Introduction

I was drawn to include this ‘blog’ by the short quotation I included in it from the late Maya Angelou (1928–2014),

If you are going down a road and don't like what's in front of you, and look back and don't like what you see, get off the road. Create a new path!

This appeals to me even now, three years after I first wrote the piece, for its brutal naivety and, because of that, the way it points us to ask ourselves some very basic questions about what we are doing.

But does the reality of our lives trying to deliver wider participation and success in higher education and beyond allow us to meet the challenge Angelou’s set for us? Unfortunately, constraints of the structures of power within which we work and the policies we must adhere to, most often prevent any simple solutions such as those some people may interpret in the quotation.

Nevertheless, the blog presents ways to rise to the challenge by changing our discourse. Looking back, critically, on the language we have used for so long to describe what we are doing, and considering alternative options, might just enable us to develop strategies for lasting, sustainable change.

The piece argues, briefly, for a new narrative of ‘engagement’. But this is only one way in which we might ‘create a new path’ as Angelou puts it.

Whichever path is chosen by those now leading this field – whether in institutions, locally, nationally or even internationally – it is crucial in my considered view that a new one is found.