Between frustration and education: Transitioning students’ stress and coping through the lens of semiotic cultural psychology

Abstract

This article proposes an alternative conceptualization of the processes with which new university students try to overcome the challenges and potential stresses experienced in their movement into the university context. Instead of viewing coping efforts as solely directed towards avoiding stress and enhancing well-being, efforts of overcoming difficulties and stress are to be seen in relation to students’ goal-oriented movement towards becoming students at a particular institution and in a particular field of study. By drawing on the concepts of (hyper)generalized affective semiotic fields, and equifinality and bifurcation points, it is suggested that the process of making sense of a difficult situation is related to the dynamics between well-defined short-term goals and ill-defined long-term goals. In this conceptualization, students not only cope with a specific problem in the here-and-now but make sense of the problem while negotiating their unique trajectory towards more distanced imagined educational outcomes.