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Abstract
This paper utilises the theories of Archer to explore the impact of student ‘internal conversations’ upon the development of reflexive approaches employed by work-based students (WBS). The study informing this paper draws on the voices of a range of WBS on a Foundation Degree in Educational Support within a new university. A range of reflexivities are identified within the strategies students employ to ‘make their ways’ through the often unfamiliar and sometimes alienating contexts of higher education (HE). Whilst routinisation can be viewed as in decline people are not equally placed to be liberated or to liberate themselves from structurally determined biographies. Importantly for this paper, liberation is not strongly identified by participants as a site of what they ‘care most about’. It is argued in the conclusion to this paper that students have an ‘empirical tendency’ to employ the reflexivity that enables them to remain knowledgeably embedded to their social context, to move on but not necessarily ‘out’ of their social circumstances; so the autonomous reflexivity of Archer’s study is less relevant to many of these students.