Practices of Becoming: First-generation students transition to university

Presenter

Flora Petrik, University of Tübingen

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Location

This is an in-person event.

Introduction

My presentation explores the learning experiences of first-generation students in higher education. While existing studies highlight the risks of social exclusion, they tend to overlook what and how first-generation students learn in their transitions to university. By utilising a theoretical framework that integrates biographical and practice-theoretical perspectives on learning, this study addresses a gap in research on how these students navigate their transition to university by learning. Empirically, the study is based on 24 biographical case studies conducted over three years (2019–2022) across universities in Austria and Germany. The findings reveal that biographical learning is embedded in concrete practices of becoming: collective becoming, engagement, and pedagogical accompaniment. These practices of becoming a student simultaneously transform and reproduce social inequalities. The presentation concludes by emphasising the importance of understanding first-generation students’ learning experiences in relation to social inequality, higher education, and societal change.

About the presenter

Flora Petrik is a research assistant in the Department of General Education at the Institute of Educational Science at the University of Tübingen. She studied Education, German Studies and Comparative Literature in Vienna and Jyväskylä and has been an associate fellow in the DFG Research Training Group “Doing Transitions” since January 2020. During her doctoral studies, she completed research stays in Manchester (Education and Social Research Institute – ESRI) and Barcelona (Globalisation, Education and Social Policies – GEPS). Since September 2024, she has been coordinating the Exploration Fund-funded project “Ambivalent Educational Advancement – Cultural and Social Science Approaches in Dialogue” (duration: 2024-2026). In her dissertation project, she deals with the experiences of the first in her family to start studying: How are educational advancements biographically accomplished? What possibilities does the university open up for biographical transformations? And which processes come to the fore if the only question is not the conditions for the success or failure of educational advancement? In doing so, not only does the university as a transitional space come into view, but it also creates and implements class transitions. Her other research and teaching interests include social inequality in schools and universities (with a particular focus on social class and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice) and questions of scientific theory and methodology.

Flora Petrik is currently co-leader of the research collective “Ethnographic Collage” and co-convenor of the Bourdieu Study Group of the BSA (British Sociological Association). She regularly works as a reviewer for scientific journals, including BIOS: Journal for Biography Research and Oral History, Critical Studies in Education and Sociology of Education.