Abstract
The tutorial system is considered to be a useful pedagogical intervention that can improve
student retention, particularly in the context of a first year student’s experience of entering
university. For these novice students to achieve academic success, it is important that they
are given access to the subject specific knowledge and practices in their different disciplines,
that is, that they acquire ‘epistemological access’. A recent study of the tutorial system in a
South African university (Layton, 2013), sought to discover to what extent tutorials were
constructed as being for the enablement of epistemological access. This paper focuses on
two discourses that emerged from the study – the parent discourse and the partnership
discourse. Both discourses were concerned with relationships between the key stakeholders
in the tutorial programme structure, namely, academics, tutors and students. Given that
tutorials are considered to be spaces in which more intimate learning can take place than in
the anonymous environment of the large lecture hall, an interrogation of the relationships
fostered in tutorials is important. The parent discourse, in which students were positioned as
‘kids’ needing care, was sympathetic and supportive of new students but ran the risk of
being patronising and reductionist. The partnerships discourse, in which tutors and
academics were seen to be working together towards the common goal of student success,
was seen to be enabling of epistemological access. But it required a commitment of time and
energy to teaching endeavours that was found to be in tension with the institutional focus on
research. Through a social realist analysis of the two discourses constructing relationships in
the tutorial system, we conclude that these discourses have the power to both constrain and
enable the extent to which the tutorial system can be a site of epistemological access.