Understanding Secondary School Students' Agentic Negotiation Strategies in Accessing Higher Education in Cameroon

This article investigates students' post-secondary education transition processes in Cameroon through the lens of agency. Situated in a country where the higher education participation rate is fairly low, our article explores how students agentically negotiate access to higher education within structural constraints of socio-economic status and gender. Semi-structured interviews with 25 students from two secondary schools in Yaoundé, Cameroon were conducted. The findings reveal that students enacted the four modes of reflexives (Archer, 2003) dynamically and discursively, with specific manifestations of agency relevant to gendered and classed structures in Cameroonian society. In this paper, we propose a person-centred, empowering approach to supporting students in higher education participation. We further confirm the importance of non-universal, contextually-situated employment of Archer's (2003) typology of four reflexive modes.