(re)fusing the humanity of second career students
i was a person once.
but when I walked through this Third Door, they handed me an identification card and a number and a form letter that said: “congratulations new student, you have been admitted.”
Even as educators resist the increasing economic and standardization pressures of the policy environment, the purpose of institutionalization is culturally defined and enacted as a value bestowed upon the student in a quasi-religious transactional process that celebrates and ritualizes the progression of youth towards personhood (Monaghan, 2022). Traditional students (those who arrive in post secondary institutions through direct-entry pathways) are often considered to be in a state of becoming by the institutional imaginary. In this state, they are the identity takers for whom the transactional model is constructed.
Meanwhile, mature students are constructed as students+, functionally similar to traditional undergraduate students, but carrying additional responsibilities and having traversed greater experiential distance. However, very little attention is paid to the act of (re)institutionalization on learners who held a professional identity before pursuing an undergraduate degree. A critical examination of the ruptured and reformed identities of mature students could uncover a path forward to a more equitable and inclusive education system. This is because the inquiry of complex systems analysis resists positioning institutions as neutral black boxes in student-as-variable equations.
These black boxes of Education are incapable of parsing incommensurable data, limiting the affordance for a critical pedagogy. Instead black boxes systematically and uncritically position discrepancies as measures of individual student deficit without considering the role of institution or environment. Thus, the superhuman black box always risks re-storying the narrative of those who lack the humanity to speak for themselves. However, the input-output vector of mature students’ identities problematizes the student+ construction and provides useful data points to reverse engineer the black box. Disrupting institutional neutrality may be the key to unlocking humanizing pedagogies from the dungeons of positivist knowability.
re-fuse (v.) — to re-insert potential, increase affordance or re-construct value by disrupting a refusal, withholding compliance or withdrawing permission to be positioned, conceptualized or understood as refuse : REMAKE, REBUILD, RE-ENERGIZE