1 female 1 female

Faculty 4 1 male

1 female

1 female

Student Participants as First-Generation Students

One mother in the study had attended teacher-training college and trained to be a primary school teacher and two fathers had studied for diplomas part-time at night school, they did not consider themselves to be educated to the same level as their offspring. One student had a sister who had attended university a couple of years previously. However, she had left after two years. The participants’ own reluctance to consider themselves equally or closely as educated as their student offspring led to a decision to define each student as a ‘first-generation’ student. (For discussion of my unease regarding such labelling see Chapter One).

Anonymity of Participants

Participants’ names have been changed for inclusion in this thesis in order to protect their identities. With a small number of exceptions, the students’ parents have been referred to as mother and father. Occasionally first names of parents are used and these are

pseudonyms. The students’ pseudonyms are John, Steve, Christine, Karen, Louise, Francesca and Sarah. Where quotations from the parents are used, the mother or father is identified by their relationship to the student and the specific interview from which the quotation is taken is also identified. For example, John’s father, Interview 1. When quoting comments made by myself in the interviews, this is indicated through the use of my initials GB.

Journal Use

Minichiello et al (1991) comment on the importance of documenting research settings, people’s visual appearance and attitudes and the researcher’s own behaviour and thoughts in the research process in a journal. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) state that “journals are a powerful way for individuals to give accounts of their experience” (page 102). They

also point out that the type of field note entries in a journal are affected by the type of relationship the researcher has with the participants.

Throughout the research process I kept a journal which documented issues such as my responses to and relationships with the families and described where they lived and the look and feel of their homes. I also used the journal to document or expand on situations not captured on the interview tapes and to document specific concerns, thoughts or ideas about the research process. While some journal notes have been referred to in Chapter Three, below is an example of how one conversation documented in the journal led me to think more carefully about campus location:

Three students were talking with me today about how students in the western suburbs look different from other students they knew, “more grunge” they said, “more Australiana”. They found it difficult to explain what they meant other than people looked different. So not only are students dealing with university in terms of its internal workings they are also dealing with its location in a different place, a different culture from what they are used to. One student commented on how there aren’t as many Italians and Greeks in comparison to where she lives (a northern suburb) and another commented on how worried she was about travelling from the country (she lives in an outer northern suburb). These comments raise all sorts of issues about ‘the local’ and students’ negotiations of it. (13/5/98)

Participants’ Places of Residence

As my personal narrative history later in this chapter demonstrates, the geographical location in which experiences occur can be important in understanding a person’s response to issues and events. The participants in this study were no exception. The stories in Chapter Three have a very specific location which imbues them with numerous spoken and unspoken implications. A well-known local geographical marker for the participants in this study and for myself is the West Gate Bridge which spans the Yarra River. As far as possible without revealing participants’ identities, Chapter Three indicates in a general sense where the families lived in relation to this bridge and

therefore the city of Melbourne. The specific suburbs or towns in which each family lived have been omitted to protect the participants’ identities. However, given the significance of regionality in Melbourne (see below) a general indication of whether or not the

families lived to the east or west of the city of Melbourne has been indicated. For further discussion of the significance of the local see below.

Locating the ‘Local’: The West Gate Bridge

The attitudes I have noticed since my migration here in 1991 towards the eastern, western and northern suburbs and the participants’ comments about them mean that an

acknowledgement of where campuses are located and the makeup of the local

populations around them are important in understanding students’ and parents’ responses to the individual campuses and the university as a whole. Chapter Three reveals some of the preoccupations of the participants in this regard.

The polarisations of opinion and contrasts concerning Melbourne’s regions are perhaps symbolised most strongly by the West Gate Bridge. Prior to the opening of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne in 1978, the western suburbs were geographically isolated from the rest of Melbourne due to the separation of the city by the Yarra River (Hitchings, 1979). The West Gate Bridge was meant to connect a previously separated city and this it did, at least physically. Psychologically, socially and economically however, for many the bridge still stands as a symbol of division.

Before the bridge, the west was not well known or visited by people from ‘the other side of town’. That Melbourne is split into two parts by the Yarra river, referred to as the eastern and western suburbs, is important when discussing higher education in Melbourne, for inequities continue to exist between the populations.

An insight into how the west was perceived at the time its construction was being planned and built can be gleaned from Mr Len Frazer, an engineer and planner at the time. Coining the future bridge as a “West Side Success Story” he said of the western suburbs themselves:

Give us a front door through which we can bring new life to the western sector of Melbourne. Although there are at present stigmas to living in the west, we must overcome them (Hitchings, 1979: 25).

Bill Hitchings, in his historical commentary on the building of the West Gate Bridge and its impacts on Melbourne, painted a similar but more defensive and protective picture of the west:

The industrialists’ move to provide a more direct and quicker route, however, merely brought to a head the growing antagonism the people of the west had felt for the planners and politicians in the city. Across the river, just 200 yards away, they could see the magnificent park-lands, the plush office blocks and the highway stretching out from the city so that city folk could get home to their well-planned suburbs while the inner suburban western suburbs like Footscray, almost by intent, had been allowed to become a virtual slum, and Williamstown, the city’s original port, although it still had its yacht basins and colourful shoreline, was in the shadow of smoke belching factories. The “easterners” could see it, and it was a quaint place to visit (if you had a few spare hours) but who on earth would want to live there? (Hitchings, 1979: 8) The revulsion felt by those in the eastern suburbs towards the western suburbs is still felt today although arguably less so. For example, over twenty years later, Richard Teese’s (2000) important discussion of the impact of the secondary school curriculum on

achievement and failure between sectors and regions of Melbourne evokes a similar and strikingly sad and moribund picture of the west of Melbourne:

At the core of the school system are secure sites, scarcely touched by failure. On the periphery are exposed sites whose inhabitants defend themselves against the demands of the curriculum only with difficulty, and often with heavy losses. In the outer reaches of Melbourne, on the great basalt plains to the west, extending from the old quarter of noxious riverside industry to the empty shells of 1940’s and 1950’s factories and the silent railway yards, from the Ascot Vale and Kensington that were English working-class to the outer suburbs populated by Italians, Greeks, Croatians, Turks, Lebanese, Vietnamese, displaced and displacing, mortality at school rises to extremes and ravages this vast treeless expanse like the scorching sun of the southern summer. (page 208)

If it is not exactly revulsion that people feel, then many people speak of how they “do not know the west”, itself a way of expressing the west as an unknown, unexplored area and one that, given a choice in the matter, will remain so. My own feeling of being happy in a

place from which others thought I should be trying to leave, highlights something of the complexity in interpreting people’s lives and attitudes towards where they live.

I experienced the extent of the divide between east and west in my first few weeks of being in Australia in 1991. When I told colleagues I was looking for a house to rent, I was advised by all those who lived elsewhere, not to live ‘in the west’, a suggestion I found hard to understand at the time. Considering the university where I worked was in the west I was confused about why people would not want to live nearby and I was slow to realise the innate snobbery in the advice. Being without what Clandinin and Connelly refer to as a “pre-narrative” (2000: 64) of Melbourne’s urban planning, I failed to recognise the strength of feeling about the west, instead interpreting my impressions of the area through my northern English, post- industrial revolution perspective. I was used to industry and people living and working close to it and I was used to seeing people queue for their unemployment benefit. I was also used to a multicultural population. All these elements made up at least part of the picture of the western suburbs in front of me. However, in the same way that I felt comfortable in the west’s industrial heartland, I felt unsettled when I visited the eastern suburbs. I was confronted by great expanses of housing and seemingly nothing else. I had never seen anything quite like it and they taught me the true meaning of the term ‘suburb’, which until then had simply been a synonym for the word ‘town’. In these suburbs, where others saw neatness and safety, I saw sterility and mono-culture. In short, the sort of place to live that my advisers tried to steer me towards were the very things that made me feel insecure and alien.

Background to Question Selection

Clandinin and Connelly (2000) state that letters are field texts. “In letters we try to give an account of ourselves, make meaning of our experiences, and attempt to establish and maintain relationships among ourselves, our experience, and the experience of others” (page 106). A letter from my father which documented my parents’ feelings on me going to college was used early in the research process to sensitize myself to parental feelings about separation. (See below for more details about this letter).

On applying to go to college and study for a degree, I was aware that neither my parents, or I, knew what doing a degree or going to college involved. In developing the

methodology for this study, I anticipated that this might be the case for the parents I would interview. As a researcher I looked for literature as grounding for my own research but was surprised to find literature which focussed primarily on educating parents (see for example Hinni and Eison, 1990) rather than listening to what they had to say. In order to inform myself of parental experiences which in turn would inform the sorts of questions and concepts I developed throughout this study, I therefore used my own parents’ experiences as initial sensitisers to potential issues. In March 1995 I wrote to my parents in England asking them to tell me of their feelings about me going to college in 1983. Highlighting once more the importance of the personal in this study, their reply proved highly significant in developing my research approach.

I had always known that my parents and grandparents valued education very highly but I had never known that their support of my studies was so radically different from the dominant ethos of the people around them. For example, in the letter, they told me of the phrase they had been brought up with, “Never educate a child because you will only lose them”. This shocked me. I had known that I was different from all but one of my school friends in going on to further my education but I had not realised what a radical departure from the norm it was for my parents to encourage me to do so. Having little knowledge of higher education, my father had asked the men he worked with, many of whom were tertiary educated, about what doing a degree involved. In the letter he wrote that he,

was helped by working with people of the same academic background, and coming from all parts of the world, helped me to get an insight into what you were about to meet.

Whereas Rodriguez (1982) recognised that the more educated he became the more he “must move between environments, his home and the classroom, which are at cultural extremes, opposed” (1982: 46), it was my parents rather than me who preempted

potential problems related to class that I might face in going to college. For example, my father wrote:

The first change you would have to face was to be moving to what is loosely called ‘Middle Class Values’ from ‘Working-class Values’ and meeting people with backgrounds so different, we worried if you would find it ‘off- putting.’

Oblivious to the soul-searching occurring around me, and unlike Rodriguez and my parents, these issues had been of no concern to me when I was a student. Instead I had been more concerned with whether or not I would enjoy the course and make friends.

My father also wrote of his concern that going to college might transform his daughter to the point where he might not recognise or understand her. He wrote:

I think the first thing that one thinks about is will the ‘child’ change into an Adult with which you will have nothing in common, due to living in an environment which is foreign to most parents, and a very strange world in which to enter.

My father’s apostrophising of the word ‘child’ and capitalisation of Adult, highlighted his acute awareness of my legal adult status and his fear that we might no longer have

anything in common. In a manner which echoes those authors such as Chaskes (196) and London (1992), his use of the word ‘foreign’ to describe a college environment further emphasised how different they felt the college world I was about to enter would be. Back in 1983 when I choose a degree course, my choice was based on what I was ‘good at’, English Literature, but later I became uneasy at my choice, feeling that I might become bored. One teacher suggested a new course at a college of higher education as opposed to a university, a course he felt would suit me very well, a degree in Drama and Writing, an unusual course offering in the early 1980s. I agreed that I would probably enjoy this course far more, exploring subjects that had always interested me and in which I had always been involved. Here was a chance to obtain an honours degree doing what I loved. I went on to enjoy three years as an undergraduate and one year at another

institution studying for a post graduate certificate in education in Drama in Education. However, choosing an institution and a course that was not considered mainstream I encountered anxieties about my choices. Specifically, I was not going to attend a university and therefore was I being sensible in attending an institution that would be considered ‘less than’? The anxieties articulated by those around me were not dissimilar

to the ones heard today in Australia’s mass system of higher education, where hierarchies have been created to distinguish the ‘sandstones’ from the ‘new’ or ‘greystone’

universities and in turn to distinguish between students (see Chapter One).

From a financial viewpoint, I was very fortunate to attend college in the days in the UK when students received mandatory, means-tested, student-grants provided by councils, with even unemployment benefit being provided during the holidays. However, parents were still expected to top-up the grant to the full cost of an undergraduate education. Many parents I knew either could not or would not top-up the grant in this way. My parents did so, on the proviso that I asked for no extra money. It was not until a few years later that I realised the extent of the financial sacrifices my parents made in those years to ensure I received the full grant. One can therefore imagine the concern my father felt in being told by someone he worked with that college “is not all about study.” In the letter my father wrote:

This freedom has a price, and that is, are you going to use it wisely or have a good time at someone’s expense?

Both the literature and my parents’ reflections on the process of having a daughter go to college led me to want to know more about the lived experiences of parents of first- generation students. I was particularly interested in how, if it was the first time a member of their family had attended university, how could they be expected to know or

understand the unwritten and unspoken rules of that institution? Importantly, how did they deal with this situation?

Key Questions at the Study’s Outset

The questions and assumptions described so far led to the design of this study which examined the conjoint experiences of eight families in the students’ first-year of university. Key questions were:

• Did parents feel separated from their son or daughter in any way because of their