1. 25-26 SEPTEMBER The University of Queensland
Lost in Transit? The Transition to University-level French Humanities & Social Science Seed Grant Joe Hardwick, Barbara E. Hanna, School of Languages and Cultures
25-26 SEPTEMBER
The University of Queensland

2. The The student as migrant
The student’s first-year experience is a process of resocialization to a new cultural environment very much like the process that immigrants experience upon their arrival in their new homeland. This resocialization process involves culture shock, ‘language acquisition’, and the internalisation of academic, bureaucratic and social norms as well as the values and expectations of the college milieu.
Chaskes, J (1996). “The First-Year Student as Immigrant”. Journal of the Freshman Year Experience and Students in Transitions 8:1, : 79

3. As tourist
The normative order that first year students encounter in a collegiate environment appears to be much like the one they became so comfortable with in secondary school. However, students soon learn that they are ‘strangers in a strange land.’ It is a bit like an American’s first trip to Great Britain. It is simultaneously very familiar and unsettlingly strange.
Chaskes, J (1996). “The First-Year Student as Immigrant”. Journal of the Freshman Year Experience and Students in Transitions 8:1, 79-91: 85

4. As rural -> urban migrant
Like the immigrant who migrates from a rural community to an urban setting, the first-year student is thrust into a more formal, complex, and impersonal organizational environment than a secondary school milieu.
Chaskes, J (1996). “The First-Year Student as Immigrant”. Journal of the Freshman Year Experience and Students in Transitions 8:1, 79-91: 87.

5. Interestingly, while [in Crisp et al’s work] students responded that they thought studying at university would be different to high school, they consistently indicated that their expectations of access to teachers, response times for the return of work and feedback, and reviewing of drafts, were the same as high school. This suggested that while students knew that there would be a change they did not really appreciate the nature of the change, nor were students sufficiently cognizant of the more ambiguous expectations and demands placed on them compared with the highly structured environment of secondary school. (Binkworth et al, 2013, p. 11)

6. Differences: School/ University
Course content: its intensity, difficulty…. and nature
Structure: its clarity
Interaction: opportunities for, language of
Support from the “teacher” : less, less personalized at university

7. The Interventions 2016: Decluttering the course

8. Additional support: (1) Transition website (2) Support for assessment
Instructional videos, talking students through the information available:
task instructions;
criteria sheets
how-to guides on online submission
Drop-in sessions prior to each major assessment item.
Online chat sessions prior to each major assessment item.

9. But what was actually used?
Corrections provided by staff on written work
Course materials on the Learning Management System (Blackboard )
The Course Description (ECP)

10. What did the transition project change?
FREN3112 was already a course about dealing with cultural difference: the transition to university culture is taken as a privileged example.
Foregrounding Transition as a potentially challenging experience, which will require work on:
Knowledge
Skills
Identity

11. FREN3112: 2017
Maintained - instructional videos, detailed assessment information, the Transition site.
Discontinued– special assessment-based drop-in sessions (usual office hours maintained).
Introduced: Fact sheet (inspired by one prepared by the Student and Staff Expectations and Experiences project run by Uni SA and U Adelaide, but adapted to FREN3112). (Prepared by Peter Cowley).
Repurposed: FREN3112 online discussion fora.

12. Factsheet
(1) Key differences – and the values and constraints which underpin them.
Greater freedom and greater responsibility
Larger workload
Respective roles of staff and students
Your lecturer isn’t avoiding you, he’s a sessional.
Your lecturer isn’t uncaring, but she’s not a trained counsellor (unlike the staff at the Health Service)
Language choice - the course is in French, not because staff think students can already understand everything, but because we want them to be able to.
(2) The ways in which French at university is an academic subject, requiring critical thinking. (Critical thinking is learning!)
(3) Their ability to survive and thrive!

13. BB forum: the construction of a successful learner identity
Me and French language and culture
Self-presentation
My favourite word in French
My prediction about who will win the French presidential election
Me and transition to university
Differences I can see between school and university
If I could advise the university as to how to improve things for first years
What I wish I had known in my first week at University
Me as the manager of my learning
What I want to be able to do in French
My personal learning goal
My personal learning goal re-evaluated

14. Lost in Transit

15. Lost in Transit