ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a project in which second-year undergraduates took responsibility for helping to promote and support first-year students’ academic transition. Our model of student engagement framed students as change agents (Kay et al., 2012) who worked as academic mentors within the first-year curriculum, encouraging newcomers to engage in dialogue about effective approaches to learning on the course, where Assessment for Learning (AfL) approaches were routinely used by their teaching staff to promote students’ academic engagement. In particular, we draw attention to the insights of seven student mentors who, at the end of the project, decided to produce a booklet for future first years, based on their own experiences of making the transition to university education. The chapter aims to highlight the ways in which the students’ voices in the booklet represent a strong sense of personal transformation, which they linked to changing learner identities, the importance of active involvement within programme learning communities, and a perceived sense of belonging (Astin, 1999; Mann, 2001). The importance these students place on the social and affective aspects of learning, rather than purely cognitive or subject-related elements, corresponds strongly with studies which demonstrate the salience, from the student viewpoint, of social integration, community dimensions and the perceptions and identities held by students as conditions for intellectual engagement (Bryson and Hand, 2008; Solomonides et al., 2012b).
