Becoming a student of English: Students’ experiences of transition into the first year

Abstract

This study explored the transition to university as experienced by first-year students of English studies. The first year has been identified by existing research as a critical time for new students in terms of their persistence and success on their degree programme. However, there is a need for further research in the current UK higher education climate, especially within subject disciplines. Attempts to account for successful transition have investigated students’ social integration, the institutional environment, and theories of approaches to learning. In particular, the study drew on research into academic socialisation and academic literacies to examine students’ accounts of joining first year and their development of student identities. While describing anxieties and concerns about adjusting to the new practices and discourses of English literature at university level, students’ identification with their chosen subject appeared closely implicated in their engagement with university study and their academic identity formation. The study adopted a phenomenographic methodology suited to suggesting interpretative narratives of the experiences of small groups of participants.

Keywords

Academic literacies English literature first year identity transition

Introduction

Embarking on a university degree programme can be transformative, and students’ choice of subject, with its particular outlooks, knowledge, and practices, influences the emergence of their academic identity. But the adjustment is not necessarily easy, and, in a changing British higher education environment, universities strive to keep up with meeting the needs of new expanded, diverse student populations, particularly during the crucial transition to the first year. Tamsin Haggis calls for fresh ways of thinking and doing to meet these changes; for example, persisting emphases on inculcation of ‘deep learning’ as the most reliable strategy for ensuring students’ academic success may be insufficient for explaining how students learn, while imposing an academic identity too specific to suit the diversity of student motivations and aims (Haggis, 2003, 2009). Understanding more about how students learn in disciplinary contexts, then, and the relationship between their learning and their identity formation, may contribute to the development of more flexible models for supporting students’ transition to university study.

This article discusses an investigation of students’ experience of transition into an English literature degree and their formation of their student identities. The experiences of these new students shared much with those of other disciplines and national contexts, but the interviews also yielded insights into particularities of student identity in the discipline of English. These insights are legible within frameworks of student identity formation, academic socialisation, and academic literacies; they may suggest some new avenues for exploring the processes of emergence of students’ academic identities, inherent in successful transitions to the first year.

Background: The first year, English studies, and approaches to learning

Research has established students’ experience of their first year of university study as critical (Gordon, 2008). Early experiences impact on chances of continuation and success on degree programmes (Jones, 2008; Leese, 2010; Thomas, 2012; Whittaker, 2008). Higher education institutions (HEIs) invest considerable resources in improving the first-year experience through pre-arrival programmes, induction, and ongoing support structures (Palmer et al., 2009; Thomas, 2012).

Discipline-specific research into transition between school and university in the UK is relatively limited (Smith, 2004); in Australia, Brinkworth et al. (2009) found few differences in the first-year experiences of humanities and science students, but discipline-specific studies tend to be small scale and similarity of experiences cannot be assumed (Briggs et al., 2012). Of the few such studies within English literature, most UK studies consider the transition from ‘A’ Level in universities operating under the English HE system (Atherton, 2006; Green, 2006; Hopkins and Smith, 2005; Smith, 2004); Lockheart and Melles (2012) detect a gulf between ‘A’ Level and university in terms of expectations, study requirements, and students’ preparedness.

These findings may not apply directly to the devolved Scottish system; most pupils take Higher and Advanced Higher, and schools and universities are not subject to identical political demands (Kemp and Lawton, 2013). Nevertheless, the challenges students face in the English system – developing the ability to analyse critical material, contextualise literary texts, manage their own reading and study time, and cope with less guidance about what to do and think than at ‘A’ level (Ballinger, 2003; Green, 2006) – are also applicable to the Scottish context in which the present study took place. The findings are therefore relevant within a wider UK context. Hopkins and Smith (2005) suggest that the genuine interest most English literature students have in their subject mean the challenges they face relate more to expectations of learning style rather than misunderstanding of what the subject is about. Factors such as the position of Advanced Higher at SCQF level 7 (the usual ‘first year’ in the Scottish 4-year Honours degree structure) (see SCQF.org.uk) indicate that, compared to ‘A’ level, the step from Advanced Higher to the Scottish first year may be differently shaped.

Research in other disciplines suggests worthwhile approaches to examining the transition of new English literature students. Aspland et al. (2013: 10) argue that nursing and ‘other professional and/or vocational disciplines may have a unique “pull” factor’. ‘Pull’ factors are reasons students have to stay on their degree programme, compared to ‘push’ factors that make them consider leaving. English may also possess unique ‘pull’ factors, which my findings will explore.¹

Socialisation and sense of belonging

Many studies have investigated reasons for student dropout of university and for student success over the first year (Jones, 2008; Ozga and Sukhnandan, 1998; Tinto, 1993). Tinto’s model of socialisation has been influential but is countered by studies highlighting external factors in students’ decisions to stay (Briggs et al., 2012; Palmer et al., 2009; Tinto, 1993). The role of the HEI is often emphasised (Aspland et al., 2013; Thomas, 2012). O’Keeffe (2013), for example, argues it is the HEI’s responsibility to create an environment in which students develop a sense of belonging, an environment welcoming diversity rather than expecting conformity to a dominant narrative of student behaviour.

However, other studies cast transition as a negotiation between student and institution. Coutts et al. (2011) suggest new students may feel doubtful, or inadequately skilled to meet new demands, but nonetheless that they have the potential to do so. Action and responsibility on both sides are therefore vital. Bowles et al. (2014) and Clarke et al. (2012) follow Clarke et al. (2010) in advocating a ‘transition pedagogy’ that supports students’ engagement in learning across an institution, based on shared understandings of learning practices.

Studies of transition often revolve around questions of how students develop a ‘sense of belonging’ (O’Keeffe, 2013; Thomas, 2012) to their new social and academic environment and to the specific student identities produced by the practices and discourses of their degree subject (Knights, 2005). Fyvie-Gauld et al. (2005) argue that new students navigate a complex transition from their old life to their new, particularly if they have left home for university; students negotiate a ‘betwixt space to form a sense of belonging to university life’ (Palmer et al., 2009: 38). Lairio et al. (2013) found university had significant implications for students’ development and sense of identity. For Briggs et al. (2012: 7), ‘[e]stablishing a positive learner identity is… an essential factor in persistence and success’, and the period of initial transition and induction to university study is crucial. Together, these studies suggest the formation of student identity is far from only a process of academic socialisation but requires a profound shift in worldview and sense of self.

There are further reasons why academic socialisation may be insufficient to explain student transitions in the 21st-century context. Gourlay (2009) suggests that the ‘apprentice’ model of socialisation into a community of practice better suited past, ‘elite’ systems of higher education with more homogenous student groups. This model may not take into account increasing diversity of students (Ballinger, 2003) from a range of prior educational backgrounds (Christie et al., 2004). Yet diversity is a major feature of admissions to HE, perhaps particularly for universities committed to the widening access agenda, which includes many post-1992 universities (see SFC, 2005).

A widening range of student characteristics and profiles problematises generalisations about the factors implicated in student retention, engagement, and success. Christie et al. (2004) emphasise that a series of factors rather than a single factor almost always characterises students’ decisions to withdraw (see also Moir (2011) and Thomas (2012)). Ali et al. (2014) claim a ready formation of student identity cannot be assumed given the diversity of student circumstances and possible modes of study.

Barnett (2006, in Moir (2011)) argued that the main issue facing education in the modern world ‘is neither one of knowledge nor of skills but is one of being’ (Moir, 2011: 5). Cultivating attitudes to learning such as Barnett’s notion of the ‘will to learn’, Moir suggests, opens up scope for a more personalised and heterogeneous set of HE pedagogies better suited to diverse student populations in a swiftly changing educational world. The study of English literature, and other humanities subjects, may be well suited to this, already promoting and requiring an understanding of the world that embraces multiple perspectives, disputed values, and subjective knowledge.

Academic literacies and identities

Barnett’s notion of student ‘being’ resonates with research into academic literacies. Academic literacies as an approach to understanding student learning was first developed by Lea and Street (1998) to move beyond models of study skills deficit and academic socialisation. Student learning, especially writing, is seen as ‘issues at the level of epistemology and identities rather than skill or socialisation’ (Lea and Street, 1998: 160). Students’ adjustment to university study and to a new academic identity is thus bound up with the worldview of their subject discipline and constituted through their acquisition and use of its practices and discourses. If Brinkworth et al. (2009) are right that there are few differences in the general transition experiences between students studying sciences and humanities subjects, then it may be fruitful to explore students’ development of academic literacy within their subject. Tapp (2014) points to a lack of research on the implementation of participatory pedagogies promoting academic literacies, despite an established body of supporting literature.

In English as in other humanities subjects, reading and writing practices are vital components of academic socialisation but also of becoming academically literate. Yet this process is not straightforward. As Tapp (2014) puts it, the discourse and expectations of the academic context, or ‘the rules of the game’, need to be made visible and explicit to students. Weller (2010: 93) explores a disjunction between humanities lecturers’ ‘multi-layered’ and students’ ‘one-dimensional’ perceptions of texts. For students, ‘[r]eading involves a profound familiarising of what they experience through texts’ (Weller, 2010: 93, 97), very different from lecturers’ articulation of reading ‘as an exploratory or illuminative practice – a way of seeing things differently’. However, Weller acknowledges that students may experience reading in a more interrelated way even if they cannot articulate it. Becoming academically literate in English literature has to do, therefore, both with its activities and its discursive language, which are related but not neatly equivalent.

English literature as an academic subject has developed significantly over its lifetime. The discipline was significantly influenced by the rise of cultural studies, advocating a more pluralistic, inclusive approach to ‘literature’, as proposed by Anthony Easthope in his influential Literary into Cultural Studies (1991). This development took place both critically and pedagogically, with implications for student ‘being’ and the nature of their ‘academic literacy’.

Knights (2005) discusses learning activities and identities in the history of English literature as an academic subject and traces their development through to the modern incarnation of English studies. In this modern model, student identity and students’ critical practice can be conceptualised in similar terms:

Avoids seduction by hegemonic ideology;

Willing to expose contradiction, embraces ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’;

Celebrates popular culture;

Understands author and text as palimpsest of writings;

Recognises subjectivity as constituted in language;

Affirms intertextuality;

Sees production of meanings as political practice (Knights, 2005: 37).

Knights (2005: 38) suggests that in recent social constructionist models of a subject discipline, ‘the implied student is to become what he or she does’. By extension, if student ‘being’ accords with critical practice, then success in studying the subject may, perhaps, follow.

However, the nature of student ‘being’ is no more stable or essential than the nature of critical practice in English literature. Postmodern conceptions of identity understand it as dynamic and in a constant process of change and renegotiation, at odds with the stability assumed by concept of academic socialisation (Tapp, 2014). The existence of a community of practice into which students would be socialised requires consensus, but research into academic literary practices has shown they are ‘plural, contested, unstable and largely tacit’ (Gourlay, 2009: 182).

The model of students becoming socialised into the norms of their discipline without question presumes a passive process, arguably incompatible with the development of an active, critical mindset. English, after all, is ‘a discipline based on debate, on interaction between different viewpoints and perceptions’ (Smith, 2004: 86; see also Green, 2006; Lockheart and Melles, 2012). For a student of English, understanding this way of seeing the world is crucial to the development of their identity. Knights (2005: 45) argues that disciplines are ‘unwieldy and often contradictory masses of practice which make demands on, in some senses even produce, the intellectual and social identity of the learner’. Such identity development is more than academic socialisation; it is closer to the development of academic literacies. Through these principles, mutual transformation may be possible, whereby students as active agents and creators of meaning have the capacity to transform disciplinary practices as well as being transformed by them.

This study sought to understand more about some of the factors affecting English literature students’ successful transitions. The participants’ experiences may shed light on strategies used by students to manage and overcome challenges facing both continuing and non-continuing students (see Christie et al., 2004). In particular, the participants’ accounts of their experiences may suggest both some constraints and some enabling factors in the emergence of students’ academic identities as university learners, through their negotiation of the practices of their chosen subject discipline in their first year.

Methods

The research took a phenomenographic approach, conducted through a series of interviews with eight first-year students and four second-year students. Faculty ethical approval was obtained and participants were guaranteed anonymity. Volunteers were invited from each cohort on the English degree programmes, which share a common first year. All but one of the first-year students were interviewed twice: approximately half way through their first trimester and again about half way through trimester two. The second-year students were interviewed during trimester two. The interviews were digitally audio recorded and transcribed verbatim using F5.²

All the participants had necessarily continued successfully with their programme so far. As Christie et al. (2004) suggest, examining ways in which students successfully bear pressures that may cause others to withdraw has value: interviewing second-year students enabled a sense of how the first year appeared in retrospect, in addition to glimpsing the first-year students’ immediate experiences. This follows a similar approach to separate experience from reflection used by Brinkworth et al. (2009).

In interviews used for phenomenographic research, participants’ own expression and reflection is essential (Entwistle, 1997; Sjöström and Dahlgren, 2002). The researcher prompts without leading (Barnard et al., 1999) and responds and clarifies meaning during the interview (Kvale, 1996), so that ‘the outcome of the research analysis is a description of a phenomenon that reflects as closely as possible the meaning of the research data’ (Barnard et al., 1999: 224). The reader has an active role in making meaning from phenomenographic research, and the researcher therefore presents a substantial and discursive account of findings to enable readers to reach towards a sense of participants’ lived experience (Sjöström and Dahlgren, 2002).

The outcomes of phenomenographic research are categories that describe the collective experiences of the phenomenon under investigation (Entwistle, 1997). Phenomenography seeks to identify and describe the qualitatively different ‘patterns of understanding’ in people’s conceptions of the world and shares some features with phenomenology (Barnard et al., 1999: 215; Sjöström and Dahlgren, 2002). Phenomenography, however, investigates how groups of people, rather than individuals, collectively conceptualise aspects of the world. Conceptions of the world are argued to have commonalities, rather than being entirely unique and isolated (Barnard et al., 1999).

At the same time, however, individual experience and identity are central to phenomenography; access to multiple accounts of experience can inform comprehension of individual experience (Sjöström and Dahlgren, 2002). Phenomenographic analysis can, like the phenomenological, involve constantly ‘negotiating [the] relationship between convergance and divergence, commonality and individuality’ (Flowers et al., 2009: 109). In educational research, awareness of the differences and dynamics uniquely shaping individual experiences of learning is important, to avoid reduction and generalisation (Haggis, 2004).

There are benefits to adopting a phenomenographic approach that takes these tensions into account and values them. Phenomenography can yield insights into teaching and learning, for example into how students understand and conceptualise what they learn (Entwistle, 1997; Ornek, 2008). It is concerned with identities and the value of participants’ voices, seen as crucial by Paxton (2012) for understanding students’ experience of their learning. It searches for not the essence but the variation of lived experience of the world (Sjöström and Dahlgren, 2002). Phenomenography is therefore cognate with the aims of this study to explore students’ transition to university, their experiences of their learning, and the emergence of their academic identities as multiple and negotiated rather than essential and stable.

Despite some principles of approach, there is no definitive procedure for phenomenographic research (Barnard et al., 1999). This study’s approach draws on some of the opportunities suggested by critiques of phenomenography. Haggis (2004) notes that phenomenography’s purposeful focus on certain areas obscures the significance of others; Clegg and Stevenson (2013:8) suggest that phenonemographic outcomes can seem ‘thin’ because ‘treating the data as a single transcript consciously attempts to strip out context from analysis’.

Phenomenographic research, then, may sometimes be conducted in the style of ‘mining’ from ‘pure’ experience described by Kvale (1996) at the expense of valuing the subjectivity and plurality of lived experience. Clegg and Stevenson (2013: 8) argue that interviews are never neutral or context free, and treating them as if they are ignores the ‘richly ethnographic data… entailed in interpretation, even if only tacitly’. However, phenomenographically conducted research may verge on ethnography if it is to take into account, as this study does, the researcher’s insider knowledge and other influencing contexts surrounding the interview.

Although a researcher’s insider position is problematic, it is also unavoidable. Reflexivity is therefore necessary to help enable the researcher to scrutinise the society in which they are immersed, to become aware of its structures and values or their own ‘taken-for-granted ideas’ (Clegg and Stevenson, 2013; Paxton, 2012: 383). Such an approach opens up the research analysis to some of its transformative potential for both researcher and researched, recognising the position of the researcher as a traveller in conversation (Kvale, 1996). For Kvale, conversation exists not only in the interview but also in the ways the researcher’s own worldview, conceptions, and knowledge shape and inform their interpretation and presentation of the participant’s experience. The researcher’s position as someone ‘with a feel for the game’ has implications for the research findings that present both risks and opportunities (Clegg and Stevenson, 2013). Researchers must be aware of their position and able to use that awareness: the fact that conversation takes place at all levels (material, conceptual, interpretative) of the interview has value for interpreting its meanings.

The phenomenographic approach of this study undertakes reconnaissance into students’ perceptions of their experiences, presenting to the reader the meanings of their reflections as an ‘open text’ (Clegg and Stevenson, 2013). The analysis of the findings suggests ways in which the participants’ experiences may be understood in the contexts of the research literature about first-year transitions, students’ academic identities, and theories of learning, including academic socialisation and academic literacies.

Academic identities, socialisation, and literacies in the first-year transition experience

Overall, the students’ accounts of their experience of transition into the first year of university study resonated with findings of existing research. As in other subjects, students negotiate new circumstances relating to their subject, institution, peers, and tutors to form their student identity (Briggs et al., 2012; Christie et al., 2008; Lairio et al., 2013). When asked about what had helped her settle in to university, first-year E answered, ‘it’s cheesy – it’s friends! […] They helped me settle in the most, I’d say. Because if you’ve got friends in your class you feel more settled, you feel better, you feel less anxious’ (tr1). When the second-year students reflected on memories of their first day, the social aspect was foremost: ‘they put us all into groups and stuff so you know it was a good way to get into the social side of it’ (second-year L). Participants also appreciated positive interaction with tutors in the early weeks: ‘[they] said, you know, if you need anything, […] come and knock on the door. It’s very open, I like that. It’s very helpful’ (first-year C, tr1).³

When asked about challenges in the first trimester, participants expressed anxieties about written assessments, note taking during lectures, reading, and overall volume and difficulty of the work. ‘Note-taking was kind’ve, er, a guess really’ for first-year C, (tr1), while memories of early coursework stood out for second-year K: ‘the very first thing, that really did scare me […] was when I looked at the first assignments. […] I was thinking […] I can’t do this, there’s no way I can do this, I’m going to fail university’. A sense of not knowing what was expected or how to do the task appeared frequently in these accounts, although some participants spoke of feeling well prepared for independent learning by ‘A’ Level or Advanced Higher teachers. However, most participants also reported various degrees of improvement in these areas of their studies as time passed.

The experiences described in these accounts resonate with existing research demonstrating the crucial role in student engagement, retention and persistence of peer bonds, staff interaction, and gaining familiarity with learning and assessment expectations. However, the specific manifestations of these factors and how they shape students’ identities depended to an extent on the degree subject.

‘Everyone has such a passion for it’: ‘Pull’ factors of studying English literature and film

From the participants’ accounts, their chosen subject appeared to possess some unique pull factors (Aspland et al., 2013) contributing to their formation of academic identity. The reasons given by first-year participants for choosing English all figured enjoyment of the subject in some way, sometimes expressed as feelings of pleasure and success at school: ‘after doing English [higher] I remembered how much I liked it’ (first-year E, tr1); ‘English was the one kinda course that I loved and I was actually quite good at’ (first-year C, tr1).

Other participants represented their identification with English as intrinsic and long term: ‘I love literature, and I love film. […] I’ve always wanted to do something that’s um, connected with those’ (first-year F, tr1); ‘I’d always been like quite passionate about English […] it just seemed the right thing to do’ (first-year G, tr1); ‘I can’t ever imagine like not have been doing English’ (first-year H, tr1). For these participants, study of English appeared almost inevitable or natural in their educational career, with the origins of their passion lost in memory.

After two years of university in her home country, first-year A’s Scottish programme was more like ‘I was imagining for myself, I don’t have to be about boring stuff that I don’t actually care about, just literature’ (tr1). Her degree subject figures in her sense of identity: she herself, not only the object of her learning, can be ‘about’ literature. Others described their sense of self in specific literary terms. Second-year K called herself ‘a Shakespeare junkie. I love Shakespeare so much, when other people are sitting down reading […] Bridget Jones’s Diary I’ll literally sit and read Shakespeare, so (laughing)’. For first-year E, ‘I like the fact that I’m reading books that I wouldn’t read. Like I’m not a mystery-solving Sherlock-reading girl, I’ve never, you know, watched Sherlock let alone read it’ (tr2). For these students, literature offers one way of defining an identity against those of others and of expanding their sense of self.

Participants also valued shared interests. When asked for three words or phrases to describe their year group, words such as ‘enthusiastic’ and ‘interested’ appeared regularly. One student who selected the word ‘passionate’ explained: ‘I think it’s because the people who are here chose to study English. Everyone has such a passion for it, that if you talk to someone they will give you a good answer’ (first-year D, tr1). A shared and shareable passion for the degree subject may serve as a particular ‘pull’ factor.

However, participants reported discovering that their subject is constituted differently at university (Briggs et al., 2012). University could be ‘such a big change from school, like, especially the library…. was just so different’ and the solution ‘was just getting used to it’ (first-year G, tr1). This realisation and the adjustment to a new way of thinking and working are presented a struggle. Early experiences of studying university English were rarely described as being as natural and inevitable as their choice of degree subject. Instead, many accounts described uncertainty, anxiety, and processes of re-learning how to study (Christie et al., 2008).

First-year participants commented on note-taking struggles: ‘Note-taking is still a bit of a problem for me, I’m still not sure which information is important and how to, um, how exactly to yeah, to take notes’ (first-year F, tr1). Second-year N reflected that ‘I wasn’t sure what they were looking for, and I was very self-conscious about my writing, and still didn’t really know how to write academic essays yet, so that was a bit (pause) bit nerve-wrecking’.

These accounts suggest lack of transparency, to them, about how university-level study of English is constituted, which assaults the positive energy provided by their underlying identification with their subject. These accounts suggest a process of change, legible within contexts of academic socialisation – how students ‘learn the rules of the game’ – and within contexts of academic literacies – how students develop their own sense of agency and competence within their subject discipline.

‘It’s university, so something has to change’: Academic socialisation as a student of English

On joining university, participants perceived demands to learn new reading, writing, and thinking practices. These were often presented as an academic socialisation process in which students, rather than the learning environment, were required to change: ‘I was a wee bit shocked by how much work we had at first, but I think at this point you just get used to it and think well it’s university, so something has to change’ (first-year D, tr2). The accounts often positioned the students as the ones having to ‘change’ or ‘adapt’ to the relatively fixed mould of university study.

Gradually, however, students felt increasingly practiced at meeting learning and assessment expectations. Trimester 2 ‘just feels… like a little easier and just, I just know how to do things better’ (first-year F, tr2). Repeated practice characterised many participants’ efforts to adapt and was unquestioned as a feature of university study. Second-year M attributed increased confidence with assessments to ‘trial and error, mainly, it was just you know you write, do an essay, you get the feedback, you learn from that feedback and then you just try it again’. Practice at academic writing seemed key, but students experienced little agency in performing it. Trial and error is seen as inevitable: ‘I think it’s still a learning process, you have to make a few mistakes before you learn anything’ (first-year E, tr2).

In due course, this academic socialisation process seemed to affect students’ sense of identity. For second-year M,

now that I’m here I know how everything works I know what the people, what’s expected of me, what’s, you know, how to do, what to do in tutorials, what the essays are like, you know, how to take notes things like that – I’m a lot more sure of myself I think.

Confidence with the practice of being a student shapes this student’s sense of herself. First years also expressed changes in studying practices in terms of personal qualities or behaviours:

I think I’m actually a lot more focussed and more disciplined than I’ve been ever before. I think in most other parts of my life I’ve had someone to tell me to do things, and that’s just not part of this – I have to remind myself. (first year B, tr2)

However, a straightforward process of academic socialisation to a pre-existing set of practices was not all that seemed to be happening. First, as Gourlay (2009) points, assimilation to a community of practice implies a consensus, which may be what many of these participants thought they were learning to meet. However, in these students’ experiences, the ‘rules of the game’ were often not clear or consistent. First-year H perceived not a single set of expectations for her written coursework, but one for each lecturer: ‘it’s like three different perspectives’. Part of developing identity as an English student may be to understand that texts and practices are constructed in varied, conflicting, and contested ways (Knights, 2005). However, until those processes can be understood by new students, the effects may be confusing and requirements obscure.

Second, academic identities themselves are not straightforward; identities exist in a state of change and renegotiation (Christie et al., 2008; Lairio et al., 2013). Academic identity positions are more varied and dynamic and less neat than a traditional or straightforward socialisation model would suggest (Christie, 2009; Haggis, 2003). At the same time as learning how to study, participants also expressed the emergence of new identities in terms suggesting the transformative effects of studying English. When asked to compare herself now to herself at the start of first year, second-year K answered:

I would say I was like Bambi in my first year (laughing). Now I’m not quite grown up Bambi – I’d say I’m teenager Bambi (laughing) […] I’m still growing my antlers as you would say (laughing). I’m a lot more confident with speaking to other members of my class, a lot more confident when it comes to essays and studying. […] but I think there’s always going to be room for improvement, and I think that will really be brought out of me in my third year.

This student links her perception of her emerging maturity with her development as a student: her capacity to debate topics, write essays, and pursue her own studies independently. But she casts this as a continuing and continual dynamic process of identity development, not as an expectation of attaining a single static academic identity.

Developing academic identities and literacies: ‘It’s not just books and poetry – it’s proper society’

Acquiring and continually renegotiating an academic identity as a university student belies the earlier representations of a natural affinity with the subject of English, yet the ‘pull’ factors of English may still contribute to students’ successful transition. Despite the struggles of participating successfully in university learning practices such as writing, those practices open up spaces in which students can start to develop academic literacies and form individual and independent academic identities within the context of their new academic community (Lillis and Scott, 2008). In this study these spaces seem partially at last to be created by the underpinning philosophies and pedagogies of the degree programmes, which understand literature and film as intrinsic to history and culture, and emphasise developing reflective, critically aware graduates (Edinburgh Napier University, 2011).

This contextual approach to studying literature and film appeared to be a significant feature in students’ transition, with the potential for transformative effects (Lillis and Scott, 2008) on students’ sense of their academic self as they became more literate in their discipline. When asked in the follow-up interview to compare herself now to herself at the start of first year, first-year D felt ‘a lot more confident’ and expanded:

I just feel a lot less ignorant on the subjects than I did, because coming into it I thought, right, it’s gonna be just like – […] it was going to be very similar to Higher and Advanced Higher. But it wasn’t – now looking back and you’ve got all these theories and all these – all this culture and how it’s relevant and all that, it’s just, you realise how ignorant you kind of were to English at first. It’s not just books and poetry – it’s proper society (laughing), history and that. So. Yeah, I’d be impressed with myself, if I looked back. (tr2, her emphases)

Here, first-year D describes how her conception of her subject discipline has transformed. English was her ‘favourite subject’ at school in the first interview, but her trimester 2 reflections reveal feelings of previous ignorance about what English ‘is’. Specifically, university English’s engagement with ‘theories’, ‘culture’, and ‘history’ revealed the subject to her as one concerned with ‘proper society’: a threshold revelation (Gourlay, 2009).

Further, first-year D recognises this revelation as positive and personally transformative: ‘I’d be impressed with myself, if I looked back’. Toward the end of the interview, she described her reasons for intending to return for second year:

I’m very very happy with what I’m learning, and like I said before I’ve just got this non-conceited pride about what I’ve been learning and… I don’t know, just really happy with the stuff I’m learning, it’s what I want to do, it’s what I want to learn about. It’s relatable to how my mind works, so, it’s good to know that things I’m interested in have academic value. (tr2)

Here, her description of her feelings about her programme point to her personal identification with her subject and her deepened sense of the value of her learning.

Second-year K reflected on her expectations of forming an ‘academic’ identity: ‘I thought oh, it’s great, now that I’m going to university, I’m studying English, I can get the chance to read all these texts and study them in an academic way’. In particular, she described the significance of what she termed ‘intertextuality’⁴ in shaping her conception of studying texts ‘in an academic way’:

it was really helpful that – intertextuality, that that was brought in, because it never really played a big part in my high school life apart from in sixth year in my dissertation, so having that intertextuality just made it so much easier, whereas in high school you just sit down and look at a text, you look at Romeo and Juliet and that’s it, whereas in the [university] modules you’re bringing in loads of different texts and it just helps your understanding so much.

Both second-year K and first-year D expressed a similar sense of the plural, multi-layered, multi-textual nature of studying English literature and its impact on their practice as students.

Developing critical practice was also important to students’ transition experience. First-year F found the independent style of study to be different from and ‘a lot better’ than her expectations, because of the range of texts studied and because there is a lot more, um, there is a lot more freedom with, with the studying experience […] just a lot more freedom of what, the fact that I can be critical about a book (first-year F, tr2)

First-year A also remarked on being encouraged to think actively and critically, and showed her awareness of the effect it was having on her sense of self:

It’s like basically here you are teaching us to, to think, to think critically, and that’s a really good point because […] I already recognise this kind of changes in myself, that, you know, I think a bit differently about stuff that maybe I didn’t before. (tr1, her emphasis)

The critical freedom offered by studying English, then, may create a space in which students can move towards independent thinking as a feature of their emerging academic identity.

A student’s peer group also creates a space in which a sense of academic identity could develop through engagement in learning practices:

it was good to have a conversation and you could actually be in the room with people in tutorials and talk to other people about the same things, and it’s, it’s more like ah, uh, I know it’s intellectual, or I don’t want to say intellectual, but sort of like that, and the way that people are thinking the same things and you can exchange ideas and things and it’s better than sort of the juvenile environment that is school. (second-year N)

This participant tries to resist using the word ‘intellectual’ to describe the experience of working with peers, appearing more comfortable with notions of shared thoughts and discussion to distinguish university from school. Significantly, the student’s alternative terms – ‘thinking the same things’ and ‘exchange ideas’ – emphasise practices, and the potential for transformation through sharing and exchange, over the single, fixed identity of ‘intellectual’. This student ‘tells herself as academic’ (Tapp, 2014) to suggest a stage in her academic identity that is radically different from the ‘juvenile’ nature of school, but resists adopting what, perhaps, she may feel are elitist ways of describing scholarly identity in the academy.

Development of identity and literacy, therefore, is not easy. Second-year K and first-year D, whose narratives overall suggest positive development of engaged academic identities, also spoke of obstacles created by tensions between different requirements of lectures and assignments. Second-year K discussed her appreciation of peer support and the encouragement to debate and exchange ideas in terms that signalled her awareness of a possible conflict with the simultaneous emphasis on individual work:

[Induction] gave me a chance to see who I was going to be studying with […] and just generally who I would be able to receive some sort of help from, because obviously when you are writing essays, it is your work, but it’s good to have a group of friends there who are studying the same thing as you because you’re able to debate like if you’re doing the same sort of topics you’re able to debate the questions around that and bring up new ideas, so although you’re still doing it by yourself, it’s a lot easier to get that work done. (my emphases)

First-year D described her note taking in lectures:

It was just trying to balance writing between ideas that other people had said that aren’t on the slides, and then thinking, I can look at these slides later, but do I understand what’s on them. Because I often find myself writing down things that are on the slides, and then in brackets I would write down an easier way of understanding it or like a method of remembering it, and then of course while you’re doing that, the teacher’s still talking, people are putting their ideas in, and you tune in again, and something else is going on. So it’s just kind’ve catching up and writing faster and less. (tr1)

This account signals tensions between being an independent learner and developing the capacity to engage effectively in the necessary practices, suggesting areas in students’ transition that may benefit from more support.

Conclusion

If, then, part of a new student’s academic identity is learning to navigate some of the apparent contradictions inherent in being an independent scholar within a peer community, and if the student is doing so within a discipline which values debate, negotiates contradiction, and welcomes multiple perspectives, then the process of forming that identity may be intrinsically linked to the everyday practices of studying English. However, the transition process may need additional support, despite all there is already, to ease the struggles and help students to achieve the ‘balance’ of their impulse towards a new academic identity with the challenges of grasping new practices and discourses. The participants in this study are amongst the programmes’ engaged and successful students, but yet their struggles and anxieties are expressed as persistent and deeply felt. If the academic practices and discourses of the programmes still seem to present obstacles to students’ transitions, then there may be ways to reduce these obstacles or even turn them to students’ advantage, for example by making them more explicit to students and by finding ways to encourage students to take ownership.

This study responds to some of the calls outlined in the introduction for fresh ways in the current British HE climate for understanding how students learn and how they experience their transition to university study, particularly within subject disciplines, and their development of a secure, though dynamic and negotiable, academic identity. Both the struggles and positive experiences of these participants support adopting academic literacies approaches to pedagogy: that respect individual student agency and identity formation; in which academic practices and discourses are made explicit (rather than demanding a passive learning and following of the rules), creating a learning space in which students can actively form and articulate their own identity as academic; and in which as autonomous carriers of practices they have the potential to transform both outwardly and inwardly (the constitution of their academic world as well as their self).

Such a vision can already be seen in some practice. Tapp’s (2014) study shows students constructing ‘hybrid’ identities from their academic and non-academic identities, rather than shedding a former identity in favour of acculturation to their new one. This is important for modern diverse student populations because it does not privilege those who identify most easily with the traditional model of the university student while marginalising those of non-traditional age or class (Christie, 2009; Tapp, 2014). Instead, students develop academic identities for themselves, rather than have one imposed upon them, through their engagement in the social practices of their discipline (Jones, 2009). In such ways, Haggis’s (2003) call for a greater range of learner identities supported by academic literacies interventions may partly be answered, if ‘through academic engagement, new possibilities for identity can emerge as the student takes up academic discourses as though they were their own, in an on-going process of self-formation where identity is constantly under negotiation’ (Tapp, 2014, 331–332). These processes, however, need to be further understood in disciplinary contexts, where academic literacies are seen to develop. The findings of this study can inform further discussions about the research into, and production of, these academic environments.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Emily Alder is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and her current positions are as Lecturer in Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University and as Associate Lecturer for the Open University in Scotland. She teaches Shakespeare, 19th-century literature, children’s literature, and popular literature and film from the 20th century to the present. Her disciplinary research interests and publications are in literature and science, while her educational research projects have focussed around student transitions to university study, including, with Dr Julia Fotheringham, ‘Getting the Message: supporting students’ transition from Higher National to degree level study and the role of mobile technologies’, in the Electronic Journal of e-Learning (2012).

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