Burying the binaries: getting discourses to converge in a program for first-year university students

Abstract

For many students, especially those who come from groups that often seem disconnected from tertiary study, including those from low socioeconomic, rural and remote backgrounds, beginning university can be a difficult experience. Traditionally, universities have offered generic study skills programs to assist ‘new’ students to make the transition into the tertiary context. However, recent work about the first year experience of university suggests that the process of ‘becoming’ a university student requires more than ‘top-up’ academic programs that are based on a successful/unsuccessful binary about students’ capacities to cope with university study. In a regional Australian university, a program for first year Education students is based on Gee’s (1996) theorisation of Discourse (with a capital D) – the ways of being, doing, saying, believing, reading and writing that are shared by a particular social group. In seeing transition into university as a process of learning a new Discourse, the program focuses on the social aspects of transition and embeds the academic within the social. Drawing on data collected during the first two years of the program, this chapter describes the program and how it has worked to dispel the binaries that are so often used to describe new university students, and demonstrates the effects of helping students see the convergences of their different Discourses.