Universities in Transition: Foregrounding Social Contexts of Knowledge in the First Year Experience

• Main Author: Michell, Dee (auth)
• Other Authors: Fergie, Deane (auth), Maeorg, Michael (auth), Brook, Heather (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: University of Adelaide Press 2014
• Subjects: Education; universities in transition; transformations on campus; jade mckay; the university of adelaide student learning hub: a case study; university transitions in practice: research-learning; fields and their communities of practice; bradley review; reconceptualising: transition and universities; changing social relations in higher education: the first-year international student and the 'chinese learner' in australia; transition to university; dee michel; stephen parker; marcia devlin; kendra backstrom; heather brook; revaluing: 'non-traditional' student groups in higher education classism on campus?; first year experience; exploring and extending understandings of social class in the contemporary higher education debate; realising; relating experiences: regional and remote students in their first year at university; trevor gale; of education co-creation; deane fergie; knowing students; pascale quester; reframing 'the problem': students from low socio-economic status backgrounds transitioning; Critical thinking
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

Universities are social universes in their own right. They are the site of multiple, complex and diverse social relations, identities, communities, knowledges and practices. At the heart of this book are people enrolling at university for the first time and entering into the broad variety of social relations and contexts entailed in their 'coming to know' at, of and through university. By recasting 'the transition to university' as simultaneously and necessarily entailing a transition of university - indeed universities - and of their many and varied constitutive relations, structures and practices, the contributors to this book seek to reconceptualise the 'first-year experience' in terms of multiple and dynamic processes of dialogue and exchange amongst all participants. They interrogate taken-for-granted understandings of what 'the university' is, and consider what universities might yet become.