Clone of Save the Date: Equity & Access to Higher Education for Mature Students Research Symposium

The overarching purpose of the proposed two-day symposium is to disseminate existing knowledge on mature students’ access to higher education (HE) and to build a network of scholars and practitioners to support equity and access work for mature students across Canada and internationally. The symposium also seeks to identify gaps and future research directions on mature students’ access to HE and access programs that help mature students make the transition to HE.

The symposium will bring together adult and continuing education scholars, community educators, student services personnel, alumni and policy makers, to exchange research knowledge and best practices related to conceptualizing equity and access to HE for mature students. The symposium will provide opportunities for networking, collaboration, and exchange of ideas between internationally renowned scholars of adult and continuing education who focus on mature students, TYP alumni with lived experience of equity and access to HE, community educators who work to provide access to HE through advocacy, advising and support, and access program and student services personnel who work with mature students in HE.

As a forum for knowledge exchange and translation it will achieve this goal through panel presentations that feature researchers and practitioners presenting short papers, followed by dialogue facilitated by scholars in adult and continuing education. The final session of the symposium will feature a roundtable discussion among symposium participants on the future of equity and access for mature students in times of crisis.

Specifically, the objectives of the symposium are:

• To share existing knowledge on mature students’ access to HE
• To support reciprocal relationships and knowledge exchange between scholars, administrators and other knowledge users
• To identify knowledge gaps and future research directions to support equity and access work for mature students across Canada and internationally.

HE access is a relatively new area of scholarship in Canada, so the proposed research symposium, which builds a foundation for praxis for mature students’ access to HE is extremely timely.