Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Volume 20, Issue 4, Page 403-425, October 2021. Despite the plethora of research on widening participation in the last 20 years, access to the arts and humanities has remained relatively under-explored, especially in relation to the preparedness of adult learners. This article reports a case study investigating the impact of an arts and languages Access module at the UK Open University. Findings from interviews with 37 Access students were analysed in relation to four themes: (...) the need for Access preparation; generic studentship skills; discipline-specific skills; intrinsic enjoyment and interdisciplinary study. We conclude embedded generic skills enhance learner confidence and time management, while academic literacy skills relevant to the arts and humanities enhance cultural capital and enable disadvantaged learners to access challenging disciplines. The impact of a preparatory arts and humanities module extends into the lives of individual students, suggesting a counter-narrative to the prevailing, ‘economic value’ paradigms of higher education policymakers. (shrink)

This article considers the transition from school to university in Music and Music Technology, continuing the discussion of transitional issues which began in Volume 2 of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education. The focus of the article is a survey of undergraduates, examining areas that were key to their first experience of studying for a degree, such as entry qualifications, course choice, career prospects, difficult aspects of the course and aspects they felt well-prepared for. These data were supplemented with teacher (...) and lecturer interviews and a university staff questionnaire. The findings demonstrate that student perceptions of undergraduate music study are sometimes at odds with those of the university staff. In the light of the changing nature, interests and needs of these students, it is timely to rethink both what it is intended to achieve and how this is going to be assessed. (shrink)

This article reports the outcomes of an exploratory small-scale study to compare lecturer and student conceptions of critical reading at a research-intensive UK institution. Analysis of lecturer and student interviews in four humanities subjects suggests differences in the way lecturers and students conceptualize and articulate the practices of critical reading. Lecturers conceptualize reading as creative and intertextual, a defamilarization of personal experiences of the world and the development of relational ways of understanding through close reading. Conversely, students are found to (...) conceptualize reading as evaluating different perspectives, domesticating new experiences into existing personal value schema and apprehending the text as object. The discussion considers the pedagogical implications of these differences for developing reading practices in the humanities classroom. The article also reflects on the relationship between the capacity to participate in the discourses of criticality and the capacity to enact critical encounters with texts as readers. (shrink)

Although “transition” is an established area of educational research, there has been little empirically exploration of how shifts in the ways that knowledge is packaged and valued impact on students’ reading and writing as they transition into higher education. This article draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study that traced the experiences, practices and understandings of 11 students from their last year of A-levels through to their second year of undergraduate study. Analysis shows that the forms of knowledge privileged and the (...) ways that knowledge is packaged vary significantly between the two educational contexts, impacting on students’ engagement with texts as they transition into university. This article further illustrates that as a result of shifts in what counts as knowledge between these levels, students face challenges adapting to undergraduate literacies, which disrupts the simplistic notion of transition evoked in the dominant positioning of “the transition to uni... (shrink)