(Re)centring Africa in the training of counselling and clinical psychologists

The mimicry of Europe and United States of America (US) in South African psychology in the early 1900s and the continual presence of Euroamericanised psychology continues to marginalise Black, poor, and working-class people. In this dissertation, I investigated the misalignment of counselling and clinical psychologists’ professional training, specifically the first-year Masters psychology training programme with the South African socio-political context. To counter the usual reliance on hegemonic Euroamerican-centric approaches I elaborated on an Africa(n)-centred perspective so as to make sense of the training of counselling and clinical psychologists in the South African context. I argued that the Africa(n)-centred perspective was pluriversal (accepting of multiple epistemologies), endogenous (developing from within), and focuses on Africans not as the excluded Other but rather as the Subject at the centre of their lifeworlds. I elucidated curriculum practices within the professional training programmes as part of the investigation into the intransigence of Euroamerican-centric epistemologies in the professional training curriculum. I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 23 people, 8 of whom were course coordinators and 15 intern psychologists. The participants were from 5 universities falling into the 4 generic categories: Historically Black University (HBU), Historically White Afrikaans-speaking University (HWASU), merged university (MU), and Historically White English-speaking University (HWESU). For my analysis, I employed what I termed an Africa(n)-centred critical discourse analysis, which builds on the discursive turn in psychology, taking seriously the talk of people in the reproduction of socially unjust practices. All the interviews with the course coordinators and intern psychologists were dominated by talk of race and the Professional Board for Psychology. The interviews yielded a number of discourses, namely: 1) meritocracy, 2) diversity (which referenced issues of race, gender, and curriculum), 3) access, exclusion and privilege as related to language, 4) class, and 5) relevance (including social, market, and cultural relevance, with cultural relevance spoken about in relation to the curriculum). I conclude the dissertation by gesturing towards a constructive engagement (by which I mean a building) of an Africa(n)-centred professional training of counselling and clinical psychologists.PsychologyPh. D. (Psychology

The role of psychosocial factors in academic performance of first year psychology students at a historically white university

The success rate of students in higher education has been a cause for concern in South Africa (Letseka & Maile, 2008; Department of Higher Education and Training, 2015). This has been particularly concerning for first-year students, where the rate of attrition is especially high (Letseka, Cosser, Breier, and Visser, 2010). A number of factors have been identified in past research as having an effect on academic performance, which influences attrition and graduation. These factors include age (Justice, & Dornan, 2001), gender (Buchmann, & DiPrete, 2006), socio-economic status which is confounded by race (Letseka & Breier, 2008), type of educational background (Spreen, & Vally, 2006), and whether a student is a domestic or international student (Li, Chen, Duanmu, 2009), social capital (Young & Strelitz, 2014), whether the student is a first language speaker of the language of instruction at the university (Snowball, and Boughey, 2012), student wellbeing (Quinn, & Duckworth, 2007), locus of control (Findley, & Cooper, 1983), and frequency of lecture attendance (van Wallbeek, 2004). The study was conducted at Rhodes University, a small historically white South African institution. For this study, academic performance was measured using the participant’s midyear exam results for an introductory psychology cause, a course that straddles faculties. Of the 690 students registered for the course, 361 (52%) completed an electronic survey that explored the various factors associated with academic performance. A hierarchical regression analysis indicates that pre-university factors (age, gender, race, nationality, language, type of school, and socio-economic status) were the only significant predictors of academic performance, contributing 11% of the effect. Race and nationality, when all the other factors were controlled for, were the only predictors of academic performance. The implications of these findings pose troubling questions of the institutional culture at the university