PiE 2016 Volume 34 Issue 2
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Browsing PiE 2016 Volume 34 Issue 2 by Subject "Higher education"
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Item Open Access Race, gender and sexuality in student experiences of violence and resistances on a university campus(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2016) Cornell, Josephine; Ratele, Kopano; Kessi, ShoseWith the dismantling of apartheid in 1994, significant changes were made to higher education in South Africa. Access to higher education has expanded and student bodies are now more representative in terms of gender and race. However, demographic change alone is insufficient for higher education transformation. As in other parts of the world, within dominant educational discourses ideal students are still typically represented as white, middle-class, male, cisgender and heterosexual. Furthermore, students who occupy these categories tend to hold symbolic power within these institutions. Recently, student movements, starting with RhodesMustFall (RMF) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), have begun to challenge this and draw attention to these issues of transformation. This study was critically and empathically provoked by engagements around the RMF movement and aimed to examine students’ experiences of transformation in higher education relating to race, gender and sexuality at UCT. Photovoice methods (involving focus groups, personal reflections, photographs and written stories) were used to explore two groups of students’ experiences of non-direct, symbolic violence (i.e. issues of bathrooms, residences and campus art) and direct, physical violence on campus as well as these students’ resistances and disruptions to the violence they encountered.Item Open Access Shifting from disorientation to orientation: reading student discourses of success(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2016) Cloete, Nicola; Duncan, CatherineAcademic success in higher education is generally evaluated by means of concrete and measurable criteria that function as an institutional discourse of success. However, a parallel discourse of success that is far less evident is the languaging and identification of success or failure that students hold and circulate. This paper investigates what counts as success from students’ perspectives using a critical lens informed by Stuart Hall’s discursive analysis and James Gee’s inclusive articulation of discourse. We argue that students tend to describe and evaluate their success in a consistent way, making it more than a highly individualised set of statements. Being well versed in terms of “what counts” for the institution, we consider “what counts” for the students: what do they endorse, contest or negotiate as markers of success? We subsequently tease out the similarities and distinctions in these two discourses that function in parallel and read the recurring themes and nuances of (dis)orientation that come through in the interviews as markers for an alternative discourse of success or failure that stands alongside of (and occasionally in opposition to) the institutional discourse.Item Open Access Theorising a capability approach to equal participation for undergraduate students at a South African university(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2016) Calitz, Talita M. L.; Walker, Melanie; Wilson-Strydom, MerridyThis article applies a capability approach to the problem of unequal participation for working-class, first-generation students at a South African university. Even though access to higher education institutions is increasing for historically excluded students, when race and class disaggregate completion rates, there are persistent patterns of unequal participation. In the first part of the article, the capability approach is used to conceptualise dimensions of equal participation, which include resources, agency, recognition and practical reason. In the second part of the paper, these four principles are applied to an empirical case study, which is drawn from a longitudinal research project that tracked the equality of participation of undergraduate university students at a South African university. The article makes the case for pedagogical and institutional arrangements that enable equal participation for students who are precariously positioned at higher education institutions.