‘You don't have like an identity … you are just lost in a crowd’: Forming a Student Identity in the First-year Transition to University

This article draws on research grounded in a theoretical framework informed by the work of Alfred Schutz and of Berger and Luckmann and explores transition to university as a loss experience. The specific loss examined here is that which results from student identity discontinuity as they undertake the initial transition to university—a transition that the article positions within the political and economic issues shaping the university of the twenty-first century. What causes this initial identity instability is that students have only naïve ‘knowledge about’, rather than contextualised ‘knowledge of’, the new learning context. This means that drawing on knowledge of past learning contexts does not always assist students negotiate new situated learner identities. Rather, identity results from situated interactions in which students pick up cues regarding the horizons of possibility for identity formation in the university transition. It is the nexus of situated interactions with lecturers and other students that is the context and process of identity formation.