UNIVERSITY OF DURBAN-WESTVILLE

Educational aspiration and expectations had their origins in the family, which then
provided the resources and support to facilitate their development. The participants
came from families who valued education and in most cases the educational level of the
family was higher than others in the community around them. It was in part the family's
belief in an educational pathway that overcame the competing pressures from other
significant people around for the participants to follow other routes. The extent of the
family's educational expectation for the participants was to gain a first degree. A
Doctorate was not part of their educational vision. This is not surprising since none of
the families had members educated above the first degree level. Families saw education
as leading to social and economic mobility.
Families modelled ways of behaviour that were useful later for attaining
educational success. The family also modelled ways to negotiate with authority and
power in an unequal society. Families with less overt political involvement adopted
strategies of compliance to achieve their goals. Participants whose family members
were involved in political activism were exposed to strategies of contestation with the
system more openly.
In this group three participants are second generation university attendees. Where
parents had a degree there was a strong expectation that their children would gain an
education that was higher than their first degree. In the school years the academic
expectation was from family and teachers. Teachers with good disciplinary knowledge
and degrees were role models to which to aspire. In families without graduates the
school experiences of meeting graduate teachers and people who seemed intelligent
strengthened the formation of academic aspirations. The participants performed well in
school and this caught the attention of the principals, staff and family and set up an
expectation for further good academic performance.
During the undergraduate university years there were competing academic
expectations. There were positive expectations from family and academically competent
lecturers for students to succeed in their degrees, and negative expectations from
lecturers who were influenced more strongly by the apartheid ideology than academic
professionalism. There was the challenge of overcoming these lecturers' expectations of
failure and focussing on the expectation of parents, peers and positive lecturers to
achieve success. These participants seem to have succeeded in part because the sum of
the positive expectations was greater than the negative expectations. Most participants
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