Lesley Scanlon

‘You don't have like an identity … you are just lost in a crowd’: Forming a Student Identity in the First-year Transition to University

This article draws on research grounded in a theoretical framework informed by the work of Alfred Schutz and of Berger and Luckmann and explores transition to university as a loss experience. The specific loss examined here is that which results from student identity discontinuity as they undertake the initial transition to university—a transition that the article positions within the political and economic issues shaping the university of the twenty-first century. What causes this initial identity instability is that students have only naïve ‘knowledge about’, rather than contextualised ‘knowledge of’, the new learning context. This means that drawing on knowledge of past learning contexts does not always assist students negotiate new situated learner identities. Rather, identity results from situated interactions in which students pick up cues regarding the horizons of possibility for identity formation in the university transition. It is the nexus of situated interactions with lecturers and other students that is the context and process of identity formation.

‘Becoming’ a Professional

This chapter problematises professional becoming through an examination of two principal concepts – ‘becoming’ and ‘professional– ’ which underpin the chapters in this interdisciplinary work. The author suggests ways in which we might answer the question – what are professionals and how do we account for professional becoming? The chapter first locates, within the scholarly literature, the provenance of ‘becoming’ as an iterative and emergent concept of identity formation. The adoption of ‘becoming’ rejects conventional novice-to-expert explanations of being a professional, accepting instead the ‘ongoingness’ of developing a professional self and all that this implies. Following this the chapter draws extensively on the literature to consider the claimed cultural specificity of ‘professional’; this is followed by a consideration of the long and still unresolved search for a satisfactory definition of the term ‘professional’, again with extensive reference to the literature. The chapter continues by examining what has traditionally been taken to constitute the essence of a professional by looking at the epistemological and ontological dimensions of this essence and at the same time locating contemporary challenges to these dimensions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which becoming is contiguous with lifelong learning in an iterative cycle of becoming a professional throughout one’s professional life.

Adults’ motives for returning to study: the role of self-authoring

The contemporary political and economic context has ensured that adults continually return to education in order to avoid both social and economic marginalization. Adults make and remake themselves through a process of self-authoring a reflexive process through which they make contextual decisions about their life. This article examines the self-authoring of a group of adult students as they explore their motives for returning to further education. These motives are examined within a Schutzian framework which focuses the discussion on the origin of motives in the past experiences or future imaged experiences of the research participants. The motives are revealed as complex and multi-dimensional and provide a snapshot of the way a group of adults engage in reflexive self-authoring in order to facilitate life changes through education.

Identifying supporters and distracters in the segmented world of the adult learner

This paper examines the results of research into the learning experiences of a group of adult learners in a university preparation programme in a college of Technical and Further Education in Sydney, NSW, Australia. The research was conducted over a three year period by the author as a teacher-researcher and is grounded in the phenomenological work of Schutz, and Berger and Luckmann. Students identified the diverse segments of their complex life-worlds and the salient situated interactions within these segments which support or distract them from learning. What emerges is a representation of the life-world of the adult learner which enables adult educators and students to better understand the complex world of learning in adulthood. An understanding of this world has become increasingly significant as recent economic and social changes have ensured that more adults return to formal education.

‘Why didn’t they ask me?’: Student perspectives on a school improvement initiative

This is the first in a series of articles which will examine the results of a qualitative, longitudinal study of school improvement initiatives from the perspective of school stakeholders. The article captures the responses of students from a low socio-economic status school in NSW, Australia to a school initiative that restructured the learning and teaching environment of the senior school. This initiative, undertaken in the context of high stakes testing and public accountability, aimed to ‘break the cultural mould’ of poor attendance, retention and below state average examination results in the senior school. After explaining the senior school restructure, the article briefly reviews the literature on cultural change and student voice within the context of school improvement. The qualitative methodology is examined and this is followed by an exploration of the findings where students identify the salient dimensions of the initiative which had an impact on their learning and teaching environment. The discussion examines the findings within the context of the research literature of school improvement, cultural change and transition.

And the Conclusion for Now Is

The conclusion reminds us that claims to professional status are contested as never before. The twenty-first century has seen the widespread questioning by scholars and the laity, of expert systems and their foundationalist epistemologies. This kind of knowledge is now seen as only one way of languaging the world. Professional narratives must now compete with and accommodate local narratives in order to better serve these clients. What emerges is that becoming a professional is not about developing and maintaining an isolated, rugged individual approach to professional practice – this is the traditional professional, the movie professional. The very contexts of practice are also constantly becoming other and here the sociality of becoming a professional is manifest in the development of different work practices, such as, temporary, democratic teams composed of a range of practitioners some of whom would earlier not have been regarded as professionals. Becoming a professional is a lifelong iterative process.

White Coats, Handmaidens and Warrior Chiefs: The Role of Filmic Representations in Becoming a Professional

This chapter takes notions of becoming a professional to the movies and examines the significance of popular culture on societal constructions of what constitutes a professional and professional practice. The author examines changing filmic representations of doctors, nurses and teachers through 100 years of filmic history. These representations are fictionlised enactments of professional practice, front of stage performances by professionals in hospitals, private practice and classrooms. The contexts of practice are exotic, technologically sophisticated citadels of medical care where the good doctor battles disease and the bureaucracy for the good of the patients, and where nurses, when visible, serve both doctors and patients alike. Less exotic but still unfamiliar to most of us are the depictions of inner urban schools of despair where the good teacher makes personal sacrifices to rescue students from social disadvantage, bureaucratic inertia and community, school and, frequently, family disinterest. The omniscient doctor, the heroic renegade teacher and the still subservient nurse may be out-of-date narratives more ‘reel’ than ‘real’ but nonetheless they provide professionals with images of practice from which possible professional selves can be constructed and which contribute to society’s expectations of professionals.