By Leah Falcon
O-Week begins with the flurry of ice-breakers as first-years incept the university space. What lies before them is the rollercoaster journey of getting a degree, as well as a personal “becoming”. This process isn’t just about how long one can survive on only pickles and Red Bull, but also an understanding of oneself, to which the repetitive ice-breaker questions are just the beginning.
This process of change often feels imperceptible in the moment, but is an area rich for psychological researchers. Dr Joy Peterson chose this critical point in personal becoming as the topic for her doctoral research in 2020. To use the more esoteric academic language: the epistemic becoming of a group of first-generation students during the COVID-19 pandemic within the framework of Stellenbosch University’s (SU) Residential Education and Support Programme (RESP).
Peterson was inspired by her experience as a University Residence Head and living with a small group of student residents during lockdown. “Crisis often exposes character and accelerates transformation,” she reflected, and the pandemic created a “rare liminal juncture – a rupture in the normative discourses at SU”. By enquiring into a group of students’ experiences over a period of three years, she dug deeper into this process of pedagogical transformation.
Peterson specifically engaged with first-generation students as her subjects and their process of melding and discarding aspects of their identities that were incongruent with the University space. This process of assimilation, Peterson notes, often causes first-generation students to feel misrecognised and disconnected.
Peterson sought to disrupt this and provide a more substantial and nuanced framework through the RESP, in which the students could become. Consider it as a sustained, relational and dialogical icebreaker session or, in Peterson’s words, an “integrative framework extend[ing] beyond the confines of formal instruction, reimagining the residence space as an educative environment where teaching, learning and care intersect”.
Her epistemic study tracked how the group acquired traits and values that empowered them not only to acquire information, but also use it well. The RESP provided the catalyst for this transformation. Through its approach of ethical care, it was focused on establishing relationships and trust amongst the group, bringing the lived-realities each student faced into discussion and debate, equalising power dynamics and fostering responsiveness. Peterson witnessed the blossoming of the students as the group developed confidence, resilience, purpose, sought out leadership, and stimulated change within the university structure.
The theory of change that Peterson examined is not only relevant to the personal experiences of university students, but broader social change. Theorised by Margaret Archer and referenced by Peterson, morphogenesis and reflexivity tracks the dynamic and reflexive evolutions of societal structures and individual agency. To simplify this mouthful: how an individual can change external culture while simultaneously experiencing change within their own selves.
Peterson outlines the implications her thesis has for SU in her conclusion. She highlights that residences must be acknowledged as spaces for identity formation and socialisation with the potential to either perpetuate or diverge from practices of misrecognition and disconnection. She continues that, through the creation of sustainable and discussion-based spaces alongside academics, the epistemic development that she witnessed and helped stimulate, can become a reality for students today.
While the many rounds of ice-breakers that students face in O-week may be a superficial and partially decontextualised attempt at this, they still offer a means for students to connect with the broader community and to position themselves within it. Further development does not only depend on students managing to integrate into their cultural and structural context, but for their context to support and engage them in this process of becoming.
