals, I have observed that a lot of them are focused towards empowering women in the workplace or in society in general. These articles have been dated as far back as the 1990s so the topic of empowerment clearly isn’t just a current issue.

Rowlands, J. (1995). Empowerment examined. Development in Practice, 5(2), pp.101–107. doi:10.1080/0961452951000157074.

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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

Interview Transcript

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Below is a transcript of an interview I did with a student at Falmouth University. This interview was recorded with consent and transcribed by myself.

FR – Thank you for meeting with me today. I wanted to talk to you about your experiences at university. I believe you studied at both an arts specialised school and a non specific university?

RP – Yes, that’s right. I did my BA at art school and then left to go elsewhere for my MA.

FR – Was there a specific reason you made that decision?

RP – Yes and no. I honestly hated art school. I suppose I wanted a change of scenery with less pressure.

FR – Did you hate art school because of the teaching side of it or was there something else?

RP – I didn’t fit in there. I mean, I tried. But I couldn’t afford to socialise as much as I wanted and no one seemed to understand that. I came across as introverted and shy, I think and I struggled to make friends with my class mates. I was so scared of failing or being taken off the course because I didn’t come from the same background as others did.

FR – I’m sorry, that sounds like a tough experience for you. Did you ever talk to the university about how you were feeling?

RP – No I couldn’t. I was scared that they would tell me to leave if I was struggling so badly. I know that there was counselling they offered but I never took advantage of that. I didn’t want to admit that, I don’t know, I was seconding guessing everything? I love art, I really do. But being at art school felt like I was living in a pressure cooker and the lid could blow off any minute. Wow that sounded very dramatic *laughs*

FR – I understand what you mean. I think there’s an illusion of art school being glamorous and such fun. But there’s also a feeling of being like a fish out of water. At least from my perspective. Would you agree with that?

RP – Yes absolutely. I don’t know if that feeling is exclusive to students who come from poor backgrounds obviously but it’s a tough place to be if you are surrounded by people in paint covered designer clothes and you’re wearing Oxfam from head to toe.

FR – Talking about being a fish out of water, would you say that you struggled from imposter syndrome?

RP – I don’t know. I think that’s a term that is batted around a lot nowadays and has maybe lost its original meaning. But I do know that I felt like an imposter and as though I was a placeholder for the student who was meant to be there instead.

FR – So going back to your academic journey, once you’d left art school. Did you have similar feelings once you were at a generic university?

RP – I knew you’d ask me that. And honestly, I didn’t. I saw a lot more students that sounded like me and were also working two jobs to pay their tuition. And honestly, people were a lot more open about their lives and where they came from.

FR – That’s interesting. I wonder why that is. Do you have any thoughts?

RP – I have a theory.

FR – Would you be willing to share it with me?

RP – Absolutely. Art school is high pressure, as I mentioned earlier. There’s an expectation that you’ll do your degree and form amazing connections that will set up a career once you’re done. But a normal university? There are so many varied courses, and it mirrors society more. You’re not trapped in a building full of artistic temperaments.

FR – I’ve never thought about how a non – specialised university mirrors society. That’s really interesting! Thank you so much for your time today.

RP – You’re welcome. Good luck with your project.

This interview was very interesting to me. The thing that I found the most interesting was that this student studied at an arts institution and then made the decision to do their MA at a non arts based university.
After conducting this interview I endeavoured to find out if there was a way I could find out how many students study at an art school and then leave that environment to carry on their education, studying a creative subject in a ‘normal’ university. However, I couldn’t find any figures around this – maybe I was searching for the wrong thing or in the wrong places. But the more likely answer is that data around this isn’t collected or is unavailable to view if it is. There is data around retention rates of students, however it doesn’t tell you where the leaving students go so I didn’t find this helpful.

Another thing that struck me about this conversation is that this student was reluctant to say that they experience imposter syndrome but would say they feel like an imposter. I also found it interesting how this feeling went away once they were studying outside of an arts education environment.