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The article explores female Pakistani students' narratives of transition on moving to the UK and into post-graduate higher education. It draws on a qualitative longitudinal study with six female Pakistani students at one university to reveal the complex ongoing transformation of their thinking, feeling and believing. An analysis of troubles of identity during the year are suggestive of their seizing a 'modicum of control': a kind of agency that doesn't resist power structures, but does make an individual feel that they are choosing. As a result our participants went on to make profound changes to some of the ways they thought about and lived their lives. The results have implications for Universities, policy makers and tutors to transcend an institutional focus into a broader enculturated view that highlights an irreversible change to their past identities, which needs support both for students' transitioning to the UK University and on their return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel approach to integrating Cluster Analysis (CA) within qualitative inquiry is presented, grounded in a large, unstructured dataset from open and rather unstructured interviews. This dataset was previously subjected to typical (theory sensitive) thematic analyses. Transformed into quantitative binary matrix structures, the CA offers robustness and transparency as it systematically exhausts the whole dataset in a replicable procedure. However, then the transformation becomes bi-directional, as resulting clusters provoke new qualitative interpretations and even further quantitative analyses. This approach led to theoretically interpretable results that significantly extended previous understandings of relations between 'values' and 'learning approach' relating to mathematics learner identity. This integrated methodology is evaluated for its significance to the substantive field, but is discussed more widely for social science research drawing on such interview datasets in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper both reviews the other papers in this special issue and puts them in the context of the current agenda of research in dyslexia education. The pluralistic nature of the field is explored with reference to this special issue. The paper suggests a way forward for the field in terms of a developing research agenda for dyslexia education as we progress further into the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is provided in which the author discusses articles in the issue on topics including the use of playful research methods with special needs students, reasoning by children with learning difficulties, and school dropouts with social, emotional, and behavioural difficulties.