Boughey and McKenna (2015, 2016) used the term ‘decontextualised learner’ to describe the ways in which students are often understood as separate from the socio-cultural world. Within this discourse, the student is stripped of heritage, norms, values and social practices. Her success and failure in higher education is understood to emerge from characteristics inherent in her as an individual. She is motivated, intelligent, good at English, etc. Or she is not.
Understood as such, any potential problems experienced by the student are seen as stemming from her own innate attributes (or lack thereof). This discourse was evident in various ways in much of the data. Student failure was ascribed to factors such as age, under-preparedness, lack of language or academic skills (which were understood to be neutral), or their having poor problem-solving abilities.
... explore whether factors … predictive of performance … cognitive learning style, learning strategies employed, motivation … (M19)
… fail to demonstrate resilience when it comes to being academically successful.
(M8)
… lacked effective coping strategies such as time management. (M27)
… high emotional intelligent and constructive emotion-regulation strategies in order to achieve student success. (M54)
How do pre-entry academic and non-academic factors influence students’ first-year experience and academic performance? (D95)
The focus was identifying and itemising the factors constraining student success. These were often understood exclusively in terms of the students’ attributes and where they were more broadly conceptualised, they were still seen to be discrete issues rather than understood as complex intersectional social mechanisms, for example:
Not only are some of these students academically disadvantaged, but others are also drawn from communities with low socio-economic status. (M16)
HigHer education PatHways
The responsibility of the university under such a conception would seem to be (a) to select students wisely and (b) to provide them with opportunities to acquire any (neutral) skills they may be lacking due to poor prior schooling.
The academic selection criteria and its impact on throughput rates ... will become the subject of research scrutiny. (M96)
The dominant focus on attributes assumed to be either inherent or lacking in the student can be seen to reinforce the notion that higher education is a meritocracy in which the hard working and the bright are duly rewarded (see also Armstrong & Hamilton, 2013;
Guinier, 2016; Mettler, 2014). This ignores the international literature that shows consistent correlation between university success and students’ socio-economic background (e.g. Arum, Gamoran, & Shavit, 2012; Walpole, 2003), a correlation that takes a racialised form in South Africa (Council on Higher Education, 2017).
Where problems of student throughput and retention were interrogated within the 123 theses analysed here, there was largely a silence on how the norms, values, structures and practices of the institution, society, academics etc. might play a role. For example, one thesis appears to acknowledge the ways in which social structures are implicated in the gendered differentiation of success in Accounting: ‘Accounting is a male dominated profession historically. Females underperform and are thus dissuaded from taking up this profession.’
The solution however does not reflect a desire to better understand and address such issues;
instead it is: ‘... the need of the hour to understand the educational psychology of female accounting students in higher education’ (M98).
It may well be the case that each of the many studies that focused on characteristics of individual students justified this stance and articulated the limitations in such an approach within the thesis itself in ways that we did not ascertain from the abstract. Furthermore, taken separately, such studies are not particularly problematic, but collectively they raise concerns about the dominant lenses being brought to bear in research on the student experience. When the overwhelming majority of studies take such an approach, there is a question to be asked about the conceptualisation of the student. Notions of the student as a social being, the university as a social construct, and higher education practices as political were greatly overshadowed by the dominance of studies in which success or failure is primarily seen to emerge from the attributes inherent in the individual.
Where other issues beyond the factors deemed to be inherent in the student were considered in the studies, such as institutional culture, these were still largely in terms of the implications for the student rather than for the institutional culture itself:
What are the major challenges educationally disadvantaged students face at a predominantly white, Afrikaans university and how do [these students] function within the university. (M24)
It has now been recognised that students are in need of a strong foundation that will bridge the gap from school to university and will allow them to cope. (M94)
Aligned to the ‘decontextualised learner’ discourse, it is perhaps unsurprising that a number of these studies proffered solutions to the problem of poor student success through remedial add-on interventions. These recommendations included calls for academic support in the form of additional tutorials, supplementary instruction, online courses or enhanced orientation programmes. Such initiatives may well be beneficial to the student, and studies into their effectiveness are useful contributions to the field of student experience research, but they are arguably based on the premise that both the problem and the solution rest outside of the core university structures and cultures, the curriculum content or the teaching and assessment approaches. The university remains largely untouched while students are slotted into various initiatives to fix the lacks they have.
Evaluations of such add-on initiatives often acknowledged that there were difficulties with their implementation such as ‘minimal student participation in all programmes, including those that were compulsory’ (D44), ‘stigmatization’ (D52), and ‘poor perceptions about these programmes’ (M67). The use of under-qualified staff hired on contract to run these add-on initiatives was also flagged as an issue, as has also been noted in the literature (CHE, 2017; Dhunpath & Vithal, 2014; Moyo, 2018). But the proposed solution to the particular problem of under-qualified staff offering such initiatives seemed to reiterate the a-theoretical common sense approach:
... an intensive and ongoing training of all facilitators in functional literacies, basic counselling and handling diversity … (D44)
Most of the evaluations of add-on initiatives that identified the problems inherent in them called for improved versions of add-on initiatives. There were very few studies that called for a significant re-thinking of the entire approach, as this one did:
... although [the intervention] facilitated students’ entry into the university, it simultaneously ... exacerbated their experiences of exception. ... although the university has made major structural changes to accommodate students from disadvantaged educational backgrounds, the ideas that shape the [intervention]
perpetuate the view that these students have an educational ‘deficit’. In conclusion, the study suggests that higher education should reconsider the idea of separate programmes ... (D80)
While the dominant understanding in the 123 studies we analysed was that of the student experience as emerging primarily from the attributes of the individual, there were certainly
HigHer education PatHways
also studies that offered a more nuanced interrogation of the student experience and it is to these that we now turn.