This paper reports on an international collaborative study that investigated how students from rural contexts negotiate the transition to university, and how prior cultural and educational experiences influence their higher education trajectories. A qualitative, participatory methodology was adopted, centred on co-researcher narratives, digital artefacts and discussions. Findings demonstrate how family and community, including religious, study, and self-help groups, influenced their transitions into higher education and journey through university and to their identities, agency and sense of belonging. The paper argues that university practices, values and norms need to acknowledge and incorporate all students' prior experiences and histories and recognise their powerful contribution in working towards a decolonial higher education.
The likely presentation of scientific knowledge as faithful copies of reality, as well as orderly activities from science textbooks, could lead novice students in the field of science to believe that the learning of scientific concepts such as accuracy, precision, and methods such as observations, among others, may only take place in the classroom. Contrary to how scientific concepts and methods are normally presented by means of empirical qualitative data, in this article, I argue that the abovementioned concepts and methods are likely to be encountered in the local rural home environments of students. Data was sourced from focus group interviews that were conducted with second-year science students at one of the historically white and privileged institutions in South Africa. This article aims to contribute in theoretically informed ways in terms of enhancing equity of success and social justice in the field of science in higher education. Social justice issues were conceptualized through Nancy Fraser’s normative framework of social justice. From this understanding, an argument is put forward that a sociological framework of critical realism and social realism has the potential to draw the scientific world into the social world. From this sociological framework, it is possible to develop an understanding of students’ prior experience and to draw on it in the classroom for better educational outcomes.
In higher education in South Africa, the home practices with scientific underpinnings students from rural areas bring with them to their learning are not clearly understood and, therefore, are often marginalized in university teaching and learning. In a context where issues of equity of access to higher education and success are highly politicized, the experiences of these students cannot be ignored. This paper argues against absenting the experiences of these students in higher education with a view to harnessing the resulting knowledge to facilitate access to formal, disciplinary science knowledge. The paper posits that the way in which science curriculum (and/or teaching and learning) is structured tends to favor certain world views and not others, as a consequence, students from rural areas are often alienated because how they have learned to see the world is often not used as a starting point or seen as relevant when teaching the science curriculum. In order to contextualize learning and teaching, the paper argues for Archer's social realism as a theoretical framework to access students' prior experiences to enrich the curriculum and the student experience more broadly
The dominant discourse in higher education which rather simplistically equates hard work with success, serves to privilege the already privileged, with their background in particular forms of knowledge and learning. The assumption that success in higher education could largely be explained through meritocracy based on hard work and bright minds only favors middle class students, globally, because of their privilege. This is because students’ enrollment in universities is linked to benefitting from powerful knowledge, but this is likely to be merged with the acquisition of the knowledge of the powerful, the middle and upper classes. Consequently, students from lower class backgrounds are unlikely to draw on knowledge resources that they bring with them to university. Through empirical qualitative data drawn from discussions of 2nd year science students at a historically white and privileged university, I argue that knowledges outside of the academy, for example, in rural homes could be used as a pathway to access powerful knowledge. I draw on the theoretical lenses of critical realism and social realism to develop an understanding of students’ prior experiences. A decolonial gaze is adopted to critique how university space, physical, ideological, and intellectual, could constrain access to powerful knowledge.
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