Building an outreach culture for fairer access to higher education in Haryana, India: a ‘bottom up’ contribution to policy implementation
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Date
2023
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Abstract
This article is concerned with an institutional initiative designed to encourage the development of an
outreach culture which can support fairer, more equal, access to higher education (HE) in India. The
initiative constituted the final impact phase of a five-year research Fair Chance Foundation (FCF)
project (2017-2022) which explored gendered pathways to fair access to HE in the northern Indian
state of Haryana.
We present the methodology used to prepare a toolkit, named an Outreach Activity Resource (OAR),
which enabled staff in government colleges in Haryana to plan and conduct pilot ‘taster days’. The
article provides an assessment of the outcome of these events. It argues that a practitioner as
researcher methodology and a collaborative ‘bottom up’ research approach provides the basis for
the development of contextually appropriate outreach activities to support fairer, more equal,
access to higher education (HE).
We argue that the adoption of ‘top down’ initiatives, in very different economic, social and cultural
contexts to the those where they were originated, may fail to address the way in which the local
‘problem’ presents itself and may hinder the development of a contextually informed outreach
culture which will support fairer, more equal access to HE. In contrast, initiatives such as the one
present here, can contribute essential locally informed expertise, built on contextually informed
research, to national and international policy making in relation to widening access to HE in an era in
which massification is extending across the globe.