Breaking the barriers: supporting and engaging mature age first-infamily university learners and their families

This nuts and bolts session will report on preliminary findings from

research currently being conducted with older, first-in-family university

students. This student cohort often has family commitments and so the

research was specifically interested in the impacts of returning to

education for both the students and their family members. The study is

significant because mature age/first-in-family students are often at risk of

attrition and they also represent a growing student cohort; hence higher

education institutions need to be actively engaging with this group to

improve retention and explore the possibilities for intergenerational

educational participation. This research has been funded under the

Office of Teaching and Learning Seed Grant initiative and is a

partnership study between University of Wollongong, University of

Newcastle and Open Universities Australia. The project is innovative, as

it not only focuses on the students’ experiences but also, more

significantly, their families in order to better conceptualise family

discourses around how knowledge and learning are negotiated.