EXPERIENCES
Amanda Hlengwa, Sioux McKenna and Thando Njovane
Introduction
The recent student protests that erupted in the South African higher education landscape in 2015 and 2016 suggest that research concerning student experiences in our institutions has become all the more crucial. In light of this, our chapter argues for theoretically rigorous and conceptually rich approaches to research on the student experience, without which we will not be in a position to address the significant concerns raised by these protests. There is, of course, already a robust body of work detailing the student experience (for example Case, 2013; Case, Marshall, McKenna, & Mogashana, 2018; Walker & Wilson-Strydom, 2017). However, questions are often raised about the extent to which such research is being drawn on in subsequent studies (Niven, 2012) and this suggests that limited accounts of student experience remain dominant despite this body of research (Boughey & McKenna, 2016). It thus seemed important to make sense of the ways in which current research on student experience is being constructed.
This chapter provides a meta-analysis of research on the student experience as evidenced in South African postgraduate theses in higher education. Postgraduate research is a useful place in which to reflect on current research approaches, given that postgraduate education contributes to the ‘boundaries of the field’ (Higher Education Qualifications Sub-Framework, 2013). By looking at what theories postgraduate students are drawing on and how they are conceptualising students in their studies of the student experience, we should be able to establish a sense of what is happening at the boundaries of the field. Postgraduate students have agency in selecting what topics to focus on and how to do so, but they are constrained and enabled by their structural and cultural contexts. The ways in which masters and doctoral scholars undertake their research would be strongly shaped by the ideas and texts introduced to them by supervisors. The theories they bring to their studies would be selected from those in circulation in the field. By analysing masters and doctoral theses on student experiences we
HigHer education PatHways
were thus not critiquing the work of these specific postgraduates, but rather we were making sense of the field. The methodological and theoretical lenses brought to any phenomenon, such as that of student experience, have implications for what we see, understand and recommend. The intention of this study was thus to illuminate the current boundaries of research into student experience and to raise concerns about blind spots that emerged through this analysis.
Our analysis of 123 masters and doctoral theses found that within the broad range of theoretical approaches are those that could be considered theoretically rigorous and those that seem to be drawing on more superficial engagement with theory, or even a misapplication of theory. And we found that the conceptualisation of the student oscillated between those accounts that focused on the individual in a decontextualised way and those that positioned the student experience within broader social structures.
Methodology
This study began when most universities had been shut down by student protests calling for the eradication of fees, alongside concerns about various aspects of the student experience ranging from the state of accommodation, and the perceived colonial nature of course content to the racially unrepresentative make-up of the professoriate (Luescher, Loader, & Mugume, 2017). During this time, the issue of student experience was, and continues to be, paramount and occupied significant space in the media and the higher education sector. We wanted, however, to step back from the turbulence caused by this transformative moment and try to make sense of how student experience is conceptualised by those researching it.
A critical discourse analysis was used to examine which topics are being focused on in the current research on the student experience. We then analysed the discursive constructions of students and student experiences, together with the theories being drawn on to make sense of these. The perspective underpinning this approach is an understanding that research is never neutral; that the selection of topics and the approaches through which to study them are influenced by both the graduate student and supervisor’s ‘personal projects’ (Archer, 2000, 2007); by their disciplinary histories, norms and values (Maton, 2014); by the research community in which they are studying (McKenna, 2017); and by the discourses available to them by which their experiences of reality are co-constructed (Archer, 2000; Fairclough, 2009). Discourses in this understanding are more than simply linguistic representations of meaning; they are understood to be mechanisms with the power to enable or constrain events and experiences (Archer, 2005). While discourses are not the only mechanisms at play in the construction of student experience in the 123 theses analysed here, they are understood to be significant (Fairclough, Jessop, & Sayer, 2002). Discourses are social in nature – they emerge from the supervisors’ concerns or the concerns of other researchers in the field, as much as from each postgraduate scholar’s personal projects, and they function as mechanisms alongside a myriad other mechanisms such as institutional structures and cultures.
In seeking to analyse the ways in which student experience is being researched in masters and doctoral studies, we adopted the time frame of studies completed between 2008 and 2017.
Having set our time frame, we then searched the e-repositories of public universities in South Africa and looked at titles and abstracts to identify those studies related to student experience.
Through online searches and email communication with institutional librarians, we were eventually able to develop a list of 123 theses that interrogated some aspect of student experience. These studies were entered into a spreadsheet with the following information: Title of study, Year of graduation, Masters or Doctorate, Institution of study (and institutional research site, if different), Language of study, Scale of study, Abstract, and then from the study abstract: Relevant findings, Theoretical frameworks and Data collection methods. Having thus prepared the data, we began by examining the topics that were covered within this broad area of ‘student experience studies’, together with the theoretical approaches being used by postgraduate researchers. We then analysed the ways in which the student was discursively conceptualised in the studies.
Table 1 Overview of doctoral and masters thesis data
Masters 102 Doctorate 21
Single site 105 Multi-site 18
Traditional university 100 Comprehensive university
12 University of technology
9 Private institution 2
Historically white
institutions 60 Historically black
institutions 12 Unspecified 51
Urban universities 92 Rural universities 25 Mix of rural & urban or unspecified
6
Table 1 provides an overview of the 123 studies. It should be noted that the university characteristics were taken as the one where the thesis was registered, unless there was clear evidence in the title or abstract that the site of the student experience being researched was a different university (or universities) to the one where the masters or doctoral qualification was undertaken. The table above reveals the dominance of historically white institutions as study sites. This situation is evident across many other chapters in this book and speaks to the continued dominance of historically white and traditional universities in research productivity (see Cloete, Mouton, & Sheppard, 2016). This trend further suggests that, over and above the concerns about the theoretical frames and conceptualisations of student experiences that are raised in the rest of this chapter, there is a significant lack of studies exploring student experience in historically black universities. There is also a disparity in representation across institutional types, with 81% of the studies being undertaken in traditional universities, with little research focused on comprehensive universities and universities of technology and scant attention given to private institutions.
HigHer education PatHways
Across the whole sample, 83% were masters studies, which is in line with the national average of 82% of combined masters and doctoral graduations in South Africa being at masters level (Council on Higher Education, 2017). Moreover, 112 of the 123 studies were empirical, most were qualitative and medium to large scale (over 50 participants), and 85% were based in single sites. There is reason for concern about the large number of single site studies, many of which were within a single classroom, as there was not much scope for sector-wide understandings to emerge within a specific masters or doctoral study. This speaks to the concern raised in the National Research Foundation (2009) report on education research in South Africa, where 94% of education research was found to be small-scale. Given the time constraints of a masters or doctoral study, perhaps it is not surprising that most took place in one setting. While such studies enable rich analysis of thick data, they do not necessarily allow for system-level accounts of student experience. Single site studies are not in themselves problematic, but when they comprise the bulk of the studies being undertaken, we need to examine whether our research is structured in ways that can illuminate systemic problems.
It should be noted that our analysis of the data only went as far as the thesis title and abstract, and, in a few cases, a brief look at the study’s introduction and concluding chapters.
A thorough analysis of the full 123 theses would no doubt allow for more nuanced findings.
We would however argue that because the abstract that is uploaded onto various databases is meant to be able to ‘stand alone’ as the representation of the study, it is a significant piece of data from which to make sense of the study focus, the theoretical approach and the discursive constructions of the student.
The remainder of this paper looks at four issues emerging from this research. The first is about the use of theory in the studies and the implications this has for the kinds of conclusions that can be reached; the second, third and fourth issues relate to the discourses whereby students are conceptualised across the theses. Firstly, we consider examples where the student is constructed as a customer and the role of the university is to be efficient in serving the customer. Next, we look at examples where the student is decontextualised from her social context and background and understood as an individual possessing (or lacking) certain inherent attributes. Finally, we look at those studies, in the minority, that explicitly considered issues of institutional context and other larger structures in their interrogation of the student experience.