The growing complexity of doing a PhD necessarily demands candidates to robustly exercise their agency in navigating the doctoral journey. However, the conceptualisation of how students use their agency across multiple facets of their studies has yet to receive due scholarly attention. Drawing on the subject-centred sociocultural view on agency,…

This article examines teachers' perspectives on a neglected area of practice: academic referencing. Commonly considered a simple skill to learn, we suggest that instead a study of referencing practices enables us to glean valuable insight into the challenges experienced by students when developing a learner identity. Drawing on interviews with…

This article analyses literacy narratives of first-year students at a South African university. It uses excerpts from the literacy narratives to explain how this writing genre serves as an outlet for reconstructing experiences of social injustice and agency. The article discusses how students' experiences of social injustice and their sense of…

Previous research that evaluated first year students' transition into university found that the values of 'being, belonging and becoming' were important in particular within the first few months and within the first year of university. From our previous work, we reported that three things matter to students: the academic staff they work with, the…

While the term 'student experience' is used widely in universities, it is remarkably under-developed as a construct in the academic literature. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a conceptual framework for the student experience of undergraduate students. The approach taken is to identify the key influences that shape the student…