This article reports a project designed to foster first-year music students' academic study skills and to investigate their expectations and experiences of starting at university. Data gathered through questionnaires, diaries and in-class tasks reveal the change in learning strategies and musical identity the students experience in their first semester of the music degree course. Academic work and anxieties about workload and assessment challenge the focus on performing which has previously been the students' main source of musical involvement, necessitating a redefinition (...) of what it means to be musically successful. These findings are discussed in the broader context of musicians' life-span development, and the article concludes with some implications for practice in higher education and beyond. (shrink)

This article addresses the complex issue of lecturers’ subject knowledge and teaching. It explores the subject knowledge models of Banks, Leach and Moon and of Grossman, Wilson and Shulman . The article then delineates how these can be used in the development of robust teaching models of the subject. It also suggests how these models can be used to develop a scholarly view of teaching and how this may impact on student transition and development. The article emerges from a study (...) of teaching and learning in English Literature departments within the UK higher education sector, but it draws conclusions and offers recommendations applicable to teaching across the Arts and Humanities in and beyond the UK context. (shrink)