Being and becoming: a student trajectory

What is it to become a student? Higher education is an institution deliberately designed to sustain differentiated and public forms of human experience and seeks to enable individuals to get on the inside of those external forms of experience. The student experience of so doing is, however, a private affair. How do we make sense of this interaction of the private and public realms of the student experience? In coming into a proper relationship with an epistemological framework, the student displaces herself into that framework. With educational displacement comes a trajectory. The trajectory can continue upward, with the student gaining more confidence; or it can flatten off; or it can fall away, with the student losing interest in her studies and with her cognitive powers diminishing. The trajectory offers a form of becoming: the student becomes herself in a new guise ‐ her own new, and authentic, person. The being of the student is achieved through a process of becoming the student.