Becoming a full participant in a community of practice implies that once the newcomer has learned how to navigate the physical and social dimensions of that community and to continuously participate and contribute to its activities. Within Julie’s placement experience, for instance, both the navigation of the physical setting and participation in the placement’s activities were facilitated by instances of near transfer (Mayer, 1975; Royer, 1978) that Julie successfully implemented. Regarding these aspects Julie was able to develop the skilled behaviour and routines (Eraut, 1993) that emerge from practice and experience.
However, navigating the social dimension of the placement was not so straightforward and required of Julie some negotiation of meanings (Wenger, 1998) and the adoption of new learning strategies. Nonetheless, regarding these levels of analysis of Julie’s transition between university and the workplace, which included Julie’s navigation of the physical and social
dimension of the placement at the level of participation, there was a positive outlook on her journey towards becoming a full participant (Lave and Wenger, 1991).
However, in this study, full participation in the placement was not interpreted only as taking part in the placement’s activities, but it also implied that the newcomer identified himself or herself, and was identified by others, as part of that community, thus following Holland et al. (1998) view that within figured worlds, interactions become roles, as people understand who they are in relation to their activities, and within interactions with others, while performing those activities (Urrieta, 2007). Therefore, full participation was then understood as “becoming someone or something new” (Beach, 1999, p. 102), while adopting a new role and, maybe a new identity.
The investigation of Julie’s transition between university and the placement, regarding her identity development, started with taking into consideration her motives for having a placement. The reason for this approach was that Julie’s reasoning for having a placement may have contributed to her adopting a particular stance towards the overall placement experience with important implications to her identity development.
Indeed, Julie was not motivated to have an industrial placement and she did not apply to any other placement opportunities, except the “Year in Research”. Her interest was, then, in this particular placement, at the same university and same school where she studied, developing academic work.
“I’ve preferred the one year in research, to industry, because, rather than have that complete going out into the corporate world, I think this is like a mix. I am working with industrialists, but I’m also working with researchers and I am in my university environment and that’s why I really wanted to do this, because I didn’t actually wanted to do a year in industry before, but when this research project came by, I thought it would be a good balance between work and research. That’s why.” (Julie, Interview 2)
Overall, Julie was not considering doing a placement before this “Year in Research” became available. Actually, I learned during the search for participants that this was the first year the Business School offered such
placement opportunities to the students, which might explain why Julie had not considered it before it “came by”. However, the main question at this point was to understand what was different about this placement that was appealing to Julie, when other types of placements were not.
In the data, what Julie reported was that she liked the “Year in Research” placement because it was in Leeds and at the university. She saw it as a good transition between university and the workplace, and not a “full work life” (Julie, Interview 1) experience or as a “proper working environment” (Julie, Interview 1), which, she never fully described, rather than by opposing her idea of a workplace to her experience of university. More specifically, she described the university and the workplace as somewhat antagonist. Accordingly, while in her view university focused mainly on theoretical knowledge and was quite informal, the workplace was more formal and focused on practical knowledge. Such description seems to relate to other authors’ views (Resnick, 1987; Candy and Crebert, 1991; Tanggaard, 2008) that schools and workplaces can be perceived as intrinsically different. In Julie’s experience, it was a view that she maintained throughout the placement, further reinforced with her own experience, and with the information coming from her colleagues’ industrial placement experiences.
“(…) we had this meeting with all the other placement students and someone said, ‘oh, I had to do this business to business transaction, and this and that, I had to go meet this customer’, and it’s like, I didn’t do much of that. But, then, you know, like I said before, I am still glad that I did a year in research because it was just a perfect balance between university and work.”
(Julie, Interview 6)
In this sense, from Julie’s perspective, the university as a work-placement was somewhere in between the casual environment of university as her place of study and the more corporate environment of industrial workplaces. While it is possible to interpret her decision as a deliberate limitation of her horizons of expectation regarding her future professional life and of the possible benefits a “Year in Industry” scheme would have to that future, her decision was rather explained by her prioritisation of obtaining a good grade at the end of her
studies, over other employability enhancing strategies. For her, the “Year in research” scheme was a good compromise between obtaining working experience, while still developing her academic knowledge and skills.
My interpretation, drawing from Julie’s account was that she perceived the “Year in Research” as a mediational transition (Beach, 1999; 2003) and was interested in it precisely because of that “in between” nature. According to Beach (1999, p. 118), a mediational transition occurs “within educational activities that project or simulate involvement in an activity yet to be fully experienced”, meaning that the participants enter an “as if” realm where they can, in this particular instance, role play being in a “real workplace”. The argument unfolding here was that university as a work-placement was appealing to Julie because it allowed her, to some extent, to maintain some focus on her academic life and student identity. The negative implication of this perception of the placement, I argue at a later stage, was that it possibly interfered with her transition towards becoming a “master practitioner” (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p. 111).
“In industry you have to do other work which I don’t think is academic focused, but this is academic focused. I like that because it means that, it is a good transition from university to work life, because I don’t think it’s a full work life as in office working, that kind of stuff. But it kind of gives you a taste of that life (…).”
(Julie, Interview 1)
Consequently, on the one hand, interpreting the placement as a mediational transition (Beach 2003; 1999) might have provided a safe framework for Julie to engage with professional activities and in this way, contributed to one of the overall stated benefits of placements as facilitating the entry into the workplace (Wilton, 2012; Jackson, 2014a). But, on the other hand, I argue that this interpretation might have also relegated Julie to a peripheral (Urrieta, 2007) or marginal (Tanggaard, 2008) position in the placement by hindering her identity development. In support of this view, for example, Van Maanen (1976, p. 83) states that placements or internship experiences “cannot fully account for the behaviour of individuals in organizational settings” because of their “as if” nature in which the participants maintain their student identity.
Departing from this position that Julie perceived her placement as a mediational transition (Beach, 2003; 1999) and that such outlook implied the maintenance of a student status, I argue that it motivated Julie’s interpretation of her experiences not from the perspective of a student in transition, learning how to become a professional, but as a student struggling with the tension created by wanting to maintain a student identity and further develop within that role, while having to learn how to be a professional and meet the placement’s expectations. For example, it was possible acknowledge this tension in Julie’s experience of attending some classes on research methods as part of her placement activities. In principle, being in a classroom and learning new material was something that Julie had done before and was good at. Furthermore, her own work-supervisor was the teacher of the module. Thus, Julie was presented with the opportunity of very near transfer (Mayer, 1975; Royer, 1978) and she had, in it, the possibility to excel. This was also, in principle, a situation in which her student identity should not be very far from what was expected of her in the placement situation.
However, her experience of attending these classes was not translated into a smooth transition, motivated by direct application of knowledge (Bransford and Schwartz, 1999), or in this case, direct application of role and identity. These specific classes that Julie had to attend were not designed for undergraduate students, as the ones she had experienced before. Instead, they were developed for PhD and MBA students as part of their postgraduate studies and, for Julie, they were, regarding her role in them, distinct from what she was used to.
“And it was really different being in those kind of classes, because, when you’re an undergraduate, you don’t really participate in classes that much, you just really listen to the teacher. With this, we had full-on discussions. So, that was quite different, because at undergraduate level we don’t really have that many discussions with the teacher, unless we’re forced to (laughing). Sometimes teachers have to force us to have discussions with them (laughing).”
She observed her peers behaving in a way that was not familiar to her and to her understanding of what being a student meant. That contrast possibly created in Julie the experience of what Tanggaard (2007) described as an identity confrontation. This meant that Julie was possibly confronted with two different ways of behaving in class, and confused by the lack of direct transfer, particularly in a situation that was so close to her student experience. The dissimilarity she experienced resided in the comparison between her view of being a student in undergraduate studies, more passive, quieter, and listening more and how her peers, the PhD students were behaving, more active, more question makers, more participatory. In the end, Julie was not comfortable in that setting, she struggled to make sense of it and felt like she did not belong. Eventually she stopped going to the classes, telling me that they were not so useful for her.
“(…) after a few classes I didn´t go to some of them, because they weren´t really helpful at all to my project. Or me in general, for like, they wouldn´t be helpful for my university as well.”
(Julie, Interview 4)
Looking closely at her words, it was also interesting to note how she talked about “those kind of classes”, almost distancing herself from them and, contrastingly, talked about undergraduate level in the present tense, despite the fact that, at the time of our fourth interview (July, 2014) she had been in the placement for almost a year. Following Tanggaard’s (2007) view, in this situation Julie failed to disengage with her prior identity and became more of a “marginal stranger(s) (…) - people who sort of belong and sort of do not” (Tanggaard, 2007, p. 460). Due to her desire to maintain close to her student identity and the behaviour that was part of it, as expected within a mediational transition (Beach, 2003; 1999), Julie drove herself out of the placement activity and moved towards not full participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991), but peripheral participation (Urrieta, 2007).
There were also other instances in which Julie’s desire to maintain her student identity drove her physically to the periphery of the community of practice’s (Wenger, 1998) spaces and interactions. One good example was related to Julie’s choice of workstations. It was stated before (section 5.2) that in order
for Julie to develop her tasks, she was assigned a desk, in a room that she shared with other research students. However, throughout the placement, Julie would not use her assigned office often, since, after the first couple of weeks into the placement she got permission from her supervisors to work from home. She justified this decision to her supervisors and in our interviews with the time she lost on the daily commute and the possibility to better manage her time.
“There was just no need to come in because, you know, when I’m doing stuff, like, a literature review. Even if I was in university, and I had to write a literature review, I’d usually just go to the Library to do reading and stuff like that. I don’t like doing all this writing at university, I don’t know why, I just prefer doing it at home. So, with that kind of stuff, it was just easier for me to concentrate at home. I like being alone when I’m working on that kind of stuff.”
(Julie, Interview 4)
However, the consequence was the further separation from her placement peers and maintenance of that peripheral engagement with the placement (Urrieta, 2007), rather than moving towards full participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Moreover, since Julie started to work from home, she would only come to the university once or twice a week, mostly when she had meetings with the supervisors or when she had to use a specific software that she did not have in her personal computer (e.g. NVivo). Whenever she came to the university she would also not go to the office. Instead, Julie chose to work from a students’ computer cluster in the Business School. Regarding data collection, for example, a consequence of this decision was that every observation of Julie’s placement took place in the cluster. Consequently, I was able to testify to the cluster’s friendly environment that arguably attracted her to work there.
The environment in the cluster is friendly. It is a student environment. There is a group of students preparing a presentation, other students are working alone at the computer. It is definitely an informal environment, like any IT cluster around campus.
Such observations on top of Julie’s recurrent decision to distance herself from the physical and social arenas of her placement drove me to an alternative explanation for her choice of workstation, one that would not focus on time efficiency, but on identity. Accordingly, Julie’s identity as a student might have influenced her interpretation of her new work setting and, ultimately created a barrier for her integration as it was not a work-setting that she recognised from her student experiences.
“I don’t really know exactly what the world of work is like, cos I have the support of my supervisors and I’m in my university environment, you know. Like I said, I go to the post-graduate cluster, so that’s probably why I feel like a student, I’m around students (…).”
(Julie, Interview 2)
Moreover, in the office Julie shared the space with the PhD students, her peers in the placement, but with whom she had difficulty in identifying and interacting with.
“The PhD students that were there (in the office), they were really nice, I really think, but I just didn’t really have that much (in common), cos they were all, like, in their 30s and things like that. So, they were nice people, but I just didn’t always wanna be around people like that, I wanted to be around my own friends, so.”
(Julie, Interview 5)
From Julie’s perspective, she and her PhD colleagues had little in common, both in terms of their identity, including age and lifestyle and in terms of their work, as they were from Marketing and she was from Management. My interpretation was, then, that Julie assessed her position towards them from the standpoint of her student identity and not from the continuum of a newcomer to full participant (Lave and Wenger, 1991), which could be more useful for a student in transition, regarding identity development. In doing so I believe Julie possibly missed some opportunities to identify helpful others in her office (Eraut, 2007), which are people in the placement, apart from the designated mentors, that could act as learning mediators and possible role models into the type of professional she could become.
Regarding interactions in the placement, Julie also struggled to act her role around her supervisors. She would acknowledge the gap of experience and knowledge between her and them, but instead of viewing herself as a student in transition between newcomer and full participant, surrounded by more experienced peers, she was, almost, self-trapped in her position as a student. “(…) but I did still feel like I was their student throughout the year, just because, you know, they’re so experienced and… (Laughing). Even though they used to treat me like a colleague, I think it’s just myself, because I did feel like, you know, I’m still their student.”
(Julie, Interview 4)
In my interpretation of Julie’s experience the perception of being almost self- trapped in her student role is an important aspect, because Julie did feel more like a professional or like a colleague when she went into industries to collect data. It was only when she was in the university, around her supervisors, the PhD students and the other students that she would not move from her perception of herself as student to a researcher.
In conclusion, Julie’s outlook on the placement can be understood as a limitation towards her assessment of opportunities for development as I believe that she interacted with the placement from a particular position, that of a student, which limited her belonging. The argument developed in this section was then, that her outlook on the placement, facilitated by instances of near transfer (Mayer, 1975; Royer, 1978) and the interpretation of the placement as a mediational transition required of her the maintenance of a peripheral participation in the placement (Urrieta, 2007). Ultimately, this self- positioning limited her ability to become a full participant (Lave and Wenger, 1991), because “(…) the whole year, it was like, I just saw myself as student” (Julie, Interview 5). Hence, while placements are supposed to expose students to “possible futures” (Wenger, 2000, p. 241), Julie’s focus on being a student prevented her to make this identity leap.
The implications of this argument were that, in practice, Julie’s prior knowledge might have acted as a barrier to her ability to present herself as a researcher and, theoretically, that Julie’s struggle with identity development in the placement opened a space for critiquing frameworks supporting transfer
based on identical elements and similarities, and on the characterisation of placements as simulations in which students strongly position themselves as being in between their studies.