Two Decades of Transition Pedagogy: An Integrative Framework for Conceptual Consilience

Two decades ago, transition pedagogy was borne out of my frustration as an educator that decades of research admiring the first-year student success “problem” had not delivered significant practical improvement for many students. Today transition pedagogy is embraced as a pragmatic, programmatic response to students’ continuous transitions across post-secondary’s shape-shifting terrain. But a fresh spate of post-COVID theorising is threatening to re-widen the theory-practice gap. This second article in the Student Success special issue’s reflective trilogy suggests that consilience – the harmonising of key success constructs to create a unified evidence-based for practice-ready implementation – is the bridge we need to build to get over success’s theory-practice divide. With this consilient clarity around the “know what”, transition pedagogy brings its proven capacity and theoretical pedigree to advance the “know how”, also continually adapting as fresh insights emerge. As proof of concept, I offer a “student success umbrella gestalt” as a conceptual metaphor to capture the entangled nature of success’s complexity.