Trailblazing: Motivations and Relationship Impacts for First-in-Family Enabling Students

This chapter investigates the experiences of first-in-family enabling students as they reflect on their participation in university. Due to university outreach and participation agendas, this cohort is increasing annually in Australia although they are little researched. The data has been harvested from interviews and surveys and analysed using biographical method to explore these enabling students’ motivations and relationship impacts. The chapter shows how their motivations are deeply embedded and complexly formulated within temporal and relational contexts as well as within their broader social, cultural and economic locations. Their trailblazing engagement in higher education is shown to be a social as much as an individual action, having impacts far beyond the transformations that the enabling learner personally experiences.