Negotiating Learning and Identity in Higher Education: Access, Persistence and Retention

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While access to higher education has increased globally, student retention has become a major challenge. This book analyses various aspects of the learning pathways of black students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds at a relatively elite, English-medium, historically white South African university. The students are part of a generation of young black people who have grown up in the new South Africa and are gaining access to higher education in unprecedented numbers. Based on two longitudinal case studies, Negotiating Learning and Identity in Higher Education makes a contribution to the debates about how to facilitate access and graduation of working-class students. The longitudinal perspective enabled the students participating in the research to reflect on their transition to university and the stumbling blocks they encountered in their senior years. The contributors show that the school-to-university transition is not linear or universal. Students had to negotiate multiple transitions at various times and both resist and absorb institutional, disciplinary and home discourses. The book describes and analyses the students' ambivalence as they straddle often conflicting discourses within their disciplines; within the institution; between home and the institution, and as they occupy multiple subject positions that are related to the boundaries of place and time. Each chapter also describes the ways in which the institution supports and/or hinders students progress, explores the implications of its findings for models of support and addresses the issue of what constitutes meaningful access to institutional and disciplinary discourses.

Reviews

Negotiating Learning and Identity is a must read for anyone in higher education. While the research is located in the specific context of the University of Cape Town, it speaks to global issues of access and retention, and the often conflicting intersections of race, gender, class, culture, home, school, and language as experienced by young working class students attempting to navigate what the authors aptly call the labyrinth of a university education. The book presents both a compelling challenge and ways forward to change institutional structures, support programs, and pedagogies to better support students academic and psycho-social growth throughout their years of study. * Anne Herrington, Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA *
The longitudinal studies in Kapp and Bangenis groundbreaking collection show how student identities cannot be fixed as disadvantaged or first generation, but instead are negotiated over time in institutional spaces mediated by discipline-specific practices. For anyone interested in understanding the stresses and strains of democratizing higher education in South Africa, this is the book to read. * Jonathan Trimbur, Professor, Emerson College, USA *

Author Bio

Bongi Bangeni is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Higher Education Development, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is a Mandela Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, USA. Rochelle Kapp is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.