Narrating unfinished business: adult learners using credit transfer to re-engage with higher education

This paper seeks to advance our understanding of the credit transfer phenomenon in the UK, specifically how students draw on a credit as a form of institutional cultural capital. Drawing on interviews with twenty-six part-time mature learners this paper examines the progressive and retrospective orientations to study that surfaced in students’ accounts of credit transfer and their life-long learning journeys. A common theme of “unfinished business” appeared to dominate these accounts and a narrative-oriented analysis of the findings revealed the role of credit transfer in enabling students to complete varied personal projects or forms of “unfinished business”. The findings of this work suggest that in an increasingly complex higher education market there is a need to understand students’ strategic use of the credit they accumulate. In particular, this paper explores how credit transfer features in the narratives of students’ successful learning journey

Musical identities in transition, solo piano students' accounts of entering the academy

The purpose of this study was to explore the identity work of adult instrumental students negotiating their entry to a prestigious music academy and the professional field of music. Ten classical solo-piano students' accounts of their musical histories and experiences were collected through research interviews. The thematic analyses presented suggest that comparative dynamics between self and other(s) are key mediators of students' musical identity work. The analyses explore how students' identity work was resourced both by the discursive (re)contextualization and harnessing of entrance test results and their accounts of their early experiences of being in the academy. The salience of key musical practices and the significance of listening, as well as being overheard practising, are also considered. In addition, the analyses reveal how constructions of practice 'norms', 'exceptionality' and 'typical' life-courses and trajectories enter into students' identity work