Reflexivity and agency: Critical realist and Archerian analyses of access and participation

It is often claimed that higher education represents an emancipatory project. Barnett (1990) argued that the overall project of higher education entails students learning to engage in critical self-reflection and to question what is taken for granted. Significant intellectual and personal growth can accompany participation in higher education. There have been suggestions also that society as a whole benefits. Gutmann (1987), for instance, claimed that higher education has an important part to play in establishing and maintaining democratic societies consisting of free citizens. It is evidently thus a cause for concern when rates of participation in higher education vary according to socio-economic status or ethnicity, for instance, given the inequalities that are likely to occur on a range of levels.