Negotiating the transition of university learning : a descriptive study of the experience of three returning women students

• Main Author: Mar, Mary.
• Other Authors: Dillon, David (advisor)
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: McGill University 1998
• Subjects: Women college students.; Adult education of women.; Adult learning.
• Online Access: http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=35010

Using a sociocultural theoretical framework, this study describes the learning experience of three re-entry adult women during their first year of academic study in a university. To situate the learning historically and culturally, cultural factors of both the students and the learning context are considered as well as interactions between the two over time. Information about the students' perspective of their experience was obtained through interviews conducted throughout the year and some textual responses are examined. The women's orientations toward learning are described using three theoretical constructs: transformative or reproductive approaches to learning, connected or separate modes of learning, and rhetorical or arhetorical approaches to text. === Each of the women entered university with a different orientation to learning and each struggled to learn to respond in academically appropriate ways. In her interactions with the learning context, each experienced some disjunction and some support for her preferred ways of learning. One student, entering as an active and sophisticated learner, initially resisted academic tasks that required an arhetorical, reproductive, or decontextualized response. Another student, entering eager to apply her learning to her everyday life, responded with enthusiastic effort, compliant about meeting academic demands and sometimes suppressing her preference for rhetorical and connected learning. The third student, entering with a background as a reproductive and receptive learner, did not become engaged as a learner and avoided writing that required her to transform rather than reproduce ideas. By the end of the year, each student had shifted her pre-entry orientation, moving toward integration of her preferred approach to learning and academic ways. Writing was the activity where integration most often occurred. Changes in orientation occurred through a negotiation process. === This study adds to our understanding of learning as a sociocultural process and provides a description of individuals in transition between one domain of situated cognition and another. It also shows different ways adult women respond to disjunction with their preferred ways of learning within a university setting and ways they integrate their own preferences with academic ways. Finally, it highlights students' need for guidance in achieving intersubjectivity in academic discourse as new participants in an academic community.