Learner Diversity in Higher Education: Articulations of Diverse Subjectivities Through Everyday Life Experiences

Abstract

This paper explores how articulations of diverse learners’ identities and subjectivities emerge through everyday life experiences within a modern public university in India. The study adopts a constructivist grounded theory approach and, through in-depth conversational interviews, focuses on the voices of 35 learners belonging to diverse marginalised communities. Massification and the shifting demographics of learners in higher education have made university spaces a composite of heterogeneous identities. As learners belonging to diverse marginalised social groups began to increasingly navigate campus life, contestations emerged, due to the lack of recognition of these unfamiliar socio-political sensibilities and the emerging alternate discourses within these elite corridors of knowledge. Further, inherent elitism and meritocracy saliently dominating the normative cultural behaviour within the institutions, hindered the participation and inclusion of these learners, resulting in exclusivity and marginalisation in everyday life. As a result, the articulation and voice of learners emerged as acts of resistance and their agency freedom, leading to the emergence of a learner’s identity, an agential and assertive reflection of how learners articulate their self, succumb to or resist marginalisation, get excluded or participate and make choices for their future. Everyday life experiences, determined by learners’ situated articulations of their life course, became a framework explicating and articulating their distinct subjectivities, negotiations, challenges and aspirations. Therefore, learners’ capacity and will to negotiate, resist and persist, against the normativity in practice and processes in higher education, leads to cultivation of their agency freedom.