BACKGROUND:
The South African higher education that has been described by scholars as a “low participation and high attrition” system (Cloete, 2014: 1358) beset by student success problems of low throughput rates and high dropout rates among other measures of student success. Scholars detail the academic underpreparedness in students who make the transition from high school to higher education, social economic problems and the quality of instruction and student support at higher education as contributory factors to the student success deficiencies (Mgqwashu et al, 2020; Meier and West, 2021; Thomas and Maree 2021). This paper reports on an ongoing empirical research project at a university of technology that investigates how students learn scientific, biomedical and academic discourse and focuses specifically on student engagement in learning biomedical science discourse.

METHODS:
The research design is qualitative in the interpretivist tradition drawing on ethnographic methods used in health and educational research (Siraj-Blatchford, 2020). Different methods are used to collect data that include observation in different learning spaces, interviews with participants and analysis of artefacts such as curriculum documents and student assessments.

RESULTS:
The research demonstrates high levels of student engagement in their learning notwithstanding contextual problems such as intermittent access to high level internet and lack of appropriate devices for blended learning. The research contributes empirical data about students learning science in a resource constrained higher education institution striving to make its contribution to the national and global higher education system.

CONCLUSIONS:
Drawing on scholars such as Goradia et al (2023) the research shows that student engagement is complex and mediated by a range of contextual factors and is central in how they learn complex scientific discourse.