Avoiding deficit conceptualisations of students and their learning: methodological considerations

Abstract

The current climate of change confronting the higher education sector offers researchers unique opportunities to reflect on and review their research approaches and methodologies. Particularly in the South African context, where inequalities and racially defined disparities linked to student success continue to constrain other transformative gains, there is renewed urgency to reconsider how research agendas can show sensitivity towards avoiding deficit conceptualisations of students and their learning. This paper illustrates the research design and methodology of a recent ethnographic research study, which brought together an academic literacies perspective with Bernstein’s curriculum theory of knowledge recontextualisation. The distinct dual focus of the design and analysis framework, attending to both the student and the curriculum context, allows for exploring the student experience of assignment production without neglecting the influence of the curriculum on this activity. The existence of an interrelationship between students’ assignment production practices and curriculum decision making is shown, drawing on empirical data from the recent study. The ethnographic framing of the research methodology, with its emphasis on providing rich and detailed accounts, was further able to illustrate students’ agency as they worked with the assignment requirements. This paper demonstrates that when the research approach attends to the students and their learning, in ways that validate and affirm their perspectives, but also brings the curriculum into view, a credible way of explicitly avoiding deficit conceptualisations of students is possible.