In this paper -- where we will draw on data from a small scale longitudinal study of young people's post-COVID aspirations and sense of their futures in a de-industrialising city -- we will suggest that Appadurai's (2004) ideas about the 'capacity to aspire' encourages us to shift our focus from the 'aspirations' of individual young people to…

Purpose: This study aims to compare Chinese students' educational and career trajectories in Japan and Australia and to explore the factors that have influenced their choices that shaped their trajectories. Design/methodology/approach: The authors applied the push-pull and life planning models to compare the factors that shaped the Chinese…

Students' out-of-school science participation has been identified as a factor that supports adaptive science outcomes. Researchers have largely investigated students' out-of-school science participation in terms of structured science activities (e.g., attending a science camp), with far less consideration of how students' involvement in…

While university participation rates among Indigenous Australians have been on the rise in recent years, parity targets remain elusive. In this context, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how aspirations for higher education are formed and nurtured. Studies tend to focus on barriers to access, often in ways that position Indigenous…

While studies on refugee-background students in school contexts have been prolific, research of this population in higher education or post-tertiary education is still emergent. The paper attends to this gap by drawing on the narratives of five refugee-background young adults who are undertaking Australian higher education or have completed…

Parents' beliefs, values and associated everyday practices can play an influential role in their children's educational environment. This paper reports on a subsection of data from a larger qualitative study on how immigrant parents' cultural beliefs, values and everyday practices contributed to shaping their young children's early engagement in…

SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timed) are advocated as the gold standard for goal setting. However, goals which are non-specific and exploratory, referred to as 'open goals', may be preferred in specific circumstances. In this pre-registered experiment, we compared SMART goals, compared to do-your-best (DYB), and…

Both government reports and academic literature concur in claiming that the low standing of vocational education and training (VET) and the occupations it serves in the community is a major problem for increasing the engagement in this educational sector in an era of high aspiration. An initial analysis from a project capturing school students,…

Internationally, recent population movements due to conflict, climate change and global inequality have resulted in increased cultural and linguistic diversity in many societies. As a result, education systems are increasingly grappling with how to adapt practice to provide educational access and opportunities with increasingly diverse student…

Despite the shift from elite to mass education, the odds of accessing university remain stacked in favour of those with a university-educated parent. Not only are first-generation students less likely to engage in higher education, but the dominant narrative surrounding their enrolment emphasises cultural deficiency, constructing individuals as…

This paper is a retrospective exploration of the long-term and deep-reaching impact of an educational aspirations program, "Burunga M Gambay (Learning together)" (BMG, 2012), on the career pathways and life-long learning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander high school students. The current project, "where are the Ghundus…

Improving the academic and social outcomes of boys -- specifically boys from low-SES backgrounds -- remains of international importance. With this in mind, research continues to document the ways in which relational learning is integral for the well-being of students, specifically those students in disadvantaged school contexts. This paper focuses…

An important goal for educators is to foster student engagement in order to support a sense of valuing and aspiring to higher levels of education. To value education, students need to perceive that they are welcome, express their ideas and engage meaningfully in each education space they enter. Therefore, 'pupil voice' has the potential to become…

In the context of a stark discrepancy in the educational outcomes of Aboriginal Australians compared to non-Aboriginal Australians, this article aims to contribute the voices of rural Aboriginal high school students to the discourse. This article utilises an appreciative enquiry approach to analyse the opinions and aspirations of 12 Aboriginal…

To address social inequality, many western governments have sought to pursue principles of 'widening participation' as a key policy response in higher education. Though originally intended to complement social justice policy agendas, alignment of education policies with broader neoliberal policy frameworks has led policymakers, such as those in…