From expert student to novice professional: higher education and sense of self in the creative and performing arts

ABSTRACT

The employability of graduates is of concern across further and higher education, but it is particularly problematic in the Creative and Performing Arts disciplines. Understanding the journey to work for arts graduates requires collaborative action from multiple agencies, particularly the collection and reporting of nuanced statistics on higher education graduate outcomes and empirical investigations of graduate work and employability. This paper reports on a study of Australian creative workers who described how their experiences of work inform their sense of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. Two models are discussed in relation to the transition from student to professional worker. The first model explores how the self-determination of an individual’s motivation influences the success of the transition. The second model poses a multidisciplinary view of student engagement and provides a lens to the transformative processes for developing one’s sense of being through tacit knowledge and active engagement in professional self. The article exposes models of selfhood that might enhance our understanding of higher education students’ sense of becoming as well as how these models might be applied within the higher education context.

KEYWORDS:

• Tertiary education
• employability
• scholarship of teaching and learning
• identity
• career
• arts
• music
• motivation
• transformation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Dawn Bennett http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0676-1623

Notes on contributors

Professor Anna Reid is Dean, Sydney Conservatorium of Music and plays the cello. She has research interests in creativity theory, informed practice, ethics, leadership, statistics and policy in higher education.

Professor Jennifer Rowley is Program Leader, Music Education and academic coordinator professional placements at Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Her research interests include managing a digital learning space to enhance the cognitive, social, emotional and behavioural needs of all learners across a diverse range of educational settings.

Dawn Bennett is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education with Curtin University, where she directs the EmployABILITY thinking and creative workforce initiatives. Dawn’s research focuses on the development of employability. She is currently operationalising a free metacognitive model for employability with faculty and students at multiple institutions. Publications appear at Researchgate.