Amanda French

'How Will I Know When I'm Ready?' Re-Imagining FE/HE 'Transitions' as Collaborative Identity Work.

Abstract Drawing on the findings of a Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) funded, multi-institutional, regional project, Transitions West Midlands, this paper works with Further Education (FE) students’ transition narratives as they look forward to, and back from the move from FE to HE and explores the role of the local, contextual factors that impact on the student transition experience. We mobilise Reay et al’s notion of ‘institutional habitus’ to draw attention to the discourses about transition at play within the institutional context and explore how these function to pattern and frame students’ world figuring and concept making, about what ‘transition’ might be like. We notice the dominance of a nebulous but fixed/stable concept of skill acquisition, understood as ‘HE readiness’ that drives particular approaches to student identity work characterised by self-recognitions of deficit, not being ‘ready’ or ‘good enough’ to transition. Readiness, we contend, works paradoxically to background and under-value the assets, for example the resilience associated with managing competing demands and navigating complexity, that students might bring to ‘transition events’. We trace the reproduction of this mis-recognition in students’ reports of their interactions with teachers, which play out, in turn, equally limiting narratives of FE teacher identity. By way of response we suggest that re-imagining ‘transition’ as essentially social, a process of becoming, rather than skills acquisition might re-position students and their teachers as more active, agentic protagonists in the narratives they make, and make available, about what transition can and might mean. In this sense, working reflexively together to understand transition as identity work might enable students and teachers to recover, recognise and put to work the rich assortment of assets and resources that students bring to the process of FE/HE transition.

‘Fail better’: Reconsidering the role of struggle and failure in academic writing development in higher education

ABSTRACT Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better (Samuel Beckett). [Quoted in ‘Samuel Beckett Talks About Beckett’ by John Gruen, in Vogue, (December 1969), p. 210.]. ‘Fail Better’ is an approach which supports first-year students’ successful transition to higher education academic writing practices. ‘Fail Better’ uses a broadly academic literacies model of development to address students’ failure and struggle with writing. Rather than blaming students for ‘poor writing’, ‘Fail Better’ maintains that experiences of struggle and failure with academic writing are part of an inevitable and necessary process as students ‘write themselves’ into new disciplinary-based academic writing communities. The final part of the paper explores how subject lecturers, who are often not confident or willing writing developers, can, through the application of ‘Fail Better’ principles, offer their students a time-efficient, proactive and supportive model of writing development. It argues, moreover, that universities must reject deficit discourses around students’ struggles with academic writing and radically reconceptualise the issue of academic writing support in order to support students more effectively through their struggles and failures.

Getting lost (and found) in supervision: an ethnodrama

This paper aims to offer an innovative approach to reflecting on research and practice around doctoral study and supervision. In the opening section of the paper, the authors discuss the idea that academic development as a doctoral candidate is concerned with how researchers write themselves into being as certain kinds of researchers, and how, in doing so, they become a character, like their supervisors, in the “figured world” of their research. This process of “becoming” can, the authors argue, be nurtured or hindered by different kinds of supervision practices.,With regard to the authors’ own experiences of doctoral supervision, the paper explores how their use of post-qualitative practices and methodologies encouraged new forms of intersubjectivity and academic development as their supervisory relationship advanced alongside the thesis itself.,The authors present the script of an ethnodrama (Saldana, 2111) which they wrote and performed on a number of occasions, as an alternative way of expressing their experiences of being in a relationship as doctoral supervisor and supervisor.,This choice of ethnodrama emerged out of a frustration with what the authors felt were increasingly predictable ways of discussing and reflecting upon the philosophy, content and assessment methods of postgraduate research and supervision across the educational disciplines.,The authors hope that their exploration of the imaginative spaces created through doctoral supervision will encourage other postgraduates and their supervisors to experiment with working creatively across interdisciplinary spaces and creating radical and even risky ways of mediating and sharing postgraduate teaching and learning relationships.

Children participating as researchers in primary schools: what’s in it for the teachers?

ABSTRACT Whilst within universities, research on rather than with children/pupils is a well-established methodology, this paper reports on teachers’ responses to a schools and university-based partnership project, ‘Pupils as Research Partners in Primary (PARPP), which works to co-create pupil-led research opportunities for pupils in research projects informed by pupils’ experiences in primary schools. A previous paper, French and Hobbs, [(2017). “‘So How Well Did It Really Go’? Working with Primary School Pupils as Project Evaluators: A Case Study.” TEAN Journal 9 (1): 56–65] reported on how one PARPP project had a beneficial effect on pupils and their school environment. For this paper the project team interviewed a number of teachers whose pupils in the partner schools were involved in the pilot study phase of the project. Specifically, the teachers were interviewed to ascertain if the involvement of pupils, as lead researchers in projects exploring various aspects of the school environment, had impacted on their perceptions of pupil-led research. Findings suggest that the experiences of teachers in schools where PARPP projects had taken place had led them to re-evaluate the practicality and desirability of encouraging pupils to actively to research their school environments.

Double-entry journals: developing an embedded programme of writing development for first year Early Childhood Studies degree students

AbstractIn recent years students have been entering higher education (HE) with a diverse range of writing experiences, especially where they come through nontraditional or vocational routes that require different kinds of writing than in many HE courses (Lillis and Turner, 2001). For the past three years a team of researchers at a school of education in a large, urban, post-1992 university has been working on a CETL (Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning) research project which focuses on developing secure writing identities in first-year Early Years students (Ivanic, 1998). Although this is still a work in progress, it is clear from the data so far collected that the project provides suggestions for how lecturers can embed writing activities into subject-specific modules. At the same time, the importance of writing development to the whole learning process has been positively highlighted for staff and students alike.