Transitioning into higher education: rituals and implied expectations

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the expectations and culture that first-year students encounter when entering higher education. Induction activities are the first encounter with the new institutional setting and cultural context of the study programme, thus the students’ first opportunity to develop ideas about what studying entails and what is expected of them. The study is based on data produced through participant observations in induction activities, and interviews with the senior students organising these activities, for the following three study programmes at a Danish university: biotechnology, philosophy, and film and media studies. By applying the concepts of rituals, the implied student and students’ identity work, the analysis explores a ritual within each programme. The findings show that the rituals reflect patterns and cultural elements that the students also experience later on in their first year. The rituals differ in how they relate to the content of the programme and which available identities they present to the students. However, in all three programmes, senior students play a key role in communicating norms and traditions. We argue that although transitioning is an ongoing process throughout higher education, it is still relevant to consider what happens during induction and what is communicated to the students.

KEYWORDS:

• Transition
• first-year students
• induction
• rituals
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Later in the paper, we will use the term ‘senior students’ for these students.

2. All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Fransiska Møller Gregersen

Andrea Fransiska Møller Gregersen is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Science Education at University of Copenhagen. In her PhD project she investigates transition into higher education and how first-year students become a part of a study culture and how they develop a way of studying.

Henriette Tolstrup Holmegaard

Henriette Tolstrup Holmegaard is an associate professor at the Department of Science Education at University of Copenhagen. Her research centres around understanding students‘ identity-work in science. She has published on students‘ choices of and transition into higher education science, students‘ drop out and first year experiences.

Lars Ulriksen

Lars Ulriksen is a professor in higher education teaching and learning at the Department of Science Education at University of Copenhagen. His research areas include the transition of students into higher education and the meeting of the students’ prior knowledge and experiences with the culture and the curriculum of the programmes. He has done research on students’ choice of higher education, in particular their choice of STEM.