Achieving socio-cultural student engagement through curriculum responsiveness

With democracy came political pressure to promote both academic access and success in higher education in South Africa. However, increased formal access has not necessarily provided meaningful access to previously disadvantaged learners, and this has resulted in high attrition and dropout rates. In response to this, I propose that life-world knowledge can enable meaningful engagement through the pedagogical incorporation of real-world experiences. Therefore, my aim in this study was to determine how curriculum responsiveness could be addressed in pedagogic practices to achieve epistemological access. I used the concept of autonomy to show empirically whether content can be related to a student's socio-cultural context to bring about curriculum responsiveness resulting in better student engagement. Thus, the epistemological stance of this research is qualitative in my drawing on data collected from curriculum documentation for a selected business subject at a University of Technology as the case study, to serve as a guiding principle for considering the appropriate pathways for enabling epistemological access.