Successful students’ negotiation of township schooling in contemporary South Africa

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Date
2014Author
Kapp, Rochelle
Badenhorst, Elmi
Bangeni, Bongi
Craig, Tracy S.
Janse van Rensburg, Viki
Le Roux, Kate
Prince, Robert
Pym, June
Van Pletzen, Ermien
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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.