ABSTRACT
This Chapter brings the notion of widening participation into focus and examines the particularities of this agenda in the current global higher education environment. We link widening participation to the idea of ecologies of learning, suggesting that a student-centered approach that acknowledges the existing learning cultures to which young people belong offers a way for widening participation practitioners to engage with young people. Whilst the previous Chapters have focussed on our conceptual underpinnings for the study, this Chapter is designed to present a review of current policy and practices in the field. Beginning with an exploration of how the widening participation agenda has been operationalized, the Chapter details how this concept is inextricably linked to the displacement and redefinition of higher education’s institutional frameworks. In exploring the underpinnings of widening participation, the somewhat alienating nature of associated strategies will be exposed in order to propose ways that widening participation can be re-imagined to consider individuals’ corporeality, actions and desires in order to ensure this is enacted on a truly inclusive basis. We begin by exploring how the term widening participation has entered popular, scholarly and political discourse both nationally and internationally.
