The Swedish higher education system is, from an international perspective, described as an open system. As a consequence, higher education is also an arena for non-traditional students. Being the first generation in a family to study in Swedish higher education is one way to define a non-traditional student in this study. Other ways include: male students in an education where women are in the majority, students with working experience, students with ethnical background other than Swedish, and students with disabilities. The aim of this paper is to understand how these non-traditional learners are forming identities within two educational contexts, and how they imagine their future careers and occupational identities in relation to the educational context. The study is based on ten biographical interviews with third-year students of higher education. One group is studying to become physiotherapists and the other one is studying biomedicine. The first group is studying in order to get a particular profession, whereas for the other group education is a way to obtain more general academic degree. These approaches may influence the way the students are forming learning identities and their perception of their future careers and occupational identities. The processes of forming identities are analysed as a relation between structure and agency, and seen as both 'learning about' and 'learning to be'. When studying in higher education to obtain a particular profession, the students are not expected to relate to academy as such but to learn an identity related to their future occupation. When studying for a general academic degree, the students have to develop an academic's identity. Thus, the two educational contexts in this study are related to academy, though in different ways. The way they relate seems to influence whether the fact of belonging to the first generation in higher education results in clashes.
Health care assistants are the most common occupation for women in Sweden. Yet, facts about their learning and occupational identities are quite unknown. The aim of the paper is to deepen the understanding of how health care assistants learn their occupational identities in daily work. In the theoretical framework, the interrelationship between learning and occupational identity are elaborated on. The resulting findings come from case studies of four wards at two hospitals and are based on interviews and self-observations provided in the form of diaries. The results show that the health care assistants' occupational identity is weak when compared to other professional groups, yet strong in sharing the same orientation towards patients. Moreover, the identities are learned at work, where registered nurses and physicians are of great importance to this process. Previous life and work experiences seem to have an impact on health care assistants' motivation to learn in formal settings but learning in formal settings also seems to be crucial for learning in daily work. Four contradictions have been discussed as the potentials for developing the occupational identities: formal versus informal learning, adaptive versus developmental learning, formal versus informal legitimacy and weak status versus strong identity. My conclusion is that assistant nurses seem to learn how to do things they do not talk about, while talking about things they can but are not allowed to do. They learn how to adapt to the informal order by reproducing the formal one, which leads to their learning behind the curtains.
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