From expert student to novice professional: higher education and sense of self in the creative and performing arts

Abstract

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The employability of graduates is of concern across further and higher education, but it is particularly problematic in the Creative and Performing Arts disciplines. Understanding the journey to work for arts graduates requires collaborative action from multiple agencies, particularly the collection and reporting of nuanced statistics on higher education graduate outcomes and empirical investigations of graduate work and employability. This paper reports on a study of Australian creative workers who described how their experiences of work inform their sense of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. Two models are discussed in relation to the transition from student to professional worker. The first model explores how the self-determination of an individual’s motivation influences the success of the transition. The second model poses a multidisciplinary view of student engagement and provides a lens to the transformative processes for developing one’s sense of being through tacit knowledge and active engagement in professional self. The article exposes models of selfhood that might enhance our understanding of higher education students’ sense of becoming as well as how these models might be applied within the higher education context.