What remains opaque in how I study the world is my own position within it. In BITS Research Project – https://bitsresearch.github.io/about, I do not study student transition only as an external topic, I also stand inside it. I am a researcher exploring how students adapt to university, but also a student learning how to adapt again. Having worked and studied in Hong Kong, Canada, the UK, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands, my understanding of transition is shaped by different cultural layers, encounters, and uncertainties.
As Jenkins (2006) reminds us, “I can’t claim to be a neutral observer in any of this”. To study transition, then becomes an act of adaptation. My researcher positionality is not fully outside the field, and the student is not only an object of study. This opacity is not a weakness, but a condition of becoming.
Transition rarely moves in a clean line. It may pause, retreat, circle back, or break apart. This is important to my practice when thinking about students with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) because traditional, normative models of transition often fail marginalised students by framing variations from the linear path as “deviant” or “deficient” (Colley, 2007). Our experiences cannot be understood through a simple structure of cause, effect, and outcome.
