It's 'Orientation Week' at UCT, so there are loads of somewhat bewildered, somewhat bored 18-20 year olds walking around with an orientation leader across the campus. Most often the pack of young beings come into the library, taking in the space, as best they kind while being overloaded with useful'ish information about where the audio-visual viewing area of the library is. I was having my lunch in the open air food court close to the library the other day and just taking in all the new students and their orientation leaders. This group of students are so diverse in relation to the obvious demographic categories and the less obvious aspects of clothing style, sexual orientation, religion, accent, you name it. The level of diversity is certainly more obvious than you would find at CPUT for instance. Somehow I felt good, warm about this. From what I could tell Black students get involve in their university - they are orientation leaders, members of the SRC, RAG, Faculty Student Councils.
I thought back to my first few days as a students at UCT 24 years ago (and I had to count on my fingers to establish how long ago it actually was since I came to UCT). I also did a Orientation tour, I was lead around the campus by some hippie White guy who was a member of the SRC - I don't remember what he looked like but I remember him. It wasn't something the cool students did - by going on the tour you sort of signaled you were new and didn't know things. And in terms of gaining any 'street -cred' you couldn't really advertise your novice identity. I don't ever remember feeling like anybody wanted me to be part of the university or wanted to make me feel at home, or comfortable in that space, or develop a sense of belonging. In fact as I moved through my undergraduate years this feeling of disconnection and alienation intensified. I had no intention of fraternising with my oppressors - I was there to get my degree and piss off, I wasn't interested in speaking to some White person up at UCT who would then politely ignore me if they saw me down in Rondebosch, at the foot of the mountain. In the dying days of Apartheid my time at UCT was not about getting cozy with the oppressors, it was about getting a good education and taking it back to my own community.
Those were such different times, but even then I sought solace in the library. It was a different library then, not the modern, open space environment I often find myself sitting in these days. Back in my day it was a musty, wood-panelled, almost claustrophobic place. Back then, like today, I had my special spaces to sit and would always retreat to little hidden away areas to read and study. And in that way the UCT library symbolises my success, my academic success.
I've been reading again about the higher education sector in South Africa - a system in crisis - and one that can only ensure that less than 40% of the students who enter its doors leave with a degree after five years of undergraduate study. And while that statistic might sound marginally ok, when you disaggregate it for race then only about 5% of the Black student population are successful in obtaining a degree after five years of study. Bottom-line most Black students therefore aren't successful in finishing their course within the stipulated period.
Again I'm taken back +- 24 years ago - I finished my degree in the stipulated period - I am a stark exception. I also know that if I had been in the schooling system today I would never have seen the UCT light of day - it just would not have happened, all sorts of circumstances would have acted against me I think. I can't explain why I was successful with my studies. I just did all my assignments, went to most of my lecturers and tutorials and sat in the library studying (probably the hard, inefficient way). The courses I took didn't always make sense to me, in fact I don't particularly remember feeling a real sense that I understood the discipline I was learning about. I seem to recall that all I ever got access too was a surface level understanding of things. But I passed within the recommended time frame and didn't do too badly (I didn't do well by a long stretch of the imagination, but I didn't scrape through either).
My research, my work, my identity as a teacher are all wrapped up in finding ways to improve student learning. At the moment I'm drawn to uncovering and understanding my own undergraduate learning experience within its specific historical moment within the larger HE project at the time (yes I was a ASP student too, but really didn't understand what that meant, I signed up for the course because I had to - I wanted to do Psychology and couldn't get into the mainstream course without taking the ASP supplementary tutorials) and mapping it onto the research that exposed the realities of South African's current higher education system. In some ways my own learning experience is a helpful reflective lens, and in other ways the contextual realities of contemporary South Africa are so fundamentally different that trying to bring the two experiences together feels to me like a ridiculous proposition.
I like what I see around me when I sit in the library though - students getting to know their institution and feeling a part of it (these are my perceptions and I know they don't necessarily match the realities that students experience and I know, from the research (and anecdotal evidence), that Black students at UCT are still marginalized and alienated by what they find) - even though my undergraduate experiences at UCT weren't always positive or inviting, and even though I'm critical and cynical about the grand ideals that institutions like UCT project into the world, at a very basic level I have a strong affection for, maybe a kind of loyalty to UCT and am surprised by the degree to which I have internalised and taken on so much of its values and symbolic capital. Especially at postgraduate level UCT has been the site of much of my academic success. In a way I am because of it and I think I came to it at just the right times in my life so that I have been fundamentally shaped by all that is good about the institution and all that is/was bad.
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