Abstract

Sector evidence repeatedly highlights the importance of transition across educational borders as a means of achieving learner’s preparedness for continued study, their ongoing experiences and achievement of success (Briggs et al, 2012; O’Donnell et al, 2016). The focus upon postgraduate taught students has been less evidenced, but work that has explored this (Heussi, A., 2012 Mellors-Bourne et al, 2016; Tobbell et al, 2010) highlights the importance of identity as a critical temporal feature intrinsically linked to their advanced educational and professional development.

The workshop focused upon the notion that transition involves the management of identity change, and how an individual manages such change is a function of past experiences, and the effectiveness of institutional process and activity. Transition is not a binary function of progression, rather ‘transition as becoming’ and one that is flexible and more accommodating to re-establish a student’s professional and academic identity (Gale & Parker, 2014).

Central to this idea is the interplay between centralised induction programmes and administrative activities, and localised initiatives within and around discipline specific teaching and learning support activities and practice. Indeed, work by Wenger proposes that the development of identity is very much bound within the notion of ‘transition as becoming’. The evolution of professional and academic identity is seen as an ongoing process, constructed in social contexts, one that is not limited to a linear notion of time, and one which is defined with respect to the interaction of multiple convergent and divergent trajectories (1999).

The workshop explored the connection between ongoing transition and emergent postgraduate student identity, one that is bound within communities of practice where we act to form and legitimise these. The aim was to establish a collective discourse on postgraduate student identify and how this can be best embedded into our partnership work with students.