• Login
    View Item 
    •   KovsieScholar Home
    • KovsieJournals
    • Perspectives in Education
    • PiE 2014 Volume 32 Issue 3
    • View Item
    •   KovsieScholar Home
    • KovsieJournals
    • Perspectives in Education
    • PiE 2014 Volume 32 Issue 3
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Successful students’ negotiation of township schooling in contemporary South Africa

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    persed_v32_n3_a4.pdf (1.160Mb)
    Date
    2014
    Author
    Kapp, Rochelle
    Badenhorst, Elmi
    Bangeni, Bongi
    Craig, Tracy S.
    Janse van Rensburg, Viki
    Le Roux, Kate
    Prince, Robert
    Pym, June
    Van Pletzen, Ermien
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    This article draws on data from a larger longitudinal qualitative case study which is tracking the progress of students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a South African university. For this paper, we used background questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with 62 first-year students from working-class, township schools who were first registered for Extended Degree Programmes in 2009. The article draws on post-structuralist theory on learning and identity to describe and analyse the participants’ perspectives on how they negotiated their high school contexts. We analyse the subject positions in which participants invested, as well as how they negotiated their way through social networks and used resources. Our data illustrate the ways in which students had to carry the burden of negotiating their way through home, school and neighbourhood spaces that were generally not conducive to learning. Nevertheless, participants consciously positioned themselves as agents. They were resilient, motivated and took highly strategic adult decisions about their learning. We argue that a focus on how successful students negotiate their environments challenges the pathologising paradigm of “disadvantage” that characterises research and debates in higher education. It also offers an additional lens for admissions processes and for providing appropriate intervention strategies in the tertiary setting.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/11660/3725
    Collections
    • PiE 2014 Volume 32 Issue 3

    DSpace software copyright © 2002-2016  DuraSpace
    Contact Us | Send Feedback
     

     

    Browse

    All of KovsieScholarCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics

    DSpace software copyright © 2002-2016  DuraSpace
    Contact Us | Send Feedback