Adrian Butterworth

Currently engaged in a Doctorate of Education with the Centre of Excellence in Media Production, current abstract:

To what extent is the university television studio an inclusive pedagogic space?

A mismatch between employers’ diversity requirements and job candidates’ profiles, has in part led to a widening participation agenda directing higher education (HE) to close this gap between who is included in HE and who is not. This has perhaps begun to create a wider distance between the diverse characteristics of students and that of their educators (Leese 2010). Furthermore, media students have an instrumentalist individualised view of education, perhaps fuelled by post-92 universities’ employability modality, where the degree is an individual means to an end. With tertiary education increasingly prescriptive, centred around employability, and tailored around individual outcomes - shared group activities and group marks create tension and conflict in the university television studio. By the time students graduate their qualification is not as valued as they expect due to HE massification and grade inflation (Bachan 2017). Finally they find the UK creative industries are not the meritocracy anticipated (O'Brien et al. 2016).

With the commodification of education, the implementation of the employability agenda, and the call for widening participation, the traditional enlightenment conception of the individual, rational, humanist, student becomes challenged (Braidotti 2013). Within a rapidly changing education sector, considering the demands of an equally rapidly changing industry, neo-liberal policy and legislative burdens require new and more nuanced understandings of what happens as students learn within university teaching spaces.

This research builds on earlier epistemological work (Bourdieu 1990) by mapping the field, and the positions people take up as they relate to their habitus and use of capitals to that of other positions within the field. By conducting a micro ethnography of the university television studio (UTS) new knowledge will be generated of a pedagogical space currently underrepresented in academic literature. Through thick description and the Bourdieusian thinking and analytical tools there will be a re-presentation of the structuring structures that guide interaction and social relations in the space. This epistemological stance has been chosen in consideration of the structure/agency dilemma (Grenfell 2014) and to utilise a reflexive approach to overcome the traditional critique of participant observation. This repositions the embedded ethnologist as both subject and object - both participant and observer. Most of all however, a Bourdieusian lens has been selected as this ontological perspective allows relationships between power, education, television production, and wider social fields to be mapped. At the same time an account of the relational positions available for diverse individuals (of differing habitus and store of capitals) to take up within those fields. Tensions between these contribute to inclusion/exclusion/self-exclusion and other challenges of pedagogy, assessment, student (i.e., consumer) satisfaction and employability. These complex relationships are therefore able to give a complete relational account (although not the only account) of the extent that the university television studio is an inclusive pedagogical space.

Undertaking this type of analysis is intended to challenge the reproduction of society and culture in this pedagogic space (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). Generating an account of the relational aspects of fields and activity present in the studio space could contribute to a break in the reproductive cycle of television crews. These new perspectives are proposed to identify opportunities for curriculum design and / or pedagogy that will level the playing field increasing the extent that the university television studio is inclusive.