In South Africa, students who are poor, black and come from rural communities with poorly resourced schools are vulnerable to being victims of epistemic injustice. This is because they are usually seen as under-appreciated knowers who have low (English) language proficiency and deficits in academic literacy. In an attempt to provide a nuanced characterisation of youth from rural areas, this paper reflects on one student's life-history interviews and his photo-story that form part of data collected since 2017 for Miratho-a project on achieved higher education learning outcomes for low-income university students. The paper uses a capabilities approach as an interpretive framework for the qualitative data and theorises that students' linguistic capital and narrative capital are epistemic materials that can be mobilised into the 'capability for epistemic contribution' as conceptualised by Miranda Fricker. The paper thus makes a case for higher education researchers and educators to recognise poor black youth from rural communities as both givers and takers of knowledge or 'epistemic contributors'. It argues that doing so constitutes an ethical response to the structural inequalities that limit equitable university access and participation for youth in this demographic.
This book explores learning outcomes for low-income rural and township youth at five South African universities. The book is framed as a contribution to southern and Africa-centred scholarship, adapting Amartya Sen’s capability approach and a framework of key concepts: capabilities, functionings, context, conversion factors, poverty and agency to investigate opportunities and obstacles to achieved student outcomes. This approach allows a reimagining of ‘inclusive learning outcomes’ to encompass the multi-dimensional value of a university education and a plurality of valued cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes for students from low-income backgrounds whose experiences are strongly shaped by hardship.
Based on capability theorising and student voices, the book proposes for policy and practice a set of contextual higher education capability domains and corresponding functionings orientated to more justice and more equality for each person to have the opportunities to be and to do what they have reason to value. The book concludes that sufficient material resources are necessary to get into university and flourish while there; the benefits of a university education should be rich and multi-dimensional so that they can result in functionings in all areas of life as well as work and future study; the inequalities and exclusion of the labour market and pathways to further study must be addressed by wider economic and social policies for ‘inclusive learning outcomes’ to be meaningful; and that universities ought to be doing more to enable black working-class students to participate and succeed.
Low-Income Students, Human Development and Higher Education in South Africamakes an original contribution to capabilitarian scholarship: conceptually in theorising a South-based multi-dimensional student well-being higher education matrix and a rich reconceptualisation of learning outcomes, as well as empirically by conducting rigorous, longitudinal in-depth mixed-methods research on students’ lives and experiences in higher education in South Africa. The audience for the book includes higher education researchers, international capabilitarian scholars, practitioners and policy-makers.
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