There has been relatively little research to date that has explored the transition to postgraduate study. This paper reports findings from a project (funded by the UK's Higher Education Academy) that sought to address this gap. The research project was ethnographic and explored university practice and student participation in five UK universities. A significant emergent feature of the research was that a multiplicity of identities construct student experience and contribute to student transition. This finding provides support for learning theory that argues for inextricable links between learning and wider social identities. Moreover, the process of negotiating an academic identity in light of wider experience and university practices emerged as a key factor in understanding transition together with the imperative for independent study, which was a particularly powerful practice that necessitated complex identity negotiations in order to enable full participation in the university community of practice.

This article presents empirical research exploring adult students' transition to higher education (HE) through a program designed to enable that transition. Wenger's Communities of Practice theory has been applied to informal adult learning by Merriam, Courtenay, and Baumgartner (2003), who suggested its potential for understanding formal education. Using this theoretical framework, adults' transition to HE is explored in terms of learning, participation in practices, and identity. Students were interviewed, and qualitative data analysis revealed that although they perceived themselves to be peripheral participants in the community, university regulations, and academic procedures sometimes undermined their feelings of legitimacy. Their experiences of the community's practices were mediated by individual, shifting identities and a sense of belonging. Their experiences are discussed in terms of the power of practice to include or exclude, and the concomitant identity shifts which may lead to fuller participation. Implications for the design of transitional programs are also discussed.

This paper explores and examines the distal and proximal systems which construct social science postgraduate study in the UK and analyses the emergent identities of postgraduate students as they negotiate the multiple and interacting practices in their transition to study. The data represent part of a one year research project, funded by the Higher Education Academy, in which staff and students from five UK universities participated. The paper takes a socio-cultural perspective and situates staff and students in the wider macro context of policy and practice surrounding postgraduate study as well as exploring the micro processes which construct the proximal experience of the transition. We argue that the silence surrounding postgraduate transition in the literature must be addressed in light of existing literature and the present research both of which suggest that the systems which construct postgraduate study are complex and challenging to students, who do not always receive the support they require. We discuss the practices which implicitly assume expertise in postgraduate students in contrast to student self-identification as confused and struggling. Commonalities with other educational transitions are identified but we argue that there are distinct aspects to postgraduate transition which require greater breadth of research with both successful and unsuccessful postgraduate students.

The importance of relationships in education has been well established in the literature. However, the nature of relationship is seldom defined and as a result interpersonal and learning relationships are conflated and so implicitly treated as synonymous. In this paper we argue that learning relationships are different from interpersonal relationships, but crucially that interpersonal relationships are a pre-requisite to learning relationships. We define learning relationships as those which allow for the emergence of, and passage through, the zone of proximal development. At present there is a paucity of research which examines relationship formation of any type in education and in this paper we seek to address this gap. At the point of transition from one school to another there is a normative imperative to form new relationships. This paper focuses on the experiences of students in their transition to secondary school and explores the formation of relationships with their new teachers. An ethnographic method was employed which followed children during their final year of primary school and into their first year of secondary school. Through student and staff voices and observational data, the opening and closing of opportunities for the formation of interpersonal relationships, and by extension, learning relationships, are explored. The paper presents data from three schools in the UK and identifies the themes of courtesy, rules and resistance, and school systems and pedagogical practice as key determinants in relationship formation. We acknowledge that these findings represent the focal schools, but argue that the data demonstrate that attention must be paid to the construction of enabling transition contexts to facilitate the formation of interpersonal relationships which may lead to learning relationships in the new school. We further call for more focussed research which explores the nature of learning relationships.Keywords: transition from primary to secondary school, interpersonal relationships, learning relationships, school context It has been established in both empirical research and theory that enabling relationships are fundamental to the process of learning. The establishment of the importance of relationships emerged most strongly in Vygotsky's work. The underpinning ontology of Vygotskian psychology is that development is distributed across the social experiences of individuals, and that all behaviour, including cognition, reflects societal imperatives accessed through relationships with more able others. A range of empirical work has supported this, demonstrating that relationships cannot be thought of as a variable to be manipulated, but rather that they are inextricably embedded in all 2 learning and development. Therefore, the formation of interpersonal relationships necessarily precedes the emergence of successful learning relationships, which can be thought of as inextricably embedded in mutuality of social action. Acceptance of this premise demands that attention be paid to the opportuni...

High-fidelity patient simulation is a method of education increasingly utilised by educators of nursing to provide authentic learning experiences. Fidelity and authenticity, however, are not conceptually equivalent. Whilst fidelity is important when striving to replicate a life experience such as clinical practice, authenticity can be produced with low fidelity. A challenge for educators of undergraduate nursing is to ensure authentic representation of the clinical situation is a core component for potential success. What is less clear is the relationship between fidelity and authenticity in the context of simulation based learning. Authenticity does not automatically follow fidelity and as a result, educators of nursing cannot assume that embracing the latest technology-based educational tools will in isolation provide a learning environment perceived authentic by the learner.As nursing education programmes increasingly adopt simulators that offer the possibility of representing authentic real world situations, there is an urgency to better articulate and understand the terms fidelity and authenticity. Without such understanding there is a real danger that simulation as a teaching and learning resource in nurse education will never reach its potential and be misunderstood, creating a potential barrier to learning. This paper examines current literature to promote discussion within nurse education, concluding that authenticity in the context of simulationbased learning is complex, relying on far more than engineered fidelity.

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This article explores transition to postgraduate (PG) study in terms of the widening participation (WP) agenda. The research is located within a Communities of Practice framework, allowing for explanations of transition in terms of learning, identity and participation in practices. A qualitative ethnographic methodology is employed, and analysis reveals two themes: the heterogeneity of PG students, and the nature of PG teaching and learning. It is argued that the imperatives that the WP agenda generates are as compatible with PG as with undergraduate study, and that this may have been overlooked previously owing to assumptions of the homogeneity of postgraduates. However, students' experiences of academic practices do not always reflect the dogma of how teaching and learning should occur at PG level, and this may prevent full participation in PG study by those who might otherwise be included.

This paper considers ethnographic data collected during undergraduate students' transition to Higher Education (H.E.) Drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) Communities of Practice theory the research focuses on the psychological process of identity as a trajectory, considering how reconciliation and negotiation of identities across and between communities influences transition. We aimed to explore the academic practices which construct the transition experience, to analyse those practices in terms of student identity and participation and to explore some of the psychological mechanisms which underpin transition to H.E. The data sources included observations, informal social interactions, one to one interviews and document analysis. Data collection took place over the first term of an undergraduate course. A theoretical thematic analysis was undertaken investigating the ways in which identity shaped participation, the practices that influenced participation and how participation subsequently influenced learner identity. We argue that the reconciliation of past, present and future identities is psychologically challenging for students during educational transition and this influences individual trajectories. Some practices assumed an already autonomous learner rather than enabling development of autonomy. Inability to participate in valued (and often implicit) academic practice was seen to negatively influence learner identities, delaying full participation. The focus for transition research could therefore consider enabling systems and practices which acknowledge differences and fully support successful changes in learner identity.