This paper explores the argument that to widen participation in higher education, educational institutions should bear a greater responsibility for students’ learning. Central to this debate is the notion of ‘academic support’. There are many perspectives on what works to scaffold student participation and learning but rarely are the perspectives of those receiving support taken into account. This paper reports the findings of an exploratory ethnographic study in which students in a vocational college in South Africa reflected on the nature of academic support and access to it. Student narratives that underpin their understandings of how the support system ‘worked’, and what responsibilities they and the college respectively bore for their studies, are compared to the official prescript on student support services in South Africa – the so-called ‘Student Support Services Manual’ which was developed by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). The data indicate sharp incongruences in thinking. While the student support services manual maintains that students are a product of their disadvantaged contexts and therefore require an institutional form of academic support, students themselves placed much less responsibility for the provision of academic support on the colleges. Instead, they attributed their success or failure to ‘character’ and their own dispositions towards learning. This is an unexpected finding in the context of an often highly charged debate on the factors that constrain learning and learning outcomes. This paper argues that it is this ‘locus of control’ that undermines the idea that student success is dependent on prescription alone.

中文翻译：

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谁的错是失败？南非高等教育机构对学术支持的争议观点

本文探讨了以下观点：为扩大高等教育的参与度，教育机构应对学生的学习承担更大的责任。这场辩论的核心是“学术支持”的概念。关于什么能有效地支持学生的参与和学习，有很多观点，但是很少考虑那些获得支持的人的观点。本文报告了一项探索性民族志研究的结果，该研究中南非一所职业学院的学生反思了学术支持的性质及其获得途径。学生叙事巩固了他们对支持系统如何“运作”以及他们和大学各自承担的学习职责的理解，将其与南非学生支持服务的官方规定进行比较-南非高等教育与培训部（DHET）编写的所谓的“学生支持服务手册”。数据表明思维上的不一致。尽管《学生支持服务手册》坚持认为学生是他们处境不利的产物，因此需要机构形式的学术支持，但学生自己对向大学提供学术支持的责任要少得多。相反，他们将成功或失败归因于“角色”及其对学习的态度。在关于约束学习和学习成果的因素经常引起激烈争论的情况下，这是一个出乎意料的发现。