Who are my students?
Our job is to teach the students we have.
Not the ones we would like to have.
Not the ones we used to have.
Those we have right now.
All of them.
– Dr. Kevin Maxwell
I am teaching at a University of Technology, which comes with its own preconceptions about what knowledge is valued and how it should be taught. There is a focus on practical knowledge and competency training. This makes my classroom context very different to a traditional university, where knowledge construction is held in more esteem and conceptual skills are more valued than practical execution.
Frequently, South African students decide to go to a UoT because it is ‘easier’ and requires lower points for entry. Fashion in particular is often viewed by students as ‘easy’. Students have an impression of how it will be to study fashion on entering the course. Dall’Alba (2009: 5) argues that even students with no experience of what it means to be a discipline professional “bring with them some notion of what these professions entail that, initially at least, underpins their becoming.” These students have a different understanding/perception socially, personally and culturally coming in to the fashion course. I have had the same conversations with many different students throughout the years who all told me how shocked they were in the beginning by how difficult and demanding the course actually was. There is a difference between what students know and feel and what I know and feel about the course and about what it entails. I am trying to understand why there is a mismatch and how I can bridge this. I am seeking a middle ground.
Learning is an emotional construct (Christie et al. 2007) and as such, it is impossible to separate the learner from the learning. This makes it imperative to understand who my students are, in order to negotiate the most effective teaching strategy for them and engage them emotionally.
The 2016 South African Survey of Student Engagement (SASSE 2016) revealed deep concerns about the reality many DUT students face. Almost one third (28% of first year and 30% of senior) of students worry about paying for food "most days" or "every day". Most DUT students worry about paying for their tuition "most days" or "every day" (73% of first years and 60% of senior students). This highlights what many DUT lecturers already know, that our students are mostly from lower income households. This is something I encounter frequently, where my students cannot afford the taxi fare to come to campus, or miss many lectures because they need to go to the finance office to sort out their fees.
According to the same report, the DUT has a higher than national average of first-generation students, meaning that most of our students are the first person in their family to attend a university. This means that many of them do not know what to expect from a university, nor do they know where to get help when they aren't coping. This problem is also exaggerated by a high number of students from rural and peri-rural areas, some of whom have never used a computer before. These students come into a classroom with students of diverse races, religions and cultures that they have never interacted with in any meaningful way before. The culture shock is often alienating. For more information on "Who are our Students" at an institutional level, please see our work (Xulu-Gama, Nhari, Alcock and Cavanagh 2018).
Christie, H., Tett, L., Cree, V.E., Hounsell, J., and McCune, V. 2007. 'A real rollercoaster of confidence and emotions’: Learning to be a university student. Studies in Higher Education 33 (5) 567-581.
Dall’Alba, G. 2009. Learning professional ways of being: Ambiguities of becoming. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41(1), 34-45.
South African Survey of Student Engagement. (2016). Institutional Report: Durban University of Technology (Institutional Report: Durban University of Technology ed.). Bloemfontein: University of the Free State.
Xulu-Gama, N., Nhari, S.R., Alcock, A. and Cavanagh, M., 2018. A student-centred approach: a qualitative exploration of how students experience access and success in a South African University of Technology. Higher Education Research & Development, pp.1-13.
Although my students come from very different backgrounds, I make it a priority to ensure that I am not denying students epistemological access. I do this primarily by trying to structure all projects to be done on campus where possible. Our campus offers specialized equipment such as large scale pattern making tables, standard sized dress forms (mannequins), and specialized punches. All students have equal access to this on campus. Furthermore, students are supplied with the necessary paper (large scale sheets of newsprint and brown paper as well as pattern board) on campus, so my projects do not require students to spend money to succeed.
Where assessments become more authentic, the nature of the projects changes. I try and approach all of these with care, to ensure my students are not 'punished' by their lack of resources. For example, in the Sleeves Project, I asked students to construct videos. Instead of expecting them to all have smart phones with good quality cameras, I gave them the option of using whatever they wanted to film with, but any of them could use the document camera in the classroom to record. When they needed to edit their videos, they were once again allowed to use whatever software they liked, but free options were provided and were installed on computers on campus for them to use if they did not have laptops or computers. I would also like to point out that this project put students into groups of their own choosing, and this also seemed to help give parity of access, as most of the time at least one student had some technological skill. The results of this project are wonderful every year, as students are given the freedom to do what suits them best but with support and scaffolding from the lecturer. Please see snippets from the 2017 project here and the 2014 project here.