Placing students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds at the epistemic centre of the university

Introduction In the national universities of South Africa, various events during the past years indicate that students find the university space challenging and far removed from their worlds in historically disadvantaged places (Fataar, 2019). After South Africa was democratized, increasingly non-traditional students entered higher education institutions. Prior research in this field shows that universities generally do not recognize historically disadvantaged students and their concomitant capital entering the university (Cross and Atinde, 2015). In their core institutional function, universities do not usually cater to students who follow non-traditional pathways into higher education (Fataar, 2012). A deficit assumption in many scholarly literatures is that students entering non-traditional pathways into higher education are ´unprepared´, usually do not understand what the expectation is from the university, and struggle to get familiar with the academic culture of the university. In this regard, Boughey (2007) proclaims that with the massification of higher education in South Africa, students arrive on university campuses with different contexts relating to socio-political backgrounds, cultures, languages, and ideologies. The reality is that universities cannot assume that all students´ life worlds and knowledges can be derived from merely one layer of society. The problem to be addressed in the study is that students experience challenges and difficulties because of their unique historical circumstances to achieve academic success in the university that they experienced as a place of disconnect. Aim and objectives In this qualitative study, I want to capture how historically disadvantaged students transact their educational becoming in the context of living and learning in the space of a university. Therefore, the aim of the study is to explore how historically disadvantaged students navigate their academic pathways in the light of hardship determined by their unique historical circumstances to achieve success in the university they experience as a place of disconnect. The following objectives have emerged in line with the aim: • To engage in reflections with historically disadvantaged students, unearthing the challenges, difficulties, and achievements they met in their everyday learning environments. • To explore how autobiographical questionnaires and semi-structured interviews can capture the subjectivities and the emergent nature of student agency under challenging circumstances to obtain epistemic success in the university. I locate my arguments in Critical Realism, using the work of Roy Bhaskar (1978; 1993). Using this lens, I argue for a dialectical acknowledgment of the historically disadvantaged student living in the shadows of the university. It is necessary to make arguments for students coming from areas where colonized and apartheid legacies still influence their daily lives. Methodology Nine undergraduate education students on two campuses of one national university in South Africa participated in the study. The participants were all Black students from historically disadvantaged communities in small towns from different provinces in the country. They were purposively selected to serve the study´s purpose. These students were from poor working-class families living in historically segregated locations, as was the case under the previous apartheid dispensation in the country. Autobiographical questionnaires and semi-interviews were used to capture the subjectivities and the emergent nature of student agency, learning, and living in difficult circumstances to obtain epistemic success in the university. The different research methods in the study were used to introduce the marginalized voices of these students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, providing counternarratives that could dispute distorted accounts of who they are. Findings Historically disadvantaged students who enter the university in a non-traditional way realize for them to be successful in their university studies, they need the formal academic capital of the university. Realizing that they do not have the cultural capital that middle-class students have (see Bourdieu, 1993; 2003) they engage in broader educational and social practices to step into disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge of the university. Students use their agency and sense of self-awareness to confront their difficulties and act differently to progress academically. These students´ transversal/ empowering practices fill the gap between their horizontal engagement and the formal academic structures of the university. This finding aligns with Cross and Atinde´s findings (2015), which illustrated that students take on challenges and opportunities that initiate their sense of purpose. Once the university acknowledges students for who they are, they establish a systematic link between inaccurate beliefs and oppressive social structures and provide a reason for transforming oppressive structures (see Bhaskar, 1993) so that historically disadvantaged students can accomplish individual and communal strives. Significance of the research for education practice The study emphasizes the need for the university to reframe its core institutional function to incorporate all students´ institutional and intellectual practices as the epistemic ground on which the university can operate. The misrecognition of the humanness of the historically disadvantaged student in her/his educational becoming should be foregrounded by a strong appeal for a more accurate and less distorted account of humans. References: Bhaskar, R. 1978. A Realist Theory of Science. Brighton: Harvester Press. Bhaskar, R. 1993. Dialectic the pulse of freedom. London: Verso. Boughey, C. 2007. Educational development in South Africa: From social reproduction to capitalist expansion. Higher Education Policy, 20(1): 5-18. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300140 Bourdieu, P. 1993. The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. 2003. Systems of education and systems of thought. International Social Science Journal, 21(3): 338-358. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000018693 Cross, M. & Atinde, V. 2015. The pedagogy of the marginalised: Understanding how historically disadvantaged students negotiate their epistemic access in a diverse university environment. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 37: 308-325. https://www.uj.ac.za/wpcontent/uploads/2021/09/the-pedagogy-of-the-marg…. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2015.1065617 Fataar, A. 2012. Pedagogical justice and student engagement in South African schooling: Working with the cultural capital of disadvantaged students. Perspectives in Education, 30(4):5275. https://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/pie/article/view/1782 Fataar, A. 2019. Academic conversation: From the shadows of the university's epistemic centre: Engaging the (mis)recognition struggles of students at the post-apartheid university. Southern African Review of Education, 25(2): 22-23. https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-sare-v25-n2-a3