The Transformational Potential of Higher Education Inclusion - Biographical Trajectories of Students from Disadvantaged Environments in Venezuela

Front matter

Jesús Humberto Pineda Olivieri

The Transformational Potential of Higher Education Inclusion Biographical Trajectories of Students from Disadvantaged Environments in Venezuela

US INCAS

Contents

Acknowledgements oraraa aana tidad ida 11 Chapter; tro du ratico arana A Aa AA a 15 1.1 The genesis of the research project coccion 15 1.2 Research questions and methodology ..c.occoiccnninninaninnenconncincncincanincnnoncanonccnoninnos 19 1:3.Structufe OL the dissertations: iii dpi 21 Chapter 2. Inclusion to (higher) education ...oconcinoccinnninnnninnnnnnonenninnnonncnonncnonncnrnnancnncnnns 25 2.1 Locating my research within the field of sociology of education «0... 26 2.1.1 Sociology of education and the study of inequality wees 28

2.1.2 Inequality is not just a class issue: Other categories and current ED ALES miii an ati 30 2.2 The debate of educational inequality in Latin America cesses 31 2,3. The Tnelusion Prandi 34

2.4 The debate on higher education inclusion in Latin ÁmeriCa ooo 44 2.4.1 Funding SCHemes asseritur ainia 45 24.3 Compensatory COULSES ensesinden istiari irn iani 47 2.4.4 Creation Of new Universities sssini 48 2:4:5 Creation:of parallel systems isis.c.setscseasebecsensesonecsnnssossonetepsersesensonsedssetupadtasnes 49 2,5 Summary of the: Chapter c.ccccciscocssesesocosesevesovotsevasveastvasesbsaonsasnsdeasavesaansaotstaanvszanieas 50 Chapter 3: Theoretical Embedding ginisi aea dll 51 dal le Bormis:of Capital airada 53 DML Ai 64 3.2 Us vs. them: Norbert Elias and the relation between established and outs iio E aa 67 3.2.1 Elias approach: Figurational sociology .ccccincncincnninnaninnoninnaninncnrnnoncnnoncnncninns 67 3.2.2 The theory of established-outsiders’ relations (Elias and Scotson, 1994) 68 Chapter 4. Methodological framework... cesses cssesessescssessssesnssesnssesnsseansneenans 75 4:1 Biographical research isscsscccsssstessessseocsssscusssenssossssvesesesnstsevstvssstvesssatseansvevetneansveyenseys 76 42 Data collection issis tociescscssvcssensascssasusaotatlbspusansesusvansusveseatistsapiensdpsasbandensdsensunnapasteas 78 4.2.1 Biographical Narrative Interviews following Rosenthal (1995; 2011) ...78 42.2 Sampling: state ES ene iiadad 83 4.3 Data analysis: Biographical case reconstruction .cccncccincnninnnninoninionncincorincncnncncnns 86 4.3.1 Analysis of biographical data (data Of events) .ociccoincnnincnncnnncnconicanncananinnss 86 4.3.2 Text and thematic field analysis (sequential analysis of textual segments from the self-presentation in the interview)... 87 4.3.3 Reconstruction of the case history (life as lived) „s.es 87 4.3.4 Detailed analysis of individual textual locations ....cooonnciconnononinnnnononcnranonoso 88 43:60 Formation of types: typology) iniciados 88 AA PuUrther Methods eienn n N 89

Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1 The genesis of the research project

Historically, higher education used to be to prepare the elites to run any given society. Nowadays, it could be argued that this view has radically changed to perceiving higher education as some sort of a magical force with a variety of functions, uses and benefits for both individuals and society at large. One could ask how this paradigm shift occurred from a view on education to respond to society’s needs and to assure the maintenance of the status quo to a much more complex, individuals oriented and multidimensional vision. From the perspective of social inequality, the most debated issue when it comes to observing higher education expansion waves across the globe is whether or not the lack of access to higher education leads to poverty and underdevelopment or the other way around! . In other words, there seems to be an expectation that offering access to higher education to groups that have been traditionally separated from this level of education would improve their social and financial position. This expectation has been partly a consequence of debates and statements spread by international organizations such as UNESCO, The World Bank and others. One could argue in

1 By this I refer to the common debate on whether people from disadvantaged environments are excluded from education because of their background or if they are precisely in that financial position due to their distance from education.

these regards that one dogma (higher education must be only for the elite) was replaced by another one (higher education is a right).

One can trace back some similarities (and differences) in different regions of the world where through different approaches higher education has been widened to include all groups. By doing this, the governments in charge of these reforms try to close gaps among social groups, eradicate poverty, and promote development. My dissertation seeks to address this issue in light of recent developments in Venezuela, where a major transformation of the system has been implemented since the early 2000s*. The issues of social exclusion and access to (higher) education in Venezuela could be traced back to the colonial times. The university was an elitist institution within a complex social system based on castes. Given this historical context, the university had only a social function limited to training the few students coming from the economic and political elite to form part of either the clergy or the State (Parra et al., 2010). Eventually, the system started to open its doors for a variety of reasons, with the aim of effectively facing different historical and political challenges. My analysis suggests that the Venezuelan higher education system has gone through different sociopolitical phases in which it has been forced to fulfill different functions such as during the independence movements, the establishment of the new republic, the beginning of democracy and lately the Bolivarian revolution* My research deals with the last process of change, though, namely the transformation of the system between 1998 and 2013. One can observe nowadays a pragmatic approach to higher education for all with the coexistence of different kinds of institutions, a complex student body and staff as well as different ideas of what the university is for. However, the literature on the transformation of the Venezuelan university follows a quantitative logic in which different periods are compared in terms of the number of universities and students that were enrolled at a given time’. My dissertation seeks to analyze the long process that certain social groups have gone

2 Note that this transformation is still ongoing.

3 During this period, social class was not based on economic capital but rather on race, color and privileges. The hierarchy was Blancos Peninsulares (Spaniards), Blancos Criollos (Spanish Americans), Blancos de orilla (Inmigrants from Spain), mixed races, Indios (American indigenous) and Negros (African slaves). This implies that once a person had a specific skin color or origin there was (or only limited) no social mobility.

4 In chapter 5, I explain in depth what the Bolivarian revolution is but for explanatory purposes one could briefly mention that the Bolivarian revolution is the name of the historical phase that started in 1998 with the rise of Hugo Chavez to power.

5 In general, the indicators used by the Bolivarian revolution highlight the dimensions of the reforms as well as the speedy effectiveness of the initiatives. Examples of this can be found with the literacy program “Mission Robinson”, which announced two years after its creation that Venezuela was a country free of illiteracy. Another example is the announcement that Venezuela is nowadays the fifth country in the world in higher education and the second in Latin Ámerica in terms of enrollment rates.

Chapter 1. Introduction 17 through to gain access to (higher) education and the meaning that these experiences of exclusion and inclusion has for them.

My interest in studying the Venezuelan higher education system started in 2009 while I was doing my master’s in higher education research and development at the International Centre for Higher Education Research INCHER-Kassel) of the University of Kassel. During my time in Kassel, I joined several academic and non-academic debates about Latin America and engaged in discussions about Latin American phenomena from an international perspective. My academic interest developed into the analysis of higher education from a human capital perspective, which emphasized the value of a person’s education for his® skills, competencies and knowledge acquisition that eventually will lead to finding employment. This was the beginning of a process of comparison and reflection about higher education processes and challenges in developing countries. At this point of my analysis, I found a contradiction. Precisely in many Latin American countries there are many economic challenges, lack of industrial capacity and a high amount of informal workers without social security, which means that the higher education system must face roles different to the ones in developed societies.

I wrote my master’s thesis on the transformation process that the Venezuelan higher education system had gone through since 1998 after the start of the Bolivarian revolution. One could summarize the transformation of the system, as I perceived it back then, in the following manner: a new legal framework for education’, an accelerated increase of study places, new institutional schemes, new actors’, free higher education for all as an explicit goal? and a parallel nature between mainstream and alternative systems! The transformation of the

6 Please note that my dissertation uses the masculine form in order to maintain the simplicity of the text for the reader but without implying an intended exclusion of women from my discourse. I had initially written his/her but during the editing process I found those formulations too complicated both for the reader and for me as a non-native writer. The debate on gender inclusive language has been an important development in both German and Spanish literature and daily use in the recent past. However, up to this point, there has not been a solution for this matter in the English language.

7 This includes a constitutional amendment, new education laws, a new Ministry of Higher Education, among others.

8 By this I mean not only the inclusion of non-traditional students for the Venezuelan higher education system but also a new generation of higher education staff.

° In the last decades the proportion of private higher education institutions had progressively increased.

10 One must point out the fact that the higher educational system was divided into a traditional system and a newly established system that can be seen as an alternative even when it comes to the implementation of new management and execution processes that did not exist before the reforms.

Venezuelan university!!, however, could not be analyzed as an educational phenomenon per se because of its importance in the framework of a radical sociopolitical process in the country and perhaps in the region. I noticed this fact when I conducted my first data collection phase in the country. In the framework of my research, I visited Venezuela and conducted interviews in different universities in Caracas, both the so-called traditional ones and the newly established. What I observed at the time was a process of massification, consistent with an ongoing transition from mass! to universal higher education throughout the globe, as Martin Trow (1973) had anticipated in the 70s. Something that surprised me, though, was the conflictive nature of this change process.

I had been abroad for some time and by the time I went back to Venezuela for research purposes I had the impression that there were two parallel worlds and the same was true for the institutions I visited. Depending on who I talked to I would get a different picture of where the country was headed and that was precisely my interest at the time. Therefore, I was convinced that Venezuela was going through a different path compared to the mainstream higher education systems!3, Given the scope and the time constraints I only managed to explore the phenomenon and focused on the policies itself and their repercussions for a paradigm shift of higher education in the country. Using the metaphor of the chameleon" I can say that I had to learn how to interact with both extreme polarized interpretations of reality not only in informal conversations but also in the literature. I faced the conflict of trying to understand the change process of the higher education system while at the same time trying to make sense of the much more complex sociopolitical panorama. Something interesting was that during the analysis of data for my master’s thesis I found a common pattern in my interviews where people would talk about the value of being at the university as a personal achievement instead of an academic one. I, indeed, noticed a difference between students from different social class backgrounds. Whereas for middle and higher classes, going to the university was a taken-for-granted, logical step, it seemed to me that for a member from the lower classes it represented a dream. The perspective of this set of interviews contradicted my ideas about the professional and academic value of

11 This transformation is still ongoing but for analytical reasons I will be addressing in this dissertation what happened until 2013, which was my last empirical data collection phase in Venezuela.

12 According to Garcia Guadilla (1991), Venezuela’s higher education system became a mass system by the 80s. For more information about this issue see chapter 2.

13 Tt is possible that this observation stems from my experience in the transformation that I had experienced in Europe in the framework of the Bologna Process where there was a commitment towards regional integration and unification of educational policy, whereas in Venezuela the educational system was in the middle of a polarized society both as a result and as a trigger of polarization.

14 T owe this idea to Prof. Dr. Anita Engel, who used it to describe her role as both a woman and a professor during a study on women in excellent research in Germany.

Chapter 1. Introduction 19 education and made me want to look in more depth the experience of students as individuals instead of future job seekers.

Once I finished my master’s, I did an internship at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland'5. During my six-month internship I was in charge of supporting developing country universities, members of UNCTAD virtual institute as well as the conceptualization and organization of workshops, conferences, meetings and expert presentations on international trade and development issues. After my experience there I had experienced many efforts from around the world to overcome poverty, the importance of education in all those efforts and I had gained an understanding of many successful policies and practices. That was when my interest in social inequality emerged and I started to approach the issue of educational policy but as a tool to eradicate poverty and trigger sustainable development rather than to provide the system with employees.

What I had observed in Venezuela was an interesting case because it was a classical debate on education and reproduction and on whether or not education can change society. Meanwhile, the portrait of Venezuela from the distance was contradictory, given the ideological and political polarization among social groups. There were a great deal of policies and initiatives that were being constantly implemented and announced. Therefore, I decided to address the higher education reforms again but focusing exclusively on Mission Sucre!®, which was a specific social program to offer higher education for all. My interest was on the program itself but at the same time on its impact!” on individuals” lives, especially the poor, which is a large sector in Venezuelan society and the main target of the policies among which Mission Sucre was launched. Furthermore, I decided to extend my analysis to visit other areas of the country, especially isolated and marginalized sectors, which represents a contrast to my master’s thesis where I only took into account the capital of the country.

1.2 Research questions and methodology

The idea to focus on the experiences of students and how higher education has impacted their lives was a decision that shaped my work both as a methodology and a theoretical approach based on the premises of the interpretative paradigm of social research (Rosenthal, 2011). Therefore, my empirical work follows the logic of a constructivist and phenomenological sociological approach (Berger and

15 The internship was possible in the framework of the DAAD Carlo-Schmid-Programme for internship at international organizations and EU institutions (Carlo-Schmid-Programme fúr Praktika in internationalen Organisationen und EU-Institutionen, in German).

16 Mission Sucre is a social program launched in 2003, which I describe in depth in chapter 6.

17 Aponte (2007) defines impact evaluation as a comprehensive, systematic and rigorous process to document and measure the effects of a program or policy to be able to understand what would have happened to the target group had the program never existed.

Luckmann, 1966). It is important to mention that my work aims at targeting higher education phenomena from a biographical perspective. This means that I perceive higher education not as an isolated subsystem of education but as the sum of all previous levels. As such, the previous biography of the person is not only relevant but paramount to understand how higher education impacts individuals. Furthermore, my biographical perspective also argues that higher education can be seen as a rite of passage because in many cases the fact that a person takes part (or not) in it shapes his future.

This project started in October 2011 and over the course of my research I conducted three field phases in Venezuela in 2012 and 2013. I managed to gather data from a variety of sources by using different methods: biographical narrative interviews (Rosenthal, 1995; 2011) with higher education students of Mission Sucre, participant observations (Marcus, 1998) at Aldeas Universitarias!® across the country and ethnographic interviews with higher education staff and experts on educational policy and research. Consistent with the interpretive paradigm, my research project started with two general open research questions:

1. What implications has the creation of Mission Sucre had in the lives of members of provinces of Venezuela?

2. How have marginalized groups in different areas of Venezuela experienced inclusion to higher education through Mission Sucre?

As I said before, my interest was about how individuals perceive their participation in the system after a major reform opened access for many individuals who had not had access before. I must point out the fact that both the literature and the public discourses about the issue of higher education expansion in Venezuela deal with the topic from a perspective that does not take into account the individual experiences. I decided to offer the individual, actor-focused perspective to close that gap. My research questions allowed me the flexibility to explore different areas of inquiry, given the general formulation of implications and experience. Therefore, I did not focus on social inequality from a financial perspective where one analyzes social class belonging before and after going to the university, nor did I discuss on the fact that there were a certain number of institutions before and now there are more. Instead I reconstruct the life trajectories of those individuals that were targeted by the educational policy of the Bolivarian government to explore how they experienced their access to the system based on their previous experiences, expectations and struggles. I critically explore the issue that we nowadays call inclusion, which describes both the explicit aim of national governments to widen access to education for disadvantaged groups as

18 This is a new institutional framework that was implemented in the framework of Mission Sucre.

Chapter 1. Introduction 21 well as the actual group and individual dynamics that take place within the system when all actors get to interact.

1.3 Structure of the dissertation

The next chapter titled “Inclusion to (higher) education: the evolution of a contemporary concept” can be understood as a literature review as well as a conceptual positioning. In the chapter I locate my research within the broader field of social inequality as a core area of sociology of education. Then, I describe the evolution of the study of educational inequality and some of the most relevant debates over time. Even if my research project is about educational inequality in Venezuela, I felt the need to discuss the different rhetoric and problems that are addressed in the developed world and Latin America respectively. I argue in this chapter that the sociological study of social inequality went from measuring and understanding it to addressing it. I name this particular shift the “Inclusion Era” and offer my conceptual understanding of what terms such as exclusion and inclusion nowadays can be supposed to mean. I, subsequently, discuss their general use and their implementation, different interpretations and implications for the debates as well as policy making of the universalization of higher education. The chapter ends with some current discussions and experiences in Latin America.

Chapter 3 is the theoretical framework that guides my analysis of educational exclusion-inclusion phenomena. In this chapter, I discuss Bourdieu’s and Elias’ theoretical concepts about educational inequality reproduction and established-outsiders figurations, respectively. The chapter starts with the theoretical premises of Pierre Bourdieu’s scholarship. I develop the basic concepts that have made him prominent among sociologists of education while at the same time trying to bring his research as close as possible to my context through a variety of examples and analogies. Certainly, Bourdieu is one of the most cited authors in the field of educational inequality, which one could argue is not the case with Elias. However, I am convinced that the approach developed by Elias offers an extraordinary tool to complement Bourdieu’s and to make sense of my own process-oriented approach. Therefore, the chapter continues with an account of what figurational sociology offers for researchers of different disciplines. The last section of the chapter is a reconstruction of the theory of established-outsiders’ relations as developed by Elias and Scotson (1994) and its pertinence for my research.

In chapter 4, I describe my methodological framework. I begin the chapter by elaborating the premises of the interpretive paradigm more in depth to provide the reader with the underlying methodological understanding that I used in the elaboration of my research project. Before explaining the different methods that I used to gather the data, I present a brief evolution of the field of biographical research. This is an important step for me to position myself within what Hermilio

Pereira dos Santos has called the Rosenthal School!'”. The chapter continues with a description of the different steps that Rosenthal proposes for the data collection and empirical analysis of biographic narrative interviews. I also present my sampling strategies and the context where my research took place. After having presented my main method to focus on life history/stories I introduce my further methods such as short-term multi-sited participant observations, ethnographic interviews and even social media.

Chapter 5 is titled (Higher) education expansion as a sociopolitical issue in the Venezuelan context: Sociohistorical outlook of the emergence of the Bolivarian Missions in Venezuela. In this chapter, I deal with the sociocultural presentation of the Venezuelan context. As I previously argued, the educational system has always been closely related to political, economic and social forces, which I had to explore in order to understand the phenomenon in question. Even if I deal with the educational reforms launched after the beginning of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, it was necessary to provide the reader with some background information about the evolution of the higher education system in the country and its sociopolitical role in the transformation of the nation during different periods. The chapter, then, focuses on the Bolivarian revolution and the emergence of the Bolivarian missions. I describe the emergence of the Bolivarian Missions as the beginning of a new paradigm of social policy in Venezuela with the complexity of the idea and its implementation. The chapter ends with an overview of all the Bolivarian Missions that had been launched by the time of writing of the chapter.

The chapter number 6 deals with the phenomenon of Mission Sucre, exclusively. After having described the evolution of the Bolivarian Missions in the previous chapter, I discuss the idea of the municipalization of higher education. Given that the literature of Mission Sucre is still incipient I discuss this educational program both theoretically and empirically. To do the former, I present the most relevant debates in the literature as well as the known facts presented by official and unofficial reports by the government. In order to complete the gaps that I identified in my desk research, which could be considered a first result of my dissertation, I offer an ethnographic account through pictures and descriptive memos after my experience in the field. The empirical work presented in the chapter analyzes the polarization of the higher education system after the creation of Mission Sucre and discusses a new higher education paradigm that I identified. In order to present my data I developed certain categories that I address with the use of my interviews, observations and other sources. Those categories are management and personnel issues, indicators, formal constraints for the creation of a new Aldea Universitaria, types of Aldeas and political use of Aldeas Universitarias.

19 On May 9th 2014 during the Symposium called “Biographie — Gesellschaft — Geschichte” Hermilio Pereira dos Santos gave a speech titled “Action and relevance in biographical reconstruction: an approximation to the sociology of Gabriele Rosenthal”.

Chapter 1. Introduction 23

The chapter 7 can also be seen as a transition chapter into the results of my research. It offers a result oriented presentation of the biographical case reconstructions that I analyzed and the typology of inclusion experiences that I developed. My research distinguished among two types of biographical trajectories that my interviewees went through. Type A is called the chance seekers/ opportunity driven type, which means individuals who despite their educational discontinuity, managed to enter either the labor market or alternative educational paths. This type is subdivided into two subtypes: the redeemed and the relieved as I title them to differentiate how the individuals experienced access to Mission Sucre and their current status of being a higher education student by the time of the interviews. Type B, on the other hand, is what I call the overwhelmed/ the helpless, which means individuals who could not deal with the shortcomings or their structural and longterm educational interruption, given the tough circumstances that they had to cope with before the reforms. The chapter presents both types with the structural characteristics that form them and the respective cases that allowed me to create them.

The last chapter (chapter 8) of the dissertation is titled “Discussion of results”. Based on the typology developed in chapter 7 as well as the analysis of participant observations, global analyses, ethnographic interviews and my theoretical reflections, I address the research questions individually to discuss the biographical meaning of inclusion to higher education for Mission Sucre participants. I approach the research questions one by one in order to be able to examine on a concrete level the most relevant issues that I found but also to reflect on my own perception about how my perspective changed during the realization of this research project. Furthermore, I offer a theoretical discussion to be able to discuss both the particularities of the Venezuelan case but also a more abstract contribution for the current debate on higher education inclusion. In addition to that, the chapter continues with a discussion about the limitations of my research and an attempt to offer a prognosis about the perspectives of the phenomenon as a whole.

Chapter 2. Inclusion to (higher) education

The objective of this chapter is to elaborate on my understanding about (higher) educational inequality and how my research is conceptually delimited. It is divided into several sections to examine the development of the current debate on inclusion in the framework of higher education for all. Although my research is about a specific case in the Venezuelan higher education system, I will begin by locating my research within the field of sociology of education. A second part of the chapter presents a reflection on how even after major expansion waves of educational systems in the world, the phenomenon of social inequality persists almost everywhere but with differences depending on the context. I mean by this not only the differences in practical terms, but how even the theoretical and empirical focus of sociology of education has been affected by what happens in the specific society where the researcher is investigating. Given that I have concentrated to a large extent on social class inequality, which seems to be the most relevant analytical unit in contemporary Venezuela in the framework of Mission Sucre.

In order to be able to provide a complete overview of the literature and to be able to deliver a critical outlook for the identification of gaps, I will mention other relevant debates in the field such as gender, ethnicity, race and the intersectional perspective on inequality. Then, I will examine the shift from social inequality analysis to the “Inclusion Era”, where the trend is toward targeting all population groups, which ate labeled as being outside of the inner circle with the aim of acknowledging diversity, addressing conflicts and embracing differences. This is relevant for my research project because it deals with the potential of education to create an inclusive society. In other words, the expected outcome of educational inclusion is the likely resolution of societal inequality, exclusion and unfairness. Finally, the chapter will go on with a discussion on the Latin American context, specifically, recent trends when it comes to higher education inclusion among which one can find the higher education reforms that I address with my research.

2.1 Locating my research within the field of sociology of education

In general terms, one could argue that the main emphasis of sociology of education is the theoretical and empirical analysis of educational systems and the processes that occur within its institutions from the perspective of different actors. Its objective is to take into account and to reconstruct the meaning of these processes for society as a whole as well as their institutionalization in the specific historical and social context where they take place (Low, 2006). Dale (2001 page 27) offers a detailed definition of this by offering four imperative questions that guide the field:

‘Who gets taught what, how, by whom, and under what circumstances, conditions, contexts and resourcest; How, by whom and through what structures, institutions and processes are these matters defined, governed, organized and managed?'; What is the relationship of education as a social institution to other social institutions of the state, economy and civil society?; and “In whose interests are these things determined and what are their social and individual consequences?”

Becker (2009) divides the objectives of the sociology of education into clarification of phenomena, model/ theory development and problem solving (ie. projection and advice for policy development). Indeed, the sociology of education has often triggered policy developments. It has also reacted in order to understand and document processes that emerge as a combination of political, social and economic forces. This is one of the reasons why some authors express a need to clearly differentiate this discipline from the fields of pedagogy or educational sciences (Brúsemeister, 2008; Kupfer, 2011).