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.

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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...