Purpose: This qualitative study interrogates the barriers that historically disadvantaged higher education students in South Africa face when it comes to access and success. It specifically explores the challenges black students encounter in gaining epistemic access within the South African higher education system. Design/methodology/approach:…

At the national universities within South Africa, various events during the past years indicate that students suffer under different kinds of oppression. It is widely acknowledged that students from poor, rural geographical areas find the university space alienating and not speaking to their life worlds. In this paper I respond to Fataar's (2019)…

The quest for access to higher education has increased rapidly in the past 25 years of democracy in South Africa. However, this increase has not been matched by student academic success. This lack of success may even be worse with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has given rise to challenges that have affected student learning,…

South African higher education experiences low outcomes regardless of the significant financial investments made into the sector to address student poverty through financial aid. Concerning is that more than half of the low-income students who receive funding from the government do not graduate which points to the presence of other deprivations…

The advent of COVID-19 and the consequent imposition of a national lockdown from March 2020 in South Africa spurred South African universities to introduce new remote ways of delivering their curricula and offering extra-curricular activities. Some of these new modes of delivery tended to disadvantage already socio-economically disadvantaged black…

The study sought to establish what academic support programmes, policies and systems were in place to support first entering students who were at risk of not succeeding with their studies at a historically disadvantaged rural based South African University. The study examined institutional frameworks for supporting at-risk students and systems…

Students bring their own unique stories, shaped by history, culture and language, to the higher education context. Developing a sense of place-belonging on a diverse university campus is intrinsically intertwined with the intersectionality between race, ethnicity, gender and language. This study uses narrative inquiry to understand one student's…

While the importance of academic language and literacies in students' meaningful participation in higher education has been well-explored, studies have focused on writing rather than reading. There has been a significant silence in the literature around what constitutes reading in higher education, the sociocultural complexities of reader…

Although engagement of the low-income students increased since the introduction of inclusive policies in the post-apartheid higher education in South Africa, inequality of access, participation and achievement still persists. While focus has been on increasing enrolment and addressing students' concerns in universities, little attention has been…

Objective: A critical evaluation of a salutogenic, wellness education programme was conducted with a group of first-year socioeconomically disadvantaged higher education students, in order to assess the value they placed on health information and wellness priorities. Methods: This study took a mixed-methods approach utilising a…

While literature reveals the positive perception of online learning, this study examines the issues caused by the digital divide for students at South African universities during the 2020 academic year. The study reveals the perceptions and experiences of university students from historically marginalised and privileged universities. This research…

This is a theoretical paper that addresses the challenge of educational access to the Humanities and Social Sciences. It plots a theoretical quest to develop an explicit pedagogy to give "disadvantaged" students in the Humanities ways of working successfully with texts. In doing so it draws on Bernstein, Moore and Maton's work to…

While education has been recognised as a route out of poverty, for many black South Africans, equality of opportunity and access to quality post-school education are often hampered by lack of resources and the lingering legacy of apartheid. The main focus of this study is on learners' perceptions in the disadvantaged rural community of Siyabuswa,…

This article focuses on the role of access to music education as an agent of social change and as an important way of empowering previously disadvantaged learners, putting this forward as an argument against the proposed downscaling of music in schools as advocated by the government. This narrative inquiry shed light on the perceptions of…

This paper sketches an innovative conceptualisation of disadvantaged youth, shaped dialogically by the interactions of theorising and data from a case study at Orange Farm informal settlement in South Africa in 2013. The study focused on the challenges for the young people in this area in accessing higher education. Drawing on Sen's and Nussbaum's…