1
Telling tales: a fresh look at student experience and
learning in higher education
Dr Dilly Fung (University of Exeter) D.Fung@exeter.ac.uk
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual
Conference, University of Warwick, 6-9 September 2006
BERA Conference 2006
Session: Parallel Session 5
Reference Number: 0498
Date: 08/09/2006 from 09:00 to 10:30
Abstract
Drawing on sequences of oral narratives by first year university students, this paper
takes a fresh look at the complex issue of ‘student experience’, using personal stories to gain
a rich description of the lifeworld of students and their learning. Twenty-two first year
students, arriving at an ‘old’ university, were invited to talk at length on three occasions (at
the beginning, middle and end of the first year) about their experiences. In this era of
widening participation, half of the narrators were ‘traditional’ students and half ‘nontraditional’: a hermeneutic analysis (Gallagher, 1992) of the transcribed narratives was then
conducted, and the stories of students from different backgrounds juxtaposed.
As students represented at length their experiences, it was noticeable that, whilst the
traditional and non-traditional students express some differences in terms of their
representations of experiencing university culture, participants show a marked and common
emphasis on the social and interactive dimensions of their approaches to learning. The
centrality within the narratives of this collective dimension of their experience emphasises the
importance of ‘education as relation’ (Bingham and Sidorkin, 2004), for students from all
backgrounds.
Research into aspects of teaching and learning in higher education in recent years has seen
a much-heralded ‘turn’ towards analysing and evaluating education from what is described
as ‘the student perspective’. In one of the seminal texts for this body of work (Marton et al.,
19971), Entwistle describes the influential ‘deep and surface learning’ model, together with its
proponents’ characteristic approaches to research into ‘student experience of learning’, as a
‘new paradigm’. Entwistle writes of the new focus on the student perspective as a significant
shift of approach:
The shift is crucial in ensuring that the explanations of student learning not only
have ecological validity within the real university or college context, but also
enable the researcher to make an interpretation of the findings which does justice
to the totality of the students’ experiences. To reach this empathetic
understanding, the alternative research paradigm has become essential (op. cit.
p16).
The focus of research in the sector here, then, has become ‘the totality of the students’
experiences’.
A similarly clear focus on ‘student experience of learning’ has been visible recently in the
literature and conferences of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), the professional body
1
The title of this key text in the field, The experience of learning: implications for teaching and studying
in higher education, and also of Prosser and Trigwell’s (1999) Understanding learning and teaching:
the experience in higher education tellingly both suggest that it is possible to characterise the
experience for students.
2
for those involved in teaching and supporting learning in higher education in the UK. The
mission of the HEA is to:
help institutions, discipline groups and all staff to provide the best possible
learning experience for their students2 [my emphasis].
The HEA’s regular publication for those working in the Higher Education (HE) sector is
entitled Academy Exchange: Supporting the Student Experience, and this year’s HEA Annual
Conference (2006) was sub-titled ‘Enhancing the Student Learning Experience’3. A keynote
speech at the conference was given by Prosser (2006), whose abstract for the conference
refers to
over 25 years of research into the student learning experience which show that it
is the way individual students perceive our teaching and courses, rather than just
the way we design them, that relates to student learning outcomes4.
This connection here between the phrase ‘student learning experience’ and the idea of ‘the
way individual students perceive our teaching and courses’ is explicit, and indicates a
commonly held notion, since the development of the ‘deep and surface learning’ model by
Marton and Säljö (1976) explicitly referred to in the paper by Prosser, that the key way of
conceptualising ‘student experience of learning’ is through consideration of their perceptions,
or conceptions, of ‘our teaching and courses’.
How has this dominant framework for thinking about the notion of student experience come
about? The deep and surface model was proposed originally by Marton and Säljö (Marton
and Säljö, 1976; Marton et al., 1997), and developed and contributed to by researchers from
a number of teams working in closely related fields (including Biggs, 2003; Prosser and
Trigwell, 1999; Ramsden, 2003). The model, which grew from a phenomenographic enquiry
into the qualitatively different ways in which students approach an academic reading and
comprehension task (Marton and Säljö, 1976), was taken up by others, some of whom
developed related quantitative measurement tools in the form of questionnaires5. The model
has evolved in a way that frames students’ ‘experience of learning’ as a combination of their
‘approaches to learning’ and their ‘conceptions of learning’, which together influence their
effectiveness as learners by affecting their ‘learning strategies’.
This body of research into these aspects of the ways in which students ‘experience learning’
has developed our understanding of the different ways in which they may conceptualise and
perceive aspects of their own education, including subject-related concepts, and a
considerable number of studies have been conducted which draw on this framework: see,
among many examples, Booth and James, 2001; Case and Gunstone, 2003a and 2003b;
Hall et al., 2004; Booth and Anderberg, 2005. Case and Gunstone characterise a commonly
expressed position as follows:
the notion of ‘approaches to learning’ has become a highly influential framing
device for thinking about student learning in higher education, particularly in
providing lecturers and educational developers with a theory of why some
students are more successful than others. Deep approaches, in which students
2
See: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/184.htm (accessed 06 08 06)
See: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/conference.htm (accessed 06 08 06).
4 See: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/documents/2006AnnualConferenceHandbook.pdf (accessed 14
08 06) p80
5 A number of related measurement tools have been used, for example the Study Process
Questionnaire (SPQ) (Biggs, 1987), the Approaches to Learning Inventory (ALI) (Entwistle and
Ramsden, 1983), and more recently a revised SPQ (Kember, Biggs and Leung, 2004).
3
3
approach their learning with the intention of understanding, have been shown to
be associated with more sophisticated learning outcomes than surface
approaches, in which there is the absence of an intention to understand (Case
and Gunstone, 2003b, p55).
There are frequent calls in this body of literature for lecturers to consider the ‘learning
experience’ of students, and take measures to move them away from activities that promote
‘surface learning’ towards the facilitation of ‘deep learning’ – the kind of learning that leads to
what Case and Gunstone refer to as ‘more sophisticated learning outcomes’ (although the
debate around what would these might constitute and why, and what ‘good’ learning is in
higher education in any philosophical sense, is very limited in this body of literature).
The methodological approach of phenomenography underpins much of the research in the
field of learning and teaching in higher education (LTHE). Marton classically defined
phenomenography as
the empirical study of the limited number of qualitatively different ways in
which various phenomena in, and aspects of, the world around us are
experienced (Marton, 1994, p4424) [my emphasis],
and Marton and Wing have more recently summarised its aim as follows:
Traditional phenomenographic research aims to investigate the qualitatively
different ways in which people understand a particular phenomenon or an
aspect of the world around them. These ‘different ways of understanding’, or
conceptions, are typically represented in the form of categories of description,
which are further analysed with regard to their logical relations in forming an
outcome space (Marton and Wing, 2005, p335) [my emphasis].
The presumption is, then, that there is a ‘limited number of … ways’ in which people
‘experience’ (or, as it is described in the later definition, ‘understand’) a phenomenon6, and
that the phenomenographic researcher’s task is to identify and describe this limited range of
conceptions held by respondents. The ‘categories of description’ derived from the research,
identified through methods of enquiry such as interview, are then presented as forming an
ordered hierarchy, known as the ‘outcome space’. So, for example, the original Swedish
research into students’ conceptions of learning (Marton and Säljö, 1976) led to a six-tier
model, a spectrum described as moving from ‘surface’ to ‘deep’:






Learning as increasing one’s knowledge
Learning as memorising and reproducing
Learning as applying
Learning as understanding
Learning as seeing something in a different way
Learning as changing a person (Marton et al., 1997, p19).
In much of the LTHE literature, then, the notion of ‘student experience of learning’ has been
repeatedly connected with ‘conceptions’ and ‘approaches’ of individuals, and the ways in
which these are seen to differ; the aims of the practitioner and policy maker in HE are tied up
6
This presumption is one which may sit very uncomfortably with many working in arts subjects, where
artistic expression through subjects such as literature and fine art is arguably predicated upon an
entirely contrary assumption: that ways of knowing, ‘experiencing’ and representing (or expressing)
the world are unlimited. (See, for example, Abbs 2003.)
4
with consideration of these, and with finding ways of encouraging ‘deep’ learning7, which
arises from having appropriate conceptions and effective approaches to learning.
Significant implications for practitioners and policy makers in HE are seen to arise from this
way of conceptualising ‘student experience of learning’. Biggs, with his notion of ‘constructive
alignment’ (Biggs, 2003) which is linked specifically with the ‘deep and surface learning’
framework, challenges university staff to ‘align’ all aspects of the curriculum so that each
student meets the planned learning outcomes. The key characteristics affecting ‘student
learning’ for Biggs (2003) in his ‘3P’ model are: the individual student’s prior experiences; the
learning context (course design, teaching methods, assessment methods); the student’s
perceptions of the learning context (which is different from the learning context as seen by
others); the ways in which the student approaches learning, and the quality and quantity of
the learning outcomes. Drawing on a constructivist model which appears to be profoundly
individualistic, Biggs tells us that
Knowledge, then, is created by the student’s learning activities, their ‘approaches
to learning’… The low cognitive level of engagement deriving from the surface
approach yields fragmented outcomes that do not convey the meaning of the
encounter, whereas the deep approach yields the meaning at least as the
student construes it. The surface approach is therefore to be discouraged, the
deep approach encouraged – and that is the working definition of good teaching
used in this book (Biggs, 2003, p13).
‘Meaning’ here is necessarily constructed by each individual:
Meaning is therefore personal. What else can it be? (op. cit., p13).
In line with the assumptions of others in the so-called new paradigm in the HE literature (see,
for example, Prosser and Trigwell, 1999), the perspective here is that ‘experience’ and
‘learning’ happen exclusively to individuals in relation to their institution, features of the
programme of study, the approaches to teaching and assessment, and the perceptions the
individual student has of these. In line with current notions of the student as individual
consumer in the HE marketplace, Biggs’s model of constructive alignment suggests that
universities need to ensure that each individual experiences a well-designed curriculum
package which leads him or her to achieve the planned learning outcomes specified in the
programme of study. The whole idea of ‘student learning experience’ is unquestioningly tied
in with the notion of how each individual student sees her or his studies and ‘learning’, and
the strategies she or he adopts to ‘learn’.
While a consensus appears to be emerging that the notion of ‘the student experience of
learning’ is an important one, there are arguably more questions to be asked about what this
is, and how (and whether) it might be known. What do we mean, and what might we mean,
by someone’s ‘experience’? And what might we mean by ‘experience of learning’? Should
we be limiting it to notions such as ‘conceptions of’, ‘approaches to’ and ‘strategies for’
The idea of ‘deep’ learning in this framework is connected with finding ‘personal meaning’. There is
very little discussion in the associated body literature of what ‘good’ learning might be in terms of what
is worth learning, and why: who decides what is to be learnt, and on what basis? Is ‘learning’ in HE
instrumental, a means to a predominantly economic end, or are there other ways of conceptualising
education at this level – as critical, democratic and so on. Philosophical questions such as these seem
to have been subsumed, within the ‘new paradigm’ described above, by an uncritical assumption that
what is required in HE is for students to achieve the planned learning outcomes specified in a given
module or programme of study. Criticisms of the lack of engagement with these and other key issues,
including the slippery role of language in defining the kinds of ‘conceptions’ described by
phenomenographers, can be found in Webb (1997a and 1997b), and by Haggis (2003).
7
5
learning? Quite apart from the spectrum of competing possible notions of how learning itself
can be defined - from behaviourist models to cognitive, constructivist, humanist,
transformatory and beyond - the notion of experience is complex, and the latter has curiously
remained largely untheorised in the LTHE literature of recent decades. Yet the notion of
human experience – defining and representing it - is one that has been addressed over many
centuries by philosophers, not least the forerunner of qualitative research in the social
sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wilhelm Dilthey.
Dilthey argued that it was the very task of the human scientist to explore ways of capturing
human experience; he emphasised the importance of time for human experience, and of our
finding ways of accounting for that experience as framed by time:
…time is experienced as the restless progression, in which the present
constantly becomes the past and the future the present. The present is the filling
of a moment of time with reality; it is experience, in contrast to memory or ideas
of the future occurring in wishes, expectations, hopes, fears and strivings. This
filling with reality constantly exists while the content of experience constantly
changes (Dilthey, 1986, p149).
For Dilthey, the treating of time by human scientists as if it were an ideal, rather than a lived
experience, is a mistake:
Thus the experience of time in all its dimensions determines the content of our
lives. …it is in the life actually lived that the reality known in the human studies
lies (op. cit., p150).
Phenomenographers – who arguably do not intend to claim for themselves the whole
landscape of what might be meant by ‘student experience’, but whose work has nevertheless
tended to occupy that ‘space’ in the LTHE literature - reduce the concept under investigation
to five or six manageable categories: this approach cannot reflect the subtlety of the kind of
multi-faceted human experience explored by Dilthey. How then might we gain a fuller, a
richer picture of that experience? One approach is to listen at length to the personal stories
of those whose experience concerns us, stories which are shaped as far as possible
according to the participants’ own agendas: the use of a form of narrative enquiry.
Narrative enquiry
What contribution could a study drawing on narrative make to our understanding of ‘the
student experience of learning’? Narrative enquiry is typically defined as ‘a form of qualitative
research that takes story as either its raw data or its product’ (Bleakley, 2005, p534). How
can using narrative(s) as a source of data, and/or as a form of representation of the ‘product’
of research, contribute to our search for greater understanding of student experience of
higher education?
Whilst much has been written over many centuries about narrative - about its elements that
are constructed into particular forms, and about the possible approaches to formal analysis it is only relatively recently that researchers in the human sciences have taken narrative
seriously as a means of gathering qualitative data about people’s life experiences. For such
researchers once again ‘experience’ is a key term; Clandinin and Connelly (2000) show that
this has been of central concern to influential theorists from different disciplines, including
such influential figures as Dewey and Geertz. Carr (2003) also looks at narrative enquiry,
which for him
6
reflects widespread contemporary resistance to reductionist, empiricist and naïve
realist conceptions of the relationship of knowledge to the world. [It is a] timely
and welcome reminder that human discourse can be meaningful in ways not
reducible to the empirical data of natural or other science. It also reflects,
however, the deep significance for personal and social self-understanding — not
least for moral agency and identity — of stories of moral or other human agency:
humans perhaps more readily conceive themselves as actors in the dramas of
life, than as passively manipulated processes of blind material forces (2003,
p84).
People see themselves, then, as participating in story, or in a sequence of overlapping
stories. If this is so, as Bochner (2001) puts it, we need to
think of the life being expressed not merely as data to be analyzed and
categorized but as a story to be respected and engaged (p132).
Narrative enquiry thus becomes a form of research which has ‘open-ended, experiential and
quest-like qualities’ (Conle, 2000, p50). Across a number of disciplines, including
anthropology, sociology, medicine, and teacher education (Riessman, 1993; Goodson and
Sykes, 2001; Goodley et al., 2004), narrative has risen in popularity as a means of
understanding people’s experience: is it time for more work drawing on narrative to be
undertaken in the LTHE literature? The later works of Jerome Bruner certainly point to this
possibility.
Bruner (see, for example, 1986; 2002) makes illuminating connections between
experience, meaning and social constructivist theories of learning, and offers a rich
framework for thinking about the relationship between human experience, knowledge
and narrative. Despite the fact that narratives (or ‘stories’, as we may popularly
conceive of these) of all kinds surround us in our everyday life, the term narrative is
notoriously difficult to define. As Bruner points out (2002), etymologically it derives from
both the verb ‘to tell’ (narrare) and a noun meaning ‘knowing in some particular way’
(gnarus); the two meanings are entangled in ‘narrative’. Bruner argues that narrative is
a form of human thinking, which offers a way of understanding and representing the
world:
To say that all human thinking is essentially of two kinds - reasoning on the one
hand, and narrative, descriptive, contemplative thinking on the other - is to say
only what every reader's experience will corroborate (Bruner, 1986, p10).
Narrative provides us with a different order of insight and representation into and, arguably,
construction of the world around us from that of ‘science’; narrative involves the thinking and
feeling dimensions of the lifeworld of individuals, aspects of human experience that are not
easily captured in quantitative or even qualitative research. The relationship between the
actions of individuals and the ways in which they perceive the world around them is most
commonly represented in everyday life through narrative – through a telling of a personal
story which constructs a sequence of experiences characterised in particular ways.
Yet narrative, for Bruner, is not something of and from an individual: it operates in the
intersubjective realm and offers a way in which we can express our uniquely human ‘capacity
for intersubjectivity’, which is ‘a precondition for our collective life in culture’ (Bruner, 1986,
p16). And it is through this engagement with others by way of narrative that we come to
understand (or ‘construct’) the notion of ‘self’. Bruner argues that
there is no such thing as an intuitively obvious and essential self to know, one
that just sits there ready to be portrayed in words. Rather we constantly construct
7
and reconstruct our selves to meet the needs of the situations we encounter, and
we do so with the guidance of our memories of the past and our hopes and fears
for the future. Telling oneself about oneself is like making up a story about who
and what we are, what’s happened, and why we’re doing what we’re doing
(Bruner, 2002, p64).
Michael Erben (2000), drawing on Bruner’s work, has recently advocated this valuing of the
concept of narrative for an understanding of the importance of selves within the educational
sphere. He argues, following both Dilthey and Bruner, that time is a key feature of human
experience that is ‘made intelligible through narrative’ (Erben, 2000, p383), and that we
comprehend one another’s lives, within a community, through narrative:
it is narrative that provides the cohering mechanism to make such experience
comprehensible (op. cit., p383).
For Bruner, Erben and others, narrative has a profound role both in helping us understand
ways in which individuals construct their selfhood, and in constructing and representing to
ourselves and others our life experiences – including ‘the experience of learning’, however
that might be construed. As Bruner argues,
A shared narrative is what matters (Bruner, 2002, p107).
The Telling tales study and its findings
Drawing on narrative both as data, in the form of students’ own stories, and as product, in a
thesis which is self-consciously and reflectively narrative in form, the Telling tales of higher
education study (Fung, 2007) has drawn on 60 oral narratives shared by students, narratives
which give (or, rather, ‘construct’) accounts of the experiences of 22 first year8 students at
the University of Exeter, all of whom were enrolled on undergraduate BA programme in
English, or in English combined with another subject (Modern Languages, Classics or Film).
Half of the student participants were ‘traditional’ students (from families with a history of
participation in higher education) and half were ‘non-traditional’9 (the first in their family to
access higher education, and/or from underrepresented social groups). The study was
designed in this way so that the groups of stories could be juxtaposed to establish whether
there are any significant ways in which ‘the student experience of learning’ as represented by
the two groups of students differs. This section of the paper offers a synopsis of findings in
response to the main research question:
How do ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ students characterise their own,
unfolding experience of education when asked to do so in their own words, in
this era of Widening Participation?
8
The fact that all participants were first year undergraduate students needs to be taken into
consideration when considering the implications of these findings. Further research is needed to
establish whether they would be echoed equally as strongly in the narratives of students with more
experience of university life. Nevertheless the first year experience is often seen as key, as it is seen
as particularly important in terms of student retention, and it is likely to set up patterns for later study
and ‘experience’. It is also evident that the findings are consistent across all three sets of narratives,
gathered at the beginning, middle and end of the undergraduate students’ first academic year.
9
The use of the term ‘non-traditional’ is open to criticism in that defines a group (or groups) of students
as being ‘other’ than the ‘traditional’ or main grouping, and hence may be seen as an example of
negatively weighted discourse. Nevertheless, it is a term used by the Higher Education Funding
Council for England (HEFCE) and will be used here as a shorthand signifier to refer to students (or
potential students) from underrepresented social and ethnic groups, including mature students from
those groups, whose family members have little experience of higher education.
8
When asked to ‘tell the stories’ of their experience of being a student, participants talked,
apparently freely, about a range of events and ‘existents’ (Chatman, 1993) – that is actions,
happenings, characters, places and items of setting. A brief overview of these as they appear
in the narratives suggests a largely shared ‘agenda’ as far as ‘student experience’ is
concerned. They give accounts of and reflect upon:
 prior experiences of school, especially in relation to influential teachers (often in
relation to the subject now being studied)
 family members and relationships
 the impact of the gap year or (for mature students) years of previous work and life,
where appropriate, particularly in terms of influential friends and family members
 non-university friends and events shared with friends prior to being at university
 expectations of university (often related to what others have said about this), and
reasons for deciding on particular courses
 making new friends at university and assessing other people and groups around them
 the university campus and its surrounding, particularly in relation to their
conduciveness to social interaction (both for recreational and study purposes)
 accommodation issues, particularly in relation to creating and managing relationships
with current or potential ‘house mates’ or similar
 ways in which free time is spent: study time, extra-curricular activities, social time and
paid-work time
 the programme of study in terms of its structure, the differences between modules,
the assessment activities and the roles of others in making these apparent,
accessible and meaningful
 different kinds of class: lectures, study groups, seminars, and the key characters
involved (fellow students and staff)
 out-of-class study activities: working with others in formal and informal study groups
and, less frequently, working alone in a room or in the library
 the changing nature of relationships with others, inside and outside classes
 engaging in assessments: essays, logbooks, presentations and examinations, and
the role of others in helping with or, less frequently, hindering these
 getting feedback from staff on assessment tasks, often in relation to that received by
other students
 planning future approaches to study, in relation to others around
 imagining and/or planning what might happen in future years of study and after the
degree has been completed, particularly in relation to what others have done and
might do, and in relation to what others expect.
While the above list indicates, in summary, the range of things referred to in the narratives
(what Chatman refers to as ‘story’), the stylistic features of the narratives (Chatman’s
‘discourse’) contribute significantly to the suggested meanings of the narratives. These
features, which re-present ‘story’ in such a way that certain elements are emphasised and
certain values and attitudes are suggested, include elements such as: narrative voice; lexical
choice and the connotations of key words; symbolism, metaphor, simile and repeated motifs;
selection, syntax and narrative structure (which create patterns of repetition and emphasis).
Because these are oral narratives (transcribed), additional paralinguistic features such as
tonal emphasis, pauses and laughter also contribute to the construction of possible
meanings.
A close analysis of the narratives in terms of both their ‘story’ and their discourse has led to
three overwhelmingly strong themes arising which, in these narratives, characterise vividly
‘the student experience of learning’. These are:
1. The challenge of adapting to a new language and a new culture
9
2. Questioning, re-evaluating and changing self-identity (in relation to
others)
3. Creating, reviewing and evaluating relationships with others, and the
making of connections between relationships and learning.
It is striking that by far the greater part of the emphasis of every one of the 60 narratives is on
the above three, interrelated areas10, each of which will be considered in turn.
1. The challenge of adapting to a new language and a new culture
There is a great deal of evidence in the narratives of students’ experiencing a sense of
challenge, even struggle, in having to adapt to a language and culture that are new and
strange, across all areas of university life: both the ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ students
repeatedly refer to the strangeness of the new world in which they find themselves. Simon11
eloquently characterises this sense of newness, which is disconcerting despite having a
certain appeal, in his October narrative:
I came here to university and I felt a real, real difference from everything I’d
experienced before. It was, it wasn’t like a dis, discomforting kind of difference, it was
actually quite comforting in a way. Suddenly we’d jumped off into another kind of ship,
with a load of different people, who’ve all been thrown together... Just a completely
different experience, but very enjoyable at the same time, and er quite cosy. And you
sort of, you suddenly feel like, for the first two weeks you forget everything else which
has happened in your life before, and it’s almost like semi-starting anew. (Simon, Oct)
This tension alluded to here between ‘comfort’ and ‘cosiness’ on the one hand, and
‘discomfort’ and ‘difference’ on the other is interesting; it is illustrated neatly by the metaphor
of having ‘jumped off into another kind of ship’. The old way of travelling through the
‘experience’ of life has been superseded by a new ship, a new means of travel. This has the
effect of making one’s past – temporarily at least – disappear, and of giving the feeling of
‘semi-starting anew’. This representation finds echoes in other narratives, where the word
‘adventure’ is used on a number of occasions:
I’m in the middle of a big, exciting adventure that hopefully will take me places!
(Laughter.) (Emily, Feb)
Phrases and images with similar connotations recur throughout the narratives.
Yet for all the excitement of the ‘adventure’ and the ‘new life’, an area of particular tension
and challenge is found in the strangeness of the new language used at university, both in
connection with the customs and practices of higher education – types of class and
assessment, for example – and the language of the subject discipline being studied.
For non-traditional students such as Lulu, William and Amy, for example, the issue of
language repeatedly arises. Lulu, a mature student who describes herself as working class,
tells of how, having found a route to university in her thirties to get away from ‘the rat race’ of
10
The first area, the challenge of adapting to a new language and culture, is understandably found
more frequently in the first set of narratives (Oct), told near the beginning of the students’ first
academic year at university, and somewhat less dominant in the last (June) set, which were shared at
the end of the students’ first year, although it is still present there. The other two themes, that of
changing and re-evaluating self-identity and that of creating, reviewing and evaluating relationships
with others (often in connection with learning) remain highly dominant through all three narrative sets:
(Oct), (Feb) and (June).
11
The names used are all pseudonyms, chosen by the participants themselves.
10
work, she finds herself in a world in which those around her speak a different language. In
the early days of the first term, for example, Lulu reads the student online discussion forum
which is designed to support the BA English students:
And first there was about ten emails, and I had to look up about nine words, because I
didn’t understand what they meant, on the computer. I’m thinking, god, I’m old enough
to be their mother, you know! (Laughter.) (Lulu, Oct)
The notion here is of her being in a foreign country with its own language, which needs a
dictionary to help with translation. There are echoes of this throughout Lulu’s stories12:
I found doing the um the reading … the language was so difficult; I’d never come
across it before. … And I feel that I’m not um learned enough to write that, that type of
language, I suppose? To write how they write.’ (Lulu, Feb)
When I first started learning like the [literary theory] module, it was just completely new
– the language that they used. (Lulu, June)
Very similar notions about the newness of the language used at university are expressed by
other non-traditional students:
It’s a challenge – it’s very different from what I’ve done before. (William, Oct)
Amy, who is also the first in her family to access higher education and who tells of having a
disability in the form of a processing disorder, comments on the particular difficulty she feels
she has with the language of the literary theory texts:
With [the theory module] it’s so complex and difficult - I feel I’m reading it two or three
times, over and over. (Amy, Oct)
This issue with language carries over for Amy into the seminar classes:
I felt intimidated quite a lot [in seminars] (laughter), because people tend to be – to me,
they seem to use very long words and I don’t understand what they mean! (Laughter.)
(Amy, Oct)
Others talk about the reading for the theory module in similar terms:
That Liberal Humanism thing last week, it’s just so like, the reading was so dense, and
so like – uh, it’s just awful. It’s like a real struggle to read it? … You read it and you
can’t take it in because it’s so, so much to grasp and they don’t put it very clearly…
(Kate, Oct)
12
Lulu’s own use of language exemplifies her points here. For example, on several occasions she
refers to ‘Human Liberalism’ rather than ‘Liberal Humanism’. A number of students from all
backgrounds adopt similar language variations, however, including mis-naming the titles of set literary
texts being studied, and using some words in unlikely contexts, which again may illustrate the ways in
which all new students’ use of language is challenged by their encounter with a culture which has
adopted its own language codes. However, the spoken language is very often full of what would be
inaccuracies if it were written, so the implications of any analysis of this evidence needs to be
considered cautiously.
11
A saving grace regarding the language difficulty, however, comes in the form of knowing that
there are others who are ‘in the same boat’ (this is a repeated theme across and within a
number of narratives):
So I was thinking I’m not gonna to be suited for here - but it’s not too bad. Especially
um talking to other students, like about the Marxist theory; they say they don’t
understand it either, and things like that - so it could be worse. (Laughter.) (Amy, Oct)
…the reading is just quite tricky to like grasp. But I think that’s like the general feeling…
It’s really nice to know that other people think that…, so you don’t feel so alone. (Laura,
Oct)
…when I’m in my [peer] study group… I don’t feel stupid (Lulu, Oct)
… everybody was in the same boat, so I’m keeping up with everybody, which I’m
pleased about. (Lulu, Feb)
Interestingly, almost all of the students in the study refer to their timetabled peer study
groups13 as places in which the strangeness of the new language is lessened because the
feelings are openly shared.
It is not just the ‘non traditional’ students who have problems with language, however.
Elizabeth and Simon, ‘traditional’ students who attended state schools, both refer the
challenge of language in ways similar to those expressed by Lulu, William, Amy and Kate.
Elizabeth talks of how, in the theory module,
The … essays we had to read from the blue booklet I found really quite stressful!
(Laughter.) I didn’t really understand… Just the Terry Eagleton thing I think just threw
me in at the deep end and I got really confused – not upset, but just totally sorry that it
was nothing I’d done before. (Elizabeth, Oct).
Simon expresses a similar experience:
The way English is taught is so different to, to how I’ve done it before. Uh I sort of got a
feeling at first that, I don’t know, this kind of way is just, just so new to me that I’m not
sure how I’m gonna cope with it… I definitely had to get used to that kind of reading. It
was definitely a sort of step in a different direction for me… The long names and things
like that just, just are there just to, just to suddenly switch your mind away, and so you
suddenly start thinking about something else, and then you go, I don’t even know
what’s happened - I can’t even remember where I am!
The disorientation arising from the effect of problematic language is evidenced here in the
phrase ‘switch your mind away’, a metaphor which suggests a rapid movement in different
directions in one’s thinking caused by the strangeness of the vocabulary – a rapid shift which
undermines one’s grasp not only of events but of one’s location: ‘I don’t know what’s
happened - I can’t even remember where I am!’.
Simon repeatedly raises the challenge of language in his first narrative:
13
Students on these programmes of study are timetabled to meet in peer study groups, without a
member of staff, to discuss questions related to the seminar for a particular module, of which the study
group is a sub-set. They meet in informal settings such as the coffee bar and are asked to report on
their discussion via the online (WebCT) forum set up for the cohort.
12
They [lecturers] don’t really take into consideration too much maybe sort of
weaknesses that people have…For me, it’s, it’s getting used to reading things in such a
sort of different language, in such a different language style… I don’t know, sometimes
I can’t quite grasp what they’re all talking about. (Simon, Oct)
Sapphire, a participant who formerly attended a prestigious public school, is particularly
aware that she is unfamiliar with the language of film:
Because I’ve never done film, just in terms of film terminology or just the connections
between different films, it’s like this layer just above my head…. So it’s quite hard to get
a foothold in that, to start seeing the connections between it... (Sapphire, Oct)
Sapphire’s spatial imagery here is of interest: it suggests a lifeworld in which there are layers
of levels of language, some of which are located just out of reach: ‘above my head’. This
leads to difficulty gaining a ‘foothold’ with the subject (the image suggests that it leads to a
slippery and unsafe place); the safe foothold she seeks is linked for Sapphire with ‘seeing the
connections’ between different aspects of the subject discipline.
Students from all backgrounds, then, express a sense of being significantly challenged by,
and at times very confused by, the unfamiliarity of the language around them. The
‘experience of learning’ constructed in the narratives is thus one of their finding themselves
at some distance from the customary and use of language in the institution and within the
subject discipline, and of having to negotiate a path towards better understanding.
It is not just the language of the new world of higher education that perplexes these first year
students, however. It is the whole network of cultural events, locations, expectations and
rules that need to be dealt with. Both non-traditional and traditional students express the
experience of grappling with these unknowns.
All of the non-traditional students represent practices, rules and expectations of university
as unfamiliar, even daunting. Once at university, Lulu grapples with the customs of being
a student. For example, she has a second year ‘buddy’ and it is a significant moment for
her when he explains that ‘you don’t necessarily have to read every single book’. Yet
despite (or perhaps because of) the strangeness of this new place, Lulu feels after the first
couple of weeks that
It’s like a breath of fresh air. It’s almost like a, to me it’s like a new beginning, and I
really, really like it. (Lulu, Oct)
There are echoes here of Simon’s ‘new ship adventure’, in which that which is comfortable
and that which is discomforting are both present in the student experience.
Emma is one of many other non-traditional students who express uncertainty about the
requirements of the written assignments:
I’ve just handed in a logbook entry, um, and I wasn’t quite sure, to be honest, what I was
doing! (Laughter.) It was, it’s a new idea to me… (Emma, Oct).
William makes a similar comment with respect to uncertainty about the way he should be
using the booklist in preparation for the beginning of the course:
They didn’t really give us any hints about what we were supposed to look for, so it was
a bit kind of scary and bewildering. (William, Oct)
13
However, a number of the traditional students also raise similar issues. Pete talks of how
little he knows about the forthcoming assessments. Of essays, he says:
I’m sure I’m gonna get completely the wrong stance, for what’s expected here. (Pete,
Oct)
And of the reflective logbooks students are asked to keep, he says:
I don’t really understand what we’re supposed to do. (Pete, Oct)
Pete knows that there are expectations, that there are ‘rules’ – ‘what we’re supposed to do’
(a phrase which echoes William’s) – but is also aware that he does not yet know what these
are.
Written work is just one of the unfamiliar practices of university. Emily is one of a number
who speak in their first narrative of the strangeness of lectures:
We have lectures, which to start with were really daunting. We didn’t know how to take
notes or anything... (Emily, Oct)
As is common in the narratives, Emily uses the plural subject form – ‘We didn’t know…’
which suggests a feeling that she and her student colleagues were in a similar position.
This picture of adapting to strangeness is further exemplified by Simon and Siena, who both
tell of arriving home from university to find that it had now changed:
It felt very strange. I walked out the station … and the whole place seemed to have
changed… I was quite sort of disorientated. A bit like a stranger to a new country.
(Simon, Feb)
Simon’s simile in which he compares himself to ‘a stranger in a new country’ vividly
characterises the implications of many other students’ stories. Like Simon, Siena also uses
the word ‘disorientated’ to describe her experience:
Last term when I went back for one weekend, I found it really strange that the whole
dimensions of my house looked completely different… Even things you just take for
granted look really warped! (Siena, Feb)
The familiar has now become strange, ‘warped’, because the previously unknown world of
university has started to become familiar. As Elizabeth says after the Christmas break,
We came back and you just slot in. (Elizabeth, Feb).
At the same point mid-year, Simon finds that the strange has become familiar in such a way
that it has ‘really affected [his] thinking’ (Simon, Feb). He tells of how at a Christmas party he
had started talking to friends about aspects of Marxist theory and Barthes’ notion of
‘mythologies’, topics explored on his programme of study:
That was really weird – and I realised afterwards that it had really influenced me.
(Simon, Feb).
Many of the students tell of experiencing moments when they realised that their views,
values and attitudes are being affected by their studies, particularly by the themes explored
in their theory module, which include Marxism, feminism and colonialism. There remains a
14
sense, however, of grappling with two simultaneous worlds - what was previously familiar,
and what is becoming familiar:
It’s an important experience, and also you, it’s alienating in a way, from everything that
you had before, sort of. I know like in terms of losing contact with things, losing touch
with things, it’s quite weird… I’ve come down here and it’s very difficult to sort of get a
sense of where you were before… And when you’re back here again, you are like in a
bubble, basically, you are in another world. You’re just carrying on another life. And it’s
difficult, to have two strands, sort of thing. Like it’s really weird… (Simon, Feb).
Simon uses the word ‘experience’ here in relation to the confusion, the alienation you feel
from ‘everything you had before’. The predominant way in which being a new university
student is ‘experienced’ here is thus as something fundamental which has the potential to
sweep away one ‘world’ and bring in ‘another life’. It is an experience which profoundly
affects each participant’s sense of self and the ways in which he or she constructs and reconstructs their lifeworld.
Pervading the students’ accounts, or constructions, of their experience, then, are issues of
challenge and change arising from being immersed in a place which has a different language
and different culture from those previously experienced. In the light of this, it is perhaps not
surprising that much of the rest of the narratives deal with ways in which the narrators come
to relate to others in this new place, and how that affects what they represent as being
‘learning’.
2. Questioning, re-evaluating and changing self-identity (in relation to others)
The second pervasive theme drawn from across all narratives is that of ‘student experience’
being constructed as a time of questioning, re-evaluating and, for many, changing one’s selfidentity, seen in relation to others. There is repeated evidence that participants are asking
themselves, on arriving in the strange place with the largely unknown language, who am I
now, in relation to who I thought I was before?’ This question is considered not in a vacuum,
but as part of a consideration of who the others are who are around them – are these people
like me? How do I relate to them? How does that affect the ways in which I relate to family
and non-university friends? And, in the light of these questions, how do I now relate to my
subject of study and the opportunities it may afford me to make decisions about who I will
become?
For a small minority of participating students, it is a struggle to see themselves as fitting in at
all to the new university community. Annie, who describes herself as ‘the Essex girl’ and
observes significant social differences between herself and the fellow students from
‘privileged’ backgrounds she describes as ‘Sloanes’, wishes at some points in her narratives
that she had not come to this university.
I wanted to stay closer to home… Exeter’s nice, but it’s not really me! (Annie, Oct)
This comment has echoes of Pete’s expressed feeling that he is grappling with the sense of
who he is, in relation to who ‘his people’ are:
[The people in my hall are] not really my people. All my friends are on the other side of
the university. (Pete, Oct)
Pete is referring here (as Annie does elsewhere) to staying in an expensive hall of residence
which accommodates many of the students from more ‘privileged’ backgrounds. Pete even
goes as far as to request (and achieve) a move into a less prestigious hall, so that he can be
with the people to whom he can relate more easily.
Annie comforts herself with the thought that
15
I’m lucky, ‘cause there’s like a couple of girls in my corridor which are kind of the same
as me (Annie, Oct),
Yet she also characterises many of those around her as being very different from herself.
She talks of a fellow student who has ‘his own BMW with blackened windows’, and who is ‘so
arrogant’, and of others who criticise her for buying second hand books: ‘It was like, why did
you get these ones?’ She talks of her family background and her ‘little three-bedroom terrace
house’, and says
I thought that was where most people were at? But they’re not!
But when she meets some other ‘Essex girls’ she says
They’re just on my wavelength – which is so relieving, ‘cause I was like, oh my god, am
I really gonna fit in anywhere?
Like many other participants in the study, both ‘non-traditional’ and ‘traditional’, she is
pleased with the day of team development training activities provided for first year students
of English at the beginning of their first year, because ‘It was the best way for us to like
bond’. Her timetabled peer study group, which first met during the teamwork training, is also
a place where ‘everyone gets on well’, and where ‘there’s not any pretensions’.
Bernie is one of a number of students who cite their peer study groups as a place in which
they can feel ‘comfortable’ about who they are:
A study group is more like say eight students all at the same place, all having the same
problems. We’ve got the same problems and we’re all at the same level, so you do feel
more comfortable. (Bernie, Oct)
William expresses this more fully, but in a similar vein:
But with the two [peer] study groups, it’s kind of like, I don’t know, not intimacy, but
something like that… much better than the lessons, it’s much more enjoyable, which is
kind of like going out with a group of friends and talking about your same interests…
(William, Oct)
Here William, who wanted to get away from home and find at university ‘this whole new
world’, articulates the key role of the relationships between fellow students in his ‘student
experience’.
Jim, a student who talks of his British Indian background, is pleased right from the beginning
of the year that he has formed meaningful relationships with peers whereby
It felt like, because it felt so safe so soon, I felt like I didn’t really have to restrain myself
in certain respects, so I was free to be who I wanted to be. So everyone, I thought,
seemed to bond really quickly. (Jim, Oct)
The phrase ‘free to be who I wanted to be’ becomes particularly significant in its context, as
Jim’s father had tried to persuade him not to read English but to go into medicine or dentistry;
Jim expresses an awareness of cultural expectations upon him to be ‘something’:
I mean there’s a whole Indian family thing; they all expect us to do really big things.
(Jim, Oct)
16
Gradually through the year Jim feels the whole family is ‘coming round’ to his decision, and
recognising him as the person he feels he wants to become; his relationships with his peers
is represented as contributing to this re-negotiation of self.
Others’ stories repeatedly echo this theme. Patrick, who came out as gay shortly before
coming to university to a mixed reception from his school friends, tells of how:
University was a good chance for me to get away and forge a new life for myself… It’s
a very key point … when I’m here I’m actually having to be a person now… I have to
forge my own identity, and stand on my own two feet. (Patrick, Oct)
And despite (or perhaps because of) her difficulty fitting in to the university, Annie recognises
at the end of the year that she is no longer the person she used to be:
I’m sure I was a totally different person a year ago. (Annie, June)
A final and vivid example of a sense of questioning and, here, changing identity in relation to
others, is found in Lulu’s narratives. She explicitly compares herself with the main female
protagonist in the play (and film) Educating Rita by Willy Russell. The main character, Rita,
changes profoundly in terms of her sense of who she is and who she might be during the
play as a result of her studies, and Lulu talks at length about how she has had similar
experiences:
I can relate to how when [Rita] went in the classroom and she was writing things and
[her tutor] was … looking at it and she said, that’s crap, isn’t it? Start again. And I can
see myself doing that… And she works in a café and there’s some students talking
about poetry … Then they get into a discussion and she thinks, she suddenly thinks,
oh, I feel like a student.
She goes on to tell the story of how she met up with another mature student and talked about
literary theory:
And she was making notes and she said, oh yeah, so and so, and I suddenly thought,
do you know what, I feel like a real student.
To feel ‘like a real student’ is surprising for Lulu – it challenges her previous self-identity. She
tells of how her friends from outside university ‘don’t understand it’. But she adds, ‘I still
watch Coronation Street and I think I always will… (Laughter)’, a line that suggests that she
is negotiating her own change in class and cultural orientation, and will hold on to some of
the cultural items she links with her former life (here, a television ‘soap opera’ centred on a
working class, northern community), even as she changes her sense of self when she comes
to understand ‘utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, whatever…’
Lulu’s story is echoed in many respects by that of Jack, who came to university ‘because he
wanted to know it was in me, sort of thing’. From what he describes as a ‘below-workingclass’ background in which violence in the family led him to leave home before he left school,
Jack made his way via adult education classes to university, and to a point at the end of his
first academic year where he can say
It’s been an amazing year, and I do feel that I’ve learnt and grown as a person a lot.
That’s something that my siblings … won’t see…
Jack’s story is a remarkable one which is explored at length elsewhere (Fung, 2007); it
suggests strongly that the experience over time (here, through the first academic year) of
17
being a student, and of learning at university, challenges a student’s most fundamental
sense of who he or she is and might become.
Both Lulu and Jack found their way to a prestigious university against their own expectations
and, in their narratives, the sense of changing identity is perhaps stronger, but students of all
ages and backgrounds repeatedly ask questions, explicitly or implicitly, about who they are
now, in relation to those around. Structured opportunities provided by the university, such as
teamwork training sessions, peer study groups and group presentation tasks, during which
the students can develop meaningful relationships with a cross-section of fellow students,
are universally welcomed in the narratives and frequently referred to, as a means by which
the students can begin to form ‘bonds’ and negotiate this experience of change.
3. Creating, reviewing and evaluating relationships with others, and
connections between relationships and learning
As has already been indicated, by far the greater part of each narrative gathered is
concerned with the creating, reviewing and evaluating of relationships with others. While
these areas of focus stand in their own right, there are also many examples of participants’
explicitly (as well as implicitly) making connections between relationships and learning itself.
There is a very large number of examples of stories about making relationships at university
and getting them ‘right’:
I thought, you know, what happens if I don’t meet the right people? (Eric, Oct)
One of my main worries at the start of the other terms was that you’d meet people and
you wouldn’t actually be friends, but now these shells of friendships are starting to fill
out with experience and shared memories and stuff, which is really, really nice. So it
feels a lot more comfortable here. (Jim, June)
Jim’s lexical choice here, ‘more comfortable’, again echoes elements of Simon’s ‘ship’
metaphor, and there is a good deal of evidence that participants are actively working to build
relationships – filling the ‘shells of friendships’ - so that they can feel more ‘comfortable’ in
their strange, new environment.
Yet it is not just a question of creating an enjoyable social life as some kind of separate
backdrop to study. The relationships are themselves intimately connected with learning, in a
wide variety of ways. The relationships between students and teaching staff are represented
as significant. They are generally expressed in very positive terms. Sapphire and Amy both
tell positive tales of being helped with their ‘learning disabilities’ by both teaching staff and
the specialist Disability Support staff. Eric is one of many who speaks warmly of his
experiences in seminars, where he was encouraged to
… come into discussion and debate. And it’s all friendly and people let you speak…
And the seminar leaders are brilliant. [One tutor] is just so enthusiastic, that it really
carries over. It really makes you want to get into the subject that you’re talking about.
(Eric, Oct)
While the relationships formed with staff are very largely a ‘positive’ for the participants, if
something does go wrong, it can have a devastating effect. In his final narrative, Eric has
been ‘destroyed’ – a word he uses repeatedly in this narrative – by the way in which one
tutor in his second semester seminar group accused him of plagiarism. He says,
18
I felt I’d put so much into this relationship with her, and I got nothing back. Absolutely
nothing. (Eric, June)
He contrasts this relationship, where there was ‘no trust’ and which had ‘almost destroyed’
his interest in the subject of study, with the very positive relationships he has formed with
his other tutors who ‘understood’, and also his strong relationship with his group with
whom he was ‘in exactly the same boat’. It is with his groups that he feels he is really
learning:
If you say something, and someone else plays off it, it gives you another route to go
down um and explore, and there’s more depth, or something to argue with? … You
suddenly think, well hang on, there are more than one side to an argument. (Eric, June)
Jim and others also characterise learning as a kind of conversation, which forges
connections:
When people debate… it’s like listening to an essay. You have a point, and a counter
point, and we’re always throwing new ideas at each other. And it’s interesting because
you think, oh, I didn’t think of that before… and you gain so many different ideas in the
space of five minutes. (Jim, June)
Siena, Emily and William are examples of those who tell of informal gatherings with friends in
which the subjects of study are explored and discussed:
I had revision sessions with my friends, we just chatted and debated things, and it
suddenly all became clear – and we realised how you can link it all? (Siena, February)
But I’m quite lucky because I’ve got a friend on my floor who does French, and a
couple who do English, so if I have problems - we quite often sit down and discuss
Marxism or Liberal Humanism… (Emily, Oct)
I do think I’ve found a good way to revise now, which is in groups, as opposed to by
myself. (William, Feb)
Beatrice sums up this emphasis on the collective dimension of learning towards the end of
her final narrative:
I would say that learning is an exploration that is not just done by yourself. (Beatrice,
June)
Overall the narratives point towards representation of ‘learning’ and of the whole experience
of higher education, as being wholly tied up with a changing sense of self, and relationship
with others, both teachers and fellow students. Meanings are not, according to these
students’ constructions of their experience, simply ‘personal’ as Biggs argued (Biggs, 2003,
p13), they are collective. The narratives represent ‘the student experience’ as something far
more akin to the notion of learning communities and communities of practice examined by
Wenger (1998), and to that of ‘education as relation’ as explored in a recent work edited by
Bingham and Sidorkin (2004), than to the models currently dominant in the LTHE literature
which tend to individualise students, to separate them and conceptualise each as being
rather like a consumer of manufactured goods, moving quite differently through ‘the learning
experience’ from their peers. While it is clearly the case that students are individuals and
have individual differences, the ways in which these student participants construct their
experiences are profoundly and overwhelmingly in terms of relating to and making meanings
with others.
19
Conclusion
There are many ways to conceptualise the notion of ‘the student experience of learning’, and
there are benefits from using a wide range of methodological approaches in investigating
how students ‘experience’ their studies and how they learn – or, rather, how such
experiences can be constructed, communicated and explored. Those in higher education
who are looking to improve in a variety of ways the students’ experiences of education need
to have a wide spectrum of representations of those experiences on which to draw.
Quantitative surveys can give us a snapshot picture of responses to key prompts;
phenomenographic research such as that adopted in Entwistle’s ‘new paradigm’ can
illuminate differences between students’ approaches to and conceptions of learning. But
because of the complexity of the notion of experience, experience which as Dilthey observed
‘constantly changes’ (Dilthey, 1986, p149), we need in the sector to explore the issue more
widely. Forms of narrative enquiry, including the practice of drawing on personal stories, can
be one effective way of increasing our understanding of how it is for students to experience
higher education at this time of rapid change.
The outcomes of the Telling tales study (Fung, 2007) suggest that policy makers and
practitioners in higher education need to pay more attention to the collective dimensions of
student life and of learning: and not only the social and collective dimensions of immediate
university life, but also the wider structural issues of power relations in the university sector
and beyond. The individualist, consumer model with which we have become so familiar, and
which has been criticised by Biesta (2004), Abbs (2003) and others, may be obscuring for
policy makers and practitioners the importance of the collective dimension of the way in
which students perceive (construct) their own experiences, and the extent to which those
experiences are situated within current structural, social and cultural frameworks. The
emphasis in recent literature on the individual may have led universities to underplay the vital
role of relationships in creating life-enhancing learning experiences. Greater consideration
needs to be given to the practical steps that can be taken to encourage students to engage
with one another more, including the provision of such activities as teamwork training,
timetabled peer study groups, other peer-assisted learning activities and classes which
explicitly promote real discussion, relationship and the building of shared meanings, in a
critically aware framework for thinking about wider issues impacting education itself.
References
Abbs, P (2003) Against the flow: education, the arts and postmodern culture,
RoutledgeFalmer: London and New York
Biesta, G (2004) ‘Against learning. Reclaiming a language for education in an age of
learning.’ Nordisk Pedagogik 24 70-82
Bingham, C and Sidorkin, A (eds.) (2004) No education without relation: Peter Lang
Publishing, Inc.: New York
Biggs, J. (1987) Student approaches to learning and studying Hawthorn, Australian Council
for Educational Research: Victoria
Biggs, J (2003) (2nd edition) Teaching for quality learning at university The Society for
Research into Higher Education and The Open University Press: Berkshire
Bleakley, A (2005) ‘Stories as data, data as stories: making sense of narrative inquiry in
clinical education’ Medical Education 39 534-540
Bochner, A P (2001) ‘Narrative’s Virtues’ Qualitative Inquiry 7 (2) 131-157
Booth, S and Anderberg, E (2005) Academic development for knowledge capabilities:
Learning, reflecting and developing Higher Education Research & Development 24 (4) 373–
386
Booth, K and James, B W (2001) ‘Interactive learning in a higher education Level 1
mechanics module’ International Journal of Science Education 23 (9) 955-967
Bourdieu, P (2001) ‘Cultural power’, in: L. Spillman (ed.) Cultural sociology Blackwell:
20
Oxford
Bruner, J (1986) Actual minds, possible worlds Harvard University Press: Cambridge
Massachusetts and London, England
Bruner, J (2002) Making stories: law, literature, life Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York
Carr, D (2003) ‘Taking narrative seriously: exploring the educational status of story and myth’
Philosophy of Education 81-89
Case, J and Gunstone, R (2003a) ‘Approaches to learning in a second year chemical
engineering course’ International Journal of Science Education 25 (7) 801-819
Case J and Gunstone R (2003b) ‘Going deeper than deep and surface approaches: a study
of students’ perceptions of time’ Teaching in Higher Education 8 (1) 55-69
Chatman, S (1993) Story and discourse: Narrative structure in fiction and film Cornell
University Press: London
Clandinin, J and F. Connelly, F M (2000) Narrative inquiry: experience and story in
qualitative research Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA
Conle, C (2000) ‘Narrative inquiry: research tool and medium for professional development
European Journal of Teacher Education 23 (1) 49-63
Dilthey, W (1986) ‘The hermeneutics of the human sciences’, in Müller-Vollmer, K (ed.)
(1986) The Hermeneutics Reader Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp148-152
Entwistle, N and Ramsden, P (1983) Understanding student learning Croom Helm: London
Erben, M (2000) ‘Ethics, education, narrative communication and biography’ Educational
Studies 26 (3) 379-390
Fung (2007) Telling tales of higher education: a narrative enquiry into first
year student experience PhD Thesis, University of Exeter
Gallagher, S (1992) Hermeneutics and education State University of New York Press:
Albany
Goodley, D; Lawthom, R; Clough, P; and Moore, M (2004) Researching life stories:
method, theory and analysis in a biographical age RoutledgeFalmer: London and New York
Goodson, I and Sikes, P (2001) Life history research in educational settings Open
University Press: Buckingham
Haggis, T (2003) ‘Constructing images of ourselves? A critical investigation into ‘approaches
to learning’ research in higher education British Educational Research Journal 29 (1) 89104
Hall, M, Ramsay, A and Raven, J (2004) ‘Changing the learning environment to promote
deep learning approaches in first-year accounting students’ Accounting Education 13 (4)
489–505
Kember, D, Biggs, J and Leung, D Y P (2004) ‘Examining the multidimensionality of
approaches to learning through the development of a revised version of the Learning
Process Questionnaire’ British Journal of Educational Psychology 74 261-280
Marton, F (1994) ‘Phenomenography’ in Husen, T and Postlethwaite, T N (eds) International
Encyclopedia of Education (8) Pergamon: London
Marton, F, Hounsell, D and Entwistle, N (eds.) (1997) (2nd edition) The experience of
learning: implications for teaching and studying in higher education. Scottish Academic
Press: Edinburgh
Marton, F and Säljö, R (1976) ‘On qualitative differences in learning’ 1 – Outcome and
process’ British Journal of Educational Psychology 46 4-11
Marton, F and Wing, Y P (2005) ‘On the unit of description in phenomenography’ Higher
Education Research and Development 24 (4) 335-348
Prosser, M (2006) Student surveys and the student learning experience Paper given to The
Higher Education Academy (HEA) Annual Conference at the University of Nottingham, 05
07 06
Prosser, M and Trigwell, K (1999) Understanding Learning and Teaching: the experience in
higher education Open University Press: Buckingham, UK
Ramsden, P (2003) (2nd edition) Learning to teach in higher education RoutledgeFalmer:
London
Riessman, C K (1993) Narrative Analysis Qualitative Research Methods Series 30; Sage
21
Publications: London
Webb, G (1997a) ‘Deconstructing deep and surface: towards a critique of
phenomenography’ Higher Education 33 195–212
Webb, G (1997b) ‘Contesting learning theory: a response to Entwistle and Ekeblad’ Higher
Education 33 225–230
Wenger, E (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge and New York