Dallin George Young

Rethinking Student Transitions: How Community, Participation, and Becoming Can Help Higher Education Deliver on its Promise, presents a reimagined theory of student transitions in college. The authors contend that while previous theorizations have helped move the practice of supporting student success forward through the latter half of the twentieth century, earlier conceptualizations and models have led to an inconsistent and incomplete picture of students’ experiences in transition. The book offers both a review and critique of current models of transition and then develops a new conceptual viewpoint based in the ideas of situated learning and transitions as becoming. The second half of the book is dedicated to using this new theoretical perspective to illustrate how higher education professionals can create conditions to support students in transition more intentionally, with a particular view toward supporting historically marginalized students, including racially and ethnically minoritized students, first-generation students, and post-traditional students.

This paper’s purpose is to review theoretical explanations of college transitions, offer a critique of their utility, and make an explicit argument that the field of higher education would benefit from a shift from a view of transition as induction or development to transition as becoming. Moreover, we propose that the use of legitimate peripheral participation paired with transition as becoming as an emerging theoretical viewpoint that (1) points toward ways educators can shape environments that support transitions as becoming, (2) more effectively describes the lived experiences of students in transition, and (3) facilitates improved understanding, study, and implementation of student transition programs in the United States.

Participation in student peer leader roles, roles in which more senior students serve as mentors and educators to their peers, have continued to grow in their application and importance to institutions of higher education around the globe. Using a theoretical approach based in Legitimate Peripheral Participation and drawing from the International Survey of Peer Leaders, our paper explored the role of the quality and quantity of participation in important outcomes of the college experience: leadership development, skill development, and academic success. The results showed that the number of hours per week spent on peer leadership activities and the total number of peer leadership positions contributed to positive quality of engagement and enhanced students’ academic outcomes, overall leadership skills, and career readiness. Moreover, findings showed that the quality of engagement moderated the influences of the quantity of participation particularly for measures of academic success. As students develop relationships with faculty, staff, and peers throughout their time in peer leader roles and feel a deepening sense of connection and belonging to the college or university, students in peer leader roles become fuller participants in the academic community and, as a result, develop the knowledge, skills, and ways of doing, thinking, knowing, and being that are critical for student success.