Variation in Black students’ conceptions of academic support

Abstract

The persistence of degree‐awarding gaps and anti‐Black racism warrant an exploration of the quality and effectiveness of academic support offered to Black undergraduate students in British higher education, and how such support is perceived by students. Our phenomenographic study found that Black students’ conceptions of academic support range from broad expectations of help with their studies to more advanced understandings of their own agency and the context of academic support. Our results highlight that attempts to enhance academic support should revisit three interconnected areas: what type of academic support is provided, where, and by whom. Most importantly, we propose a new inclusive direction that replaces existing deficit models with approaches that will strengthen Black students’ agential effectiveness within historically White institutions.

Phenomenographic Approaches in Research About Nursing

“…In a phenomenographic study, categories of description depict the qualitatively different ways in which a phenomenon is understood; the logical and structural relationship between these categories constitutes the outcome space of the phenomenon (Marton, 1986;Mimirinis et al, 2023). Within the outcome space the more advanced categories at the top of the hierarchy include elements of those at lower levels, but not the reverse.…”