**8. Closing remarks**

The broader concern of this chapter had to do with the extent to which the science curriculum draws on students' home learning experiences to enable meaningful access to powerful knowledge of science.

I did not intend to measure students' competence, in this chapter, but to further contribute to the debates on re-conceptualizing racially skewed success rate of students in higher education, particularly in the field of science at the research site [3]. I hoped to show how students from backgrounds that are 'other' to middle-class educated families that gain access to higher education are mis-recognized and mis-framed [29] by structures like curriculum. Students' discussions have shown the need to argue for social understandings to explore the experiences of students in higher education.

Using critical realism and social realism it was shown, in the domain of culture, the lack of acknowledgement of tertiary learning as a socially constructed phenomenon underpinned by values about what can count as knowledge and how that knowledge can be known. Rather, learning, and achievement in learning, was viewed as dependent on factors inherent to the individual such as intelligence and 'skills.' Learning has been observed as a socially and culturally disembodied factor. The chapter has further shown that learning and teaching as disembodied in higher education needs to be contrasted with understandings of learning and teaching as social practices emerging from structures and mechanisms which could be constraining for some but enabling for others, based on home backgrounds.

Again, in the domain of structure it was shown how curriculum, geographical location and class could act as an enablement for some and constraint for others, which disqualifies simple explanations of cause and effect, that because one is not working hard enough or motivated enough, then they will fail.

As already noted, critical realists reject determinist views of the world favoring instead an understanding which perceives structures and mechanisms at the level of the 'Real' as tendential. This means that although the structures and mechanisms are enduring, the way they combine to produce events at the level of the 'Actual' and experiences and observations at the level of the 'Empirical', where social interaction occurs, cannot always be predicted.

A decolonial gaze was useful to show how the education system privileges the already privileged through the proximity between primary socialization and secondary socialization.
