Navigating the wilderness of becoming professional

Abstract

The wilderness is often conceived as a place where persons can become confused or get into a wild condition (Nash 1982) and the ‘wilderness years’ as a time of uncertainty where the vastness of life, choices and roles bewilder actions that could be taken. Such spatial and temporal conditions could aptly be applied to graduates making the transition from safe contexts of educational preparation to becoming professionals at work. Our paper examines the nature of learning discovered by recent graduates participating in a symphony orchestra-initiated development program designed to nurture them through the transition to becoming professional orchestral musicians. We argue that this empirical example helps to support a conception of learning as an embodied and constructed experience with others in context. Here, learning to become ‘a whole musician’ is facilitated by guided contextualisation, a process that differs from conventional discussions of skill-based novice learning and mentorship. The competency that is being developed is one of learning how to become, forming a sense of identity as broader musical citizens as well as becoming members of more instrumental communities. Such attributes of graduateness are less about applying disciplinary or generic skills and more about committing to a form of lifelong learning that is relationally-based, a critical part of graduates developing a fitness for professional practice and the persistence to emerge from the wilderness to becoming professional.