Ending Up in Academia:A Story of Multiple Transitions

This chapter presents an autoethnographic account of the transition from a school-leaver teacher trainee to an academic researcher and teacher. The focus is on the notion of ‘becoming’ treading through a range of professional roles and doctoral research. The doctorate explored school transitions by combining Pierre Bourdieu’s and Basil Bernstein’s theoretical concepts. This framework was then utilised to shift attention from the researched to the researcher’s multiple identities and acts as a tool to analyse the transition into academia as a process of becoming.