Discourses of deficit

I've been inspired by being challenged. I completed my review of three papers written by Tamsin Haggis and she has inspired me by challenging me to 'think differently' about student learning in higher education. I don't think her ideas are completely new to me, but maybe I'm just more receptive to them now. The main argument that she makes is that thinking about learning in higher education is pervaded by psychological conceptualisation that places all the responsibility for the success or failure of learning within the student. As a result the dominant discourse in HE of students is that of deficit - its all about what they don't have, what they cant do, what the need to get, how they don't fit or cant adjust and how they should be fixed. How often, students who have failed a subject or a course are described as not being intellectually able (stupid or dumb, yes! most certainly in the department where I used to work) or if one was trying to be more politically correct - under prepared for university study. This is all part of the discourses of deficit!


And of course academics and the academy have an idealised version of the perfect student - one that is able to engage in a 'deep approach' to learning (a ubiquitous, psychologically informed conceptualisation of learning which Haggis in her 2003 paper critically unravels). Common to this learning approach is the focus on meaning and understanding and a critical engagement with the nature of the discipline or subject being studied. Surface approaches typically describe the focus on memorisation purely for exam purposes. Students therefore become segregated into the group that meets the expectations of their lectures (i.e using deep approaches) and those who do not (and for Haggis this typically means the majority of students in a mass HE system). Of course the system has responded to the needs of this disagreeable group, and a plethora of support programmes, new teaching technologies and pedagogic interventions have become the norm in the HE landscape - and I should know, I was often at the forefront, punting these to my colleagues
All of this narrative is set against a backdrop of a community that fails to critical reflect on its own values, culture and practices and indeed how the very way they exist might actually be the biggest barrier to learning that most students who join their ranks encounter. So she is calling for a shift away from psychologised views of learning to theorisation that instead considers placing the culture, discourse and practices of HE in the foreground of what might actually be causing problems associated with learning. 


Haggis also challenges implicit conceptualisation of responsibility for learning - suggesting that while the students still have "responsibility for reading, thinking and trying to engage with disciplinary meanings, but it is the teacher's responsibility to create pedagogic situations within which student positions and interpretations can form part of the subject they study". Teacher therefore have a responsibility to help students to learn how to do the learning in a particular subject - " how to think, question, search for evidence, accept evidence, and put evidence together to make an argument that is acceptable in that discipline" (Haggis, 2006).


I was reminded of a conversation I had last week during supervision about ideology -i.e. beliefs, values and ways of viewing the world - and ideologically positioning that results in certain beliefs being given more status than others and how this is often done in ways that makes what is essentially an unequal practice, seem implicit, the norm, value free. So HE and its deficit discourses function ideologically to maintain an education system that is inherently elitist and exclusionary and it co-opts its participants into thinking failure is a natural part of the process because not everyone can get a degree/diploma. My hands are soaked in blood!