Belonging vs. Seriality: how mature students’ bonds mediate PGDE experiences 

The Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) is Scotland’s main route into teaching. A key issue for students generally, and mature students specifically, is finding a sense of belonging within their learning community and building bonds with other students (Kahu, 2014). Our study explored how ‘belonging’ was an organising principle for how students navigated the PGDE, including encounters with academic literacies.

The theoretical approach rests on Jean Paul Sartre's (1960) conceptualisation of 'seriality.' Serial collectives are organised around an experience or object; commonality is not based on mutual identification or shared goals. Instead, they “derive unity from the way that individuals pursue their own individual ends” in response to a common set of conditions (Young, 1994, p. 724). We use this framework to illuminate how students respond to the PGDE’s structure and demands as well as their encounters with each other, particularly ‘mature student’ and ‘PGDE student’ identities.

This study drew on several data sources: a Scotland-wide survey about students’ writing aptitudes, contextual information from PGDE programme leads, and nine co-facilitated focus group of mature students across four institutions. The focus groups, which are the main data source for this proposed paper, were analysed through structured memos followed research team analytical discussions, which led to the identification of key themes that characterised how participants conceptualised their PGDE course.

Our intention was to investigate mature students’ experiences about PGDE-related academic literacies demands. We anticipated these experiences would be related to a range of personal and structural variables. What emerged during our analysis was that sociability – group membership, friendships, and social networks – was the most influential determinant of the students’ experience of the PGDE course, including their academic literacy experiences. In other words, meaningful collective engagement mattered. The circumstances in which student teachers might identify as part of a group rather than a serial point to a concern of far-reaching significance, since individual professional agency is inextricably connected not only to contextual factors but also to collective identification. Understanding how student teachers transition from series to group could help teacher educators anticipate and support this process, and in this way foster a capacity for the kind of collective action which lies at the heart of political agency.