Exploring the experiences of postgraduate Lesotho students at Stellenbosch University

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT : This thesis focuses on the experiences of six international students who attended StellenboschUniversity, a Historically White Institution, for their postgraduate studies. The six participantschosen for this study each had two or more years of experience as postgraduate students atthis university. They completed their undergraduate studies at the National University ofLesotho. For these students, there was an expectation that they would have some knowledgeand the skills to navigate their studies at a university in a foreign context. However, little isknown about how international postgraduate students experience the institutional culture of anew foreign university. Not much research has focused on the experiences of postgraduatestudents from a predominantly black African country who attend a Historically White Institutionin South Africa for their postgraduate studies only.This qualitative study provides an interpretation and analysis of students' experiences byresponding to the question: How do postgraduate students from Lesotho experience theireducation at Stellenbosch University? Situated in the interpretive paradigm, the researchexplored the educational and non-education experiences of participants who completed theirundergraduate degrees at The National University of Lesotho. Drawing on Bourdieu's conceptof cultural capital, and Yosso's (2005) notion of Community Cultural Wealth, this study showshow the participants draw on various forms of capital in order to navigate and mediate theirpostgraduate studying experience in an environment that is culturally dissonant to the previousuniversity and home culture. Through purposive sampling, the students who were doing theHonours, Masters and PhD degrees were chosen from different faculties of SU. A focus groupinterview and individual in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with students inorder to understand how they established their experiences at Stellenbosch University.The study's findings showed that the challenges they experienced included difficulties in makingfriends, difficulties in keeping up with academic work due to cultural differences, learning toadapt to a different institutional culture, and language differences. Key to the studentsnavigating and adapting to the culturally dissonant university field in which they foundthemselves was the support and assistance they received from the international office, as wellas support from their family in Lesotho, and friends in Stellenbosch University. What this showsin relation to Bourdieu's notion of playing the game is that the students used their cultural capitalstrategically in an attempt to navigate the university, in consequence of which they were ableto open a productive, if culturally challenging, educational path which secured their universitysuccess.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University