Shifting the blame in higher education – social inclusion and deficit discourses

Abstract

The principles of social inclusion have been embraced by institutions across the higher education sector but their translation into practice through pedagogy is not readily apparent. This paper examines perceptions of social inclusion and inclusive pedagogies held by academic staff at an Australian university. Of specific interest were the perceptions of teaching staff with regard to diverse student populations, particularly students from low socio-economic (LSES) backgrounds, given the institution's reasonably high proportion of LSES student enrolment (14%). A mixed-method approach was utilised: (i) in-depth interviews with a representative sample of academic staff and (ii) an online survey targeting all academic staff across the institution. The results point to the dual responsibilities of students and institutions in enacting inclusivity in order to move beyond reductive standpoints that simply apportion blame.

Students’ reception of peer assessment of group-work contributions: problematics in terms of race and gender emerging from a South African case study

“…Their level of preparedness has long been a subject of national and institutional discussion. Blanket labelling of all black students by such deficit discourses, which are themselves problematic (O'Shea et al 2016), are not uncommon (nor specific to South Africa, see McKay & Devlin 2016). Such discourses emerged as playing out in the perceptions of these students to the peer assessment of group-members' contributions, and unwittingly supporting both bias and RS-race.…”

What Is Deficit Thinking? An Analysis of Conceptualizations of Deficit Thinking and Implications for Scholarly Research

“…Finally, several researchers apply the concept of deficit thinking in their analyses without explicitly defining it (Cooper, Cooper, & Baker, 2016;Corcoran, 2015;Hardy 1. Deficit thinking has been discussed using several different terms, including deficit assumptions (Thomas, 2010), deficit discourse (Lawrence, 2008;Pica-Smith & Veloria, 2012), deficit framing or deficit framework (Zeidler, 2016), deficit ideology (Gorski, 2008(Gorski, , 2011(Gorski, , 2016Sleeter, 2004), and deficit model (Pica-Smith & Veloria, 2012;Sondermeyer, van den Berg, & Brown, 2005;Swadener & Lubeck, 1995), deficit paradigm (Ford, 2014;Moletsane, 2012;Vass, 2012), deficit theory (Collins, 1988;Dudley-Marling, 2007;Gorski, 2008;Knight, 2002;Ladson-Billings, 2007), deficit thinking (Ford & Grantham, 2003;Knight, 2002;Licona, 2013;McKay & Devlin, 2016;O'Shea, Lysaght, Roberts, & Harwood, 2016;Pérez, Ashlee, Do, Karikari, & Sim, 2017;Valencia, 1997), and some combination of two or more of the aforementioned terms (Bruton & Robles-Piña, 2009;Sharma, 2018). We use the term deficit thinking in our discussion but include literature utilizing all of these terms in our analysis.…”

‘Get Ready’: Improving the Transition Experience of a Diverse First Year Cohort Through Building Student Agency

“…Lawrence (2005) describes a 'deficit-discourse shift' away from a construction of students themselves as lacking in certain competences and thus in need of remediation (p. 243). There is now increasing recognition that 'higher education institutions themselves are underprepared for meeting the needs of the changing student body' (Smit, 2012, p.374), and that characterising certain student groups as deficient only results in perpetuating inequality and exclusion (O'Shea, Lysaght, Roberts, & Harwood, 2016).…”