Non-completion amongst black working-class students in South African universities: the dangers of a single story

Abstract

Amid competing constructions of the educational achievement gap, understanding and responding equitably to racialized, gendered and classed educational experiences and outcomes remains a major research and policy concern for higher education globally. However, dominant representations of the problem of low retention and completion rates amongst students from marginalized communities in higher education remain fragmentary, incomplete and arguably unjust. Inspired by Carol Bacchi's WPR (What's the Problem Represented to be) approach and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's notion of danger of a single story and drawing from narrative accounts of student non-completion at a South African university, this article sets out to challenge and hopefully disrupt a punitive deficit, victim-blaming, colourblind and meritocratic single story through which the “problem” of high non-completion rates amongst financial aid funded black working-class students has been represented amongst scholars, media and policymaking circles. The implications of such a single story problematization on teaching and learning in unequal higher education contexts are considered. To the extent that power is the position to not only tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person, this article takes back that narrative power and foreground the voices and lived experiences that often go unheard as valid, valuable and critical in theorizing students' experiences of non-completion in HE. Given the acceleration of global inequality across class, gender and ethnic lines, South Africa being one of the most unequal societies in the world, can be seen as an extreme case of global patterns, and thus offers important insights for other contexts.