{"title":"An exploration of African-student agency: Placing students from historically disadvantaged communities at the centre","authors":"D. Larey","doi":"10.38140/pie.v41i4.6891","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"At the national universities within South Africa, various events during the past years indicate that students suffer under different kinds of oppression. It is widely acknowledged that students from poor, rural geographical areas find the university space alienating and not speaking to their life worlds. In this paper I respond to Fataar’s (2019) notion of the “misrecognised” university student in the South African context. My focus on students coming from historically disadvantaged communities aims to contribute to ongoing debates about social justice for students in the university sector. The problem to be addressed in this paper is the misalignment between the critical horizontal knowledge ofhistorically disadvantaged students and the knowledge codes of the university relating to learning, curriculum, and pedagogical practices. I therefore argue that if university institutional practices recognise, embrace, and align with students’ agency, resilience and adaption, a reframed institutional platform could engage students in their intellectual becoming. Furthermore, I am guided by two questions: 1) How can students from historically disadvantaged communities use their critical horizontal knowledges to connect with disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge of the university to enhance critical specialised consciousness in the becoming of ethical humans? and 2) How can an African theorisation of student agency form the basis to consciously reframe the core institutional function of the university? In responding to these questions, I locate my arguments in African-student agency, reviewing literature by African scholars to gain an understanding of the African concept of student agency.","PeriodicalId":19864,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Education","volume":"63 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Perspectives in Education","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.38140/pie.v41i4.6891","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"Social Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
At the national universities within South Africa, various events during the past years indicate that students suffer under different kinds of oppression. It is widely acknowledged that students from poor, rural geographical areas find the university space alienating and not speaking to their life worlds. In this paper I respond to Fataar’s (2019) notion of the “misrecognised” university student in the South African context. My focus on students coming from historically disadvantaged communities aims to contribute to ongoing debates about social justice for students in the university sector. The problem to be addressed in this paper is the misalignment between the critical horizontal knowledge ofhistorically disadvantaged students and the knowledge codes of the university relating to learning, curriculum, and pedagogical practices. I therefore argue that if university institutional practices recognise, embrace, and align with students’ agency, resilience and adaption, a reframed institutional platform could engage students in their intellectual becoming. Furthermore, I am guided by two questions: 1) How can students from historically disadvantaged communities use their critical horizontal knowledges to connect with disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge of the university to enhance critical specialised consciousness in the becoming of ethical humans? and 2) How can an African theorisation of student agency form the basis to consciously reframe the core institutional function of the university? In responding to these questions, I locate my arguments in African-student agency, reviewing literature by African scholars to gain an understanding of the African concept of student agency.
期刊介绍:
Perspectives in Education is a professional, refereed journal, which encourages submission of previously unpublished articles on contemporary educational issues. As a journal that represents a variety of cross-disciplinary interests, both theoretical and practical, it seeks to stimulate debates on a wide range of topics. PIE invites manuscripts employing innovative qualitative and quantitative methods and approaches including (but not limited to) ethnographic observation and interviewing, grounded theory, life history, case study, curriculum analysis and critique, policy studies, ethnomethodology, social and educational critique, phenomenology, deconstruction, and genealogy. Debates on epistemology, methodology, or ethics, from a range of perspectives including postpositivism, interpretivism, constructivism, critical theory, feminism, post-modernism are also invited. PIE seeks to stimulate important dialogues and intellectual exchange on education and democratic transition with respect to schools, colleges, non-governmental organisations, universities and technikons in South Africa and beyond.