From Mediation to Independence: Writing a Research Seminar as a Case Study with Experienced Paraprofessionals in Teacher Education

Abstract

This article traces how nontraditional preservice teachers experience the mediation of academic research writing, and how the transition from mediation to independence unfolds in their accounts when the supporting structure is withdrawn. The case centers on the first research seminar of a teacher education program in which 13 experienced paraprofessionals, most of them the first in their families to enter higher education and carrying long histories of academic difficulty, design and write a structured self-regulation intervention study with a pupil. From a qualitative analysis of three retrospective focus groups, five themes were constructed: (1) arriving with academic apprehension; (2) holding the standard as recognition; (3) the graduated scaffold of the first seminar; (4) concentric circles of mediation and support; and (5) the abrupt fading of the scaffold in the move toward independence. The findings highlight that participants valued scaffolding not only for the support it provided but for the way responsibility for the work was gradually handed over. Despite this gradual structure, the handover toward independence was experienced by some students as an abrupt, sudden transition, which provoked ambivalent feelings. The discussion proposes two participant-grounded sensitizing concepts, the effort ladder and the concentric circles of mediation, as interpretive lenses for scaffolding theory. We discuss the unresolved tensions that participants hold between the importance of high academic standards and the need for accommodations, and the implications for teacher education.

1. Introduction

In recent decades, the landscape of higher education has undergone substantial change, reflected in expanded access for diverse populations and the development of distinctive training pathways. At the same time, the need for certified special education teachers has grown, particularly those with insight gained through hands-on classroom experience (Peyton et al., 2021). This has led to degree and special education teaching-certificate programs offered to teaching assistants while continuing in their roles in the education system. Despite the growing importance of these programs, research on students’ academic experiences within them is limited. Little is known about how these students perceive the academic process, what challenges they identify, and what contributes to their success, particularly in coping with complex academic tasks such as writing a research seminar paper. More specifically, previous work on paraprofessional pathways has concentrated on questions of access, recruitment, and retention (e.g., Butler et al., 2025; Fogle et al., 2024; Shelton & Cruz, 2023), whereas the ways in which experienced paraprofessionals learn academic research writing, and the ways in which the scaffolds built around that writing are faded, have received little attention. The present study addresses this gap at the meeting point of three bodies of work that rarely converge: research on adult learners in higher education, research on first-generation students’ academic belonging, and research on scaffolded pedagogy in higher education. Recent pipeline scholarship has begun to attend to how such programs recruit, fund, and shape the professional identities of paraprofessionals on their way to certification (Butler et al., 2025; Fogle et al., 2024; Shelton & Cruz, 2023). The academic work the students must accomplish inside these programs, above all research writing, has remained largely invisible in this literature.

These programs sit within a broader pattern: many adults enter teacher education through routes that lie outside the conventional path of school, university, and certification. They embark on these programs after years of classroom work supporting certified teachers and often after earlier schooling that left them wary of academic study (Gist et al., 2019; Villegas & Clewell, 1998). This population constitutes a distinct group combining two characteristics that complicate their entry into academia: they are, at once, adult students (Renner & Skursha, 2023; Rollins, 2025) and, for most, the first in their family to pursue higher education (Gist et al., 2019; Song, 2026). While prior research has largely addressed each of these characteristics separately, the present study addresses them in tandem, illuminating how their co-occurrence may intensify the challenges of adjusting to academic life, alongside the advantages afforded by participants’ extensive prior experience. For these students, the research seminar, the extended piece of supervised inquiry that anchors a degree, is a demanding rite of passage. They are required to read research, formulate a question, design and carry out an intervention, and write it up in the conventions of a discipline (Lea & Street, 2006). For learners without a natural sense of belonging in academia, the seminar concentrates both the promise and the threat of higher education in a single, sustained task.

How is such writing learned, and how does the learner transition from leaning on a mediator toward writing on her own? A Vygotskian reading treats academic competence as developing first on the social plane, between the learner and more capable others, and only afterwards on the individual plane (Vygotsky, 1978). Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory is the primary theoretical framework of this study. The related constructs introduced below, scaffolding, the gradual release of responsibility, and self-regulated learning, are read as elaborations of mediation within the zone of proximal development rather than as competing frameworks. Mediation and scaffolding name the contingent support that makes participation possible within the learner’s zone of proximal development (van de Pol et al., 2010; Wood et al., 1976). Yet scaffolding is defined not only by the support it offers, but by its fading and by the transfer of responsibility to the learner (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983; van de Pol et al., 2010). The pedagogy is complete only when the support can be removed, and the learner can carry the work alone.

This article takes one research seminar as a case study through which to trace that arc, from mediation to independence. It follows a group of experienced paraprofessionals, studying toward a B.Ed. in a college of education, as they write their first research seminar: a study in which each student designs and runs an eight-session self-regulation intervention with a pupil and reports it in the form of a structured research paper. The article asks how mediation supported these students as they wrote and how they experienced the transition toward independent inquiry once the support began to recede. The sections below set out the literature that frames the study and then present the findings constructed from the participants’ own accounts.

1.1. Becoming a Teacher from Within the Classroom: First-Generation, Nontraditional Students and the Paraprofessional Pathway

Paraprofessionals, also termed paraeducators or teaching assistants, are experienced classroom support staff who work alongside certified teachers, often offering close, individualized assistance to pupils, including those with disabilities. They are a substantial and experienced presence in schools, and pathways toward their certification draw on assets already acquired: close familiarity with classrooms, pupils, and the communities in which they work (Gist et al., 2019; Villegas & Clewell, 1998). They are typically older, balancing study with paid work and family responsibilities (Khiat, 2017). Their support needs are correspondingly wider than the classroom: mature students describe institutional flexibility and the understanding of instructors and staff as decisive for whether study can be sustained alongside home and work roles (van Rhijn et al., 2023).

Many paraprofessionals who return to study are also the first in their families to enter higher education, and research on first-generation, or first-in-family students reflects two perspectives. One line of scholarship treats these students as a distinct category, emphasizing their academic difficulties and barriers: structural barriers, earlier schooling marked by difficulty, and hurdles that existing programs often leave unaddressed (Gist et al., 2019; Longmire-Avital & Miller-Dyce, 2015; Metcalf & Wiener, 2018). A second line of scholarship resists this framing, cautioning against perceiving the first-generation position as a deficit. O’Shea (2016, p. 59) argued that transition strategies built on “filling students up” with the institution’s cultural capital misrecognize these students’ own capital and that the same background can be framed either as lacking or as a resource depending on how it is perceived. Similarly, Stephens et al. (2012) showed that the difficulty facing many first-generation students is, in part, a mismatch of cultures rather than a shortfall of ability. Universities valorize norms of independent, self-reliant achievement that are at odds with the more interdependent, relational orientation that many of these students bring from their backgrounds. Moreover, Spiegler and Bednarek (2013) added that first-generation students are a large, heterogeneous population rather than a uniform category. Research on academic writing echoes this caution: Lea and Street (2006) reframed student writing not as a neutral skill lacking in some, but as a contested social practice bound up with identity, authority, and belonging in academia. Therefore, what looks like a writing problem is frequently a question of access to a discipline’s meaning-making. Recent person-centered work reinforces this heterogeneity: Ko et al. (2025) identified distinct profiles of first-generation students whose social, financial, academic, and cultural barriers cluster in different ways, with correspondingly different implications for wellbeing and persistence. Much of this literature has been devoted to identifying such students’ needs and to designing varied institutional responses intended to promote their engagement and success. The present study adds a complementary vantage point: because the participants were interviewed at least a year after completing the seminar, their accounts illuminate not only the kinds of help they needed but how they perceived that help in retrospect, what it meant to them, and what they saw as its benefits and its costs. This retrospective vantage point also allows the study to speak back to scaffolding theory itself: it shows what the design of mediation, and above all its fading, looks like from the learner’s side, once the consequences have had time to unfold.

In addition, earlier experiences shape what learners believe they can do. From a social-cognitive view, efficacy beliefs are built largely through mastery experiences; hence, a learner whose schooling supplied few such experiences may approach academic work with low confidence and heightened anxiety (Bandura, 1997; Metcalf & Wiener, 2018). A program’s task, therefore, is twofold: to create experiences through which these students can build a sense of capability while still meeting genuine academic demands, rather than lowering the demands themselves, and to build a bridge between first-generation students and the academic world they are entering.

1.2. The Research Seminar as Mediated, Situated Practice

One of the most demanding assignments of an undergraduate degree is the writing of an extended research paper, drawing together reading, design, analysis, and disciplinary writing into one sustained activity. Academic literacies scholarship treats such writing as situated social practice rather than a generic technique, learned through participation in the meaning-making of a field (Lea & Street, 2006). Recent work brings this reading closer to the students at the center of the present study. Although set in undergraduate public health rather than in teacher education, Crawford et al. (2025) traced how first-generation students experienced writing support embedded in their courses, and their accounts indicate what such mediation consists of in practice: modeling of academic writing, guided questioning that returns the appraisal of the text to the writer, and writing tasks staged across the semester, valued together with the accessibility of the mediator and a stance the students described as free of judgment. Sociocultural accounts describe this participation as apprenticeship: newcomers take part in valued activity alongside more experienced others, moving from the edges of a practice toward fuller and more independent participation (Lave, 2009; Lave & Wenger, 1991).

The research seminar can be regarded as exactly such an apprenticeship. The lecturer models the moves of inquiry, guides the student through them, and gradually transfers the work to the student. In this view, learning to write research is not the transmission of a set of rules but the joint construction of meaning, in which a more capable other carries the parts of the task that the learner cannot yet manage alone, until the learner can manage them independently (Bruner, 1996). This challenge is particularly demanding for the population at the center of this study, which combines mature students returning to education with first-generation students.

1.3. Mediation, the Zone of Proximal Development, and Scaffolding

For Vygotsky (1978), higher mental functions appear twice: first between people, on the social or intermental plane, and later within the individual, on the intramental plane. Learning advances development when it operates within the zone of proximal development, the distance between what a learner can do unaided and what the same learner can do with the guidance of a more capable other. Development, in this frame, is the gradual movement of an activity from the space between people into the learner herself.

Wood et al. (1976) coined the term “scaffolding” to describe the support that operates in this zone. The more capable partner takes control of the elements of the task that lie beyond the learner’s current reach, to enable the learner to concentrate on and slowly extend the parts that are within reach. Reviewing a decade of research, van de Pol et al. (2010) distilled three defining features of scaffolding: contingency, the adjustment of support to the learner’s current understanding; fading, the gradual withdrawal of that support; and transfer of responsibility, the handover of the task to the learner. The point is consequential for the present case. Support that does not fade, or that is withdrawn without regard to the learner’s growing competence, is not scaffolding in the full sense; the temporary, responsive, and self-dissolving character of the support is part of what makes it scaffolding at all.

1.4. Making Mediation Visible: Visible Teaching and Visible Learning

In his account of visible teaching and visible learning, Hattie (2008) further developed this transparency of the scaffold, a condition in which teaching and learning processes become transparent and clear to both parties involved. According to this theory, visible teaching and visible learning occur when the learning goal is transparent, explicit, and appropriately challenging, and when both teacher and student, each in their own way, actively seek to determine whether that challenging goal has been achieved, and to what degree. A further condition is the presence of deliberate strategies aimed at establishing mastery of the goal, alongside ongoing feedback given and received, and active, committed participation on the part of everyone involved in the learning process, whether teacher, students, or peers. In this sense, teachers are required to see learning through the eyes of their students, whereas students are required to see teaching as a key to ongoing learning.

A central principle in Hattie’s (2008) theory is that the strongest effects on student learning occur when a double role-reversal takes place: teachers become learners of their own teaching, while students become teachers of themselves. This reversal echoes the same movement of responsibility from mediator to learner. Students who take on this role display the self-regulatory qualities most desirable in learners, while teachers are required to act as continuous evaluators, attending to their effects on student learning and adjusting their teaching accordingly.

1.5. From Mediation to Independence: Self-Regulation and the Handover of Responsibility

The endpoint of mediation is the learner’s own regulation of the activity. Self-regulated learning describes the cyclical processes through which learners set goals, plan, monitor their progress, and reflect on their own work (Zimmerman, 2002). In the seminar studied here, self-regulation is present at two levels at once. It is the content of the work, since each student designs a self-regulation intervention for a pupil. It is also the meta-goal of the pedagogy, since the seminar sets out to support the student’s own capacity to regulate the long and complex task of research writing. The mediator’s work is to support that self-regulation and then to step back as it takes hold.

How that stepping back is managed is, in this frame, part of the pedagogy rather than its aftermath. The gradual release of responsibility model describes a deliberate shift from modeling and guided practice toward independent work, in which responsibility is handed over in stages rather than all at once (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983). Likewise, scaffolding theory requires that fading be contingent on the learner’s development (van de Pol et al., 2010). Recent work in higher education traces how this staged handover is enacted in practice, describing explicit instruction, modeling, guided practice, independent practice, and reflection as distinct instructional moves within a single course (Stevens et al., 2025). Yet how a learner actually experiences that movement, from leaning on a mediator toward carrying the work alone, is less well understood, particularly for students approaching academic writing after long histories of difficulty. The present study took one research seminar as a case through which to attend to that experience. Working from the participants’ own accounts, it asked how they experienced the mediation of their first research seminar and the movement toward independent inquiry as that mediation began to recede. Two research questions guided the study: (1) How did adult, experienced paraprofessional preservice teachers, most of them first-generation students, experience the mediation offered to them while writing their first research seminar paper? (2) How did they experience the transition from mediated writing toward independent inquiry as that support faded?

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Research Context: Seminar Course About Self-Regulation

This study was designed as a qualitative, instrumental case study (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2018). A case study design was chosen because the phenomenon of interest, the movement from mediated writing toward independence, is inseparable from the real-life pedagogical context in which it occurred and is best understood through a bounded, in-depth inquiry into that context. The bounded case is the year-long first research seminar of one B.Ed. special education program at a single teacher education college, across two consecutive cohorts; the unit of analysis is the participants’ experience of the mediation offered within this seminar and of its fading.

The study was conducted within a year-long seminar course that focused on the planning, implementation, and evaluation of an individualized intervention program designed to promote the self-regulation skills of a pupil with special educational needs. Participants were drawn from two consecutive academic cohorts; within each cohort, students were divided into two groups of approximately 15 preservice teachers, each group mentored throughout the year by a single course instructor, who provided ongoing guidance, feedback, and the final grade. Thus, each preservice teacher worked with a single mentor throughout the year; the same mentor conducted the weekly meetings of her group, provided written feedback on successive drafts of each chapter, remained available for consultation between meetings, and assessed the final paper. Because the mentoring model, the accompanying booklet, the staging of the assignments, and the assessment criteria were developed jointly by the two instructors, mentoring procedures were standardized across groups and cohorts, although, as in any mentoring relationship, personal style naturally varied. One of the two instructors was also the researcher, while the other instructor was not involved in the research. Throughout the academic year, the preservice teachers followed a detailed booklet that provided step-by-step guidance throughout the research and writing process. The booklet specified the overall structure of the seminar paper, provided tables for organizing data and findings as well as literature sources for the literature review, and offered detailed writing guidelines for each chapter, including its expected general structure. In addition, they attended weekly seminar meetings that combined theoretical instruction and writing workshops focused on developing the seminar paper, with the course instructors’ ongoing guidance, support, and continuous formative feedback.

The seminar was structured as a gradual, scaffolded process. At the beginning of the course, the students studied the theoretical foundations of self-regulation, including self-regulatory processes, motivation, metacognition, time and environment management, social skills, and emotional regulation. At the same time, each student selected a focal pupil and collected preliminary information through interviews with both the pupil and the homeroom teacher. Based on these data, the pupil’s strengths and needs were identified, a research question was formulated, and an individualized intervention program was developed. The research question served as the organizing framework for all stages of the seminar and was formulated around three key components: the target population, the self-regulation domain addressed by the intervention, and the intervention tool selected.

Following the instructor’s approval of the intervention plan, the students implemented an eight-session intervention program with a pupil in their school. Throughout the implementation phase, regular supervision meetings provided opportunities for consultation, reflection, and ongoing refinement of the intervention in response to the pupil’s progress. Concurrently, the literature review was developed based on the research question, with its structure derived from the same three components. The academic writing process was supported through dedicated instruction on literature searching, synthesizing sources, academic writing, and citation conventions, together with detailed feedback on drafts of the seminar paper. Throughout the course, the instructional approach emphasized writing as an iterative process, encouraging students to incorporate feedback and continuously improve their work until the final submission of the seminar paper. The final grade was based on the completed seminar paper, and all formative feedback on drafts was provided before and separately from grading.

2.2. Participants

Participants in this study were 13 special education preservice teachers (all women) enrolled in their third or fourth year of a 4-year B.Ed. program in special education at a teacher education college. They combined two markers of nontraditional status: they entered higher education as adults, ranging in age from their thirties to their fifties, with most over 40, and 10 identified themselves, in the interviews, as the first in their family to do so. First-in-family status was not collected as a formal demographic item; it was established through the participants’ self-identification during the focus groups, where being the first in the family to enter higher education, in the sense that neither parent had studied toward an academic degree, arose repeatedly and spontaneously in their self-descriptions. All participants had been paraprofessionals for at least 2 years when they entered the program, and most held a teaching position at the time of the study. Table 1 presents the participants’ data in more detail. All names are pseudonyms. To reduce the risk of participant identification within this small and well-defined cohort, demographic details are deliberately reported at a coarser grain, a standard partial de-identification practice in qualitative research with small participant groups: ages appear in decade bands, and family status is reported without the number of children.

Table 1. Participants in the study.

No.	Name	Age	Family Status	Year in the Program	Current Employment
1	Lily	50s	Divorced	4	Homeroom teacher * in elementary school.
2	Shannon	40s	Married, with children	4	Homeroom teacher * in a special education elementary school.
3	Yara	30s	Married, with children	4	Homeroom teacher * in a special education class, elementary school. Enrolled in an M.Ed. program.
4	Yasmine	40s	Divorced, with children	4	Homeroom teacher * in a special education middle school. Enrolled in an M.Ed. program.
5	Jessica	40s	Married, with children	3	One-to-one paraprofessional.
6	Leah	30s	Married, with children	3	Homeroom teacher * in middle school.
7	Lisa	30s	Married, with children	3	Subject teacher * in elementary school.
8	Hanna	30s	Married, with children	3	Homeroom teacher * in a middle school special education class. Enrolled in an M.Ed. program.
9	Sarah	50s	Married, with children	3	Homeroom teacher * in a middle school special education class. Enrolled in an M.Ed. program.
10	Samantha	40s	Married, with children	3	Homeroom teacher * in a special education elementary school.
11	Rose	50s	Married, with children	3	Currently unemployed due to health issues.
12	Keren	40s	Married, with children	3	Paraprofessional in a middle school special education class. Enrolled in an M.Ed. program.
13	Susan	50s	Married, with children	3	Homeroom teacher * in elementary school.

* Not yet fully certified.

As the table shows, most participants combined family responsibilities, ongoing employment in schools, and their studies, a multiplicity of roles that resurfaces throughout the findings.

2.3. Research Tools and Procedure

Data were collected through three semi-structured focus group interviews. The interview guide included open-ended questions that invited participants to share their experiences in the B.Ed. program, their views of the students in the program, their academic experiences, and their experience of writing a seminar paper. In addition, participants were asked to discuss the challenges they faced during their studies and the factors that supported their academic success. Although the interview guide provided a common framework across groups, the discussions were allowed to develop naturally, with additional questions asked when participants raised issues that warranted further exploration. Each group interview lasted about an hour. Sampling was purposive. Upon receiving ethical committee approval, one of the researchers, who had been the seminar lecturer of one of the two groups in each cohort, approached students personally, presented the research goal, and made it explicit that participation was voluntary and unrelated to any academic requirement; several participants then invited additional eligible peers, in a snowball procedure. All students of the two cohorts, approximately 60 in number, were eligible, and 13 chose to take part; notably, about half of the participants had never studied with the interviewing researcher. Participants were allocated to the three focus groups mainly by cohort and by scheduling availability, forming groups of four to five participants each. Three smaller groups, rather than one large one, were chosen so that every participant would have room to speak and so that the shared meanings of each cohort could surface in conversation; focus groups were preferred over individual interviews because they allow multiple voices to be heard and the complexity surrounding a shared experience to be presented and negotiated collectively (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2013). All focus groups were moderated by the same lecturer-researcher, at least one year after the course had ended and all grades had been assigned. The interviews, which began after participants provided consent, were conducted in Hebrew. They were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, anonymized, and organized in a database. The interview guide was developed collaboratively by the research team, informed by the study’s aims and by the literature on nontraditional students’ academic experiences. In the focus groups, the participants and the researchers shared an everyday language, and the analysis was carried out on the original transcripts. The quotations presented in this article were translated into English by the researchers, who reviewed one another’s translations against the original text to preserve meaning and tone, with AI-based tools and professional language editing supporting the final phrasing. AI-based tools were used only to refine the phrasing of quotations that had already been translated and de-identified by the research team; the original transcripts were not processed by any AI tool. Every quotation was verified against the original transcript by at least one researcher after AI-assisted editing to confirm accuracy.

2.4. Data Analysis

We adopted a constructivist qualitative approach, conceptualizing knowledge as socially constructed through language and interaction, and conducted a collaborative, codebook form of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021): the analysis retained a constructivist orientation, treating themes as constructed by the researchers rather than as simply emerging from the data, while employing a structured, shared coding frame that was developed and refined in dialog among the three researchers. The trustworthiness procedures relied on the “negotiated agreement” (Campbell et al., 2013) described below, consensus-oriented discussion, and an audit trail, combined with reflexive attention to our own positions. Initially, each researcher read the interviews independently and noted preliminary impressions from the data. We then discussed the interviews jointly, comparing and consolidating initial codes into 35 preliminary codes. Coding was carried out manually using color-coding and margin notes to identify patterns across the data set. Next, we organized the codes into 13 categories, comparing and refining relationships between categories. These categories were subsequently developed into five main themes, while we discussed points of divergence and exercised collective judgment until we reached consensus regarding the themes and their interpretation; then we reviewed and refined the thematic map accordingly. The analysis was iterative, involving seven rounds of coding and refinement over a 3-month period. Although the participant group was bounded by the case rather than determined by saturation, we monitored the adequacy of the data throughout the analysis: by the third focus group no new codes were being generated, and the thematic map remained stable across the final rounds of refinement, suggesting that the data were sufficient for the interpretive aims of the study.

To enhance the study’s trustworthiness, several steps were taken throughout the research process. First and most fundamental among them was the deliberate separation of the study, in time, from the power relations of instruction: all focus groups were conducted at least one year after the seminar had ended and after final grades had been assigned to every participant, so that no participant stood in a formal evaluative relationship to the researchers. This did not, however, eliminate the broader institutional relationship: the researcher remained a faculty member in the program and had personally recruited several participants. It was precisely this residual asymmetry that motivated the additional steps described below. An audit trail was maintained to document key analytical decisions. All members of the research team analyzed the data collaboratively, discussing codes, categories, and the themes we were constructing until agreement was reached. The researchers also considered the potential influence of their own positions on the research process. One of the researchers had taught the seminar course, providing valuable familiarity with the context while introducing the possibility of confirmation bias. Additionally, the lecturer–researcher relationship had the potential to influence participants’ responses, although the focus groups were conducted at least one year after course grades had been assigned. The lecturer-researcher’s close involvement in the design and delivery of the course may also have shaped the interpretation of the findings. To minimize these potential influences, the research team discussed interpretations and checked them against the data throughout the analysis. We paid particular attention both to participants’ accounts of the strengths of the course and their descriptions of systemic and personal challenges. We used direct quotations from participants to illustrate the themes and allow readers to evaluate the interpretations. Several features of the data also temper concerns that participants merely sought to please the interviewer. About half of the participants had never studied with her and did not study with her subsequently; the conversations developed among the participants themselves rather than as a series of exchanges with the moderator; and critical accounts were voiced openly, most notably the criticism of the abrupt withdrawal of support that became one of the study’s central findings. At the same time, we regard self-selection, retrospective recall, group conformity, and social desirability as genuine limitations of the design, and we return to them in the Section 4.7.

To make the analytic process transparent, Table 2 traces selected quotations through initial codes and categories to the final themes.

Table 2. From quotations to themes: examples of the analytic process.

Illustrative Quotation	Initial Code	Category	Theme
“I started out with a very difficult experience of academia and reading texts.”	Fear rooted in earlier academic difficulty	Entering the process/starting point	“Most of Us Carry Scars from the Past”
“There are no exemptions here, no special accommodations, and that helped me cope, at least in the way I felt.”	The unchanged standard experienced as respect	Entering the process/starting point	“Academia Is Academia”
“It was brilliant that we reached the first seminar step by step. As if someone held our hand and we did it.”	Staged, hand-held progression through the task	The process itself	“Someone Held Our Hand, Step by Step”
“There was counsel, trust … I could send a message at any hour.”	Continuous availability of the mentor	The process itself	Concentric Circles of Mediation and Support
“It is fine that they dropped us, but just warn us, tell us.”	Support withdrawn in a single step, without warning	Follow up (beyond the scaffold)	“From an Embrace to a Release”

Together, the shared coding frame, the consensus-oriented procedures, and the audit trail kept the analysis transparent and anchored in the participants’ own words.

2.5. Ethical Issues

The study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee (Approval No. 243). As the first author was one of the two instructors of the seminar course described above, participants were invited to take part in the study at least one year after the course had ended and all assignments had been submitted and graded. Informed consent was obtained from all participants, and their anonymity was ensured throughout the study.

3. Results

Five themes were constructed from the focus-group accounts. Together they trace an arc that begins before the seminar, with the students’ histories and apprehensions; moves through the graduated mediation of the first seminar and the relational network that sustained it; and reaches the contested handover toward independence. Table 3 presents the main theme, the three phases of the process that organize the findings, and the five themes constructed from the data.

Table 3. Thematic structure of the qualitative data (main theme: From Mediation to Independence).

Phase of the Process	Themes
Entering the process: the starting point	3.1. “Most of Us Carry Scars from the Past”: Arriving with Academic Apprehension 3.2. “Academia Is Academia”: Holding the Standard as Recognition
The process itself	3.3. “Someone Held Our Hand, Step by Step”: The Graduated Scaffold of the First Seminar 3.4. Concentric Circles of Mediation and Support: The Human and Relational Envelope
Follow-up: beyond the scaffold	3.5. “From an Embrace to a Release”: The Abrupt Fading of the Scaffold

Each of the five themes is presented below in turn, grounded in the participants’ own words.

3.1. “Most of Us Carry Scars from the Past”: Arriving with Academic Apprehension

The participants began by describing what they had brought with them into higher education: largely fear and self-doubt. They located their apprehension in earlier schooling that had treated them as students who could not succeed, and in the span of years since they had last sat in a classroom. Lily set the tone for the group:

Most of us [in the special program], the veteran ones, the older ones, come with a lot of fears. If I talk with friends from the program, most of us carry scars from the past, things we feel we are not capable of. We did not study for a degree at a younger age because there are scars, there are fears, all kinds of conditioning around academic study, and we reached a point where age and experience had already given us the confidence to cope with it.

Hanna explicitly described their academic history and the identity of the student who was never top of the class:

Most of us [in the special program], honestly, we were not the students who came out with 90 or 100. Most of us had to work really hard to get 70 or 80. Lots of learning disabilities. Lots of us fell between the cracks, lots of feelings of not being believed in as children, of failure. And here, we have a chance to get around all of that and come out with a degree.

For several participants, the apprehension was attached to specific gateways. Lisa attributed her feelings to dyslexia: “I started out apprehensive, afraid. I am dyslexic, so it hits that exact spot of academia and reading texts.” Keren referred to the English proficiency requirement: “The English challenge. I still get a shiver remembering it. Failing and being tested again and again, and I was so anxious that if I did not pass English, I would not get the degree.”

However, the same difficulty was not only an obstacle. Looking back, Susan recast the most challenging requirement as having helped her development, and age and experience recurred across the accounts as a resource, not only as the chronological distance from their younger selves as students:

English was hard, I will not pretend otherwise. It asked a great deal of me. But today, looking back, I am happy, because it expanded my language skills, and in the articles on teachers in special education, it opened my eyes to certain issues.

Rose experienced a similar shift in a different domain, her relationship with computers:

I think the only challenge I’ve had since starting my studies was my struggle with computers, which didn’t come naturally to me. At first, the challenge was writing papers, studying, but I think, thank God, now that I’m in my third year, I’ve finished with the challenges and I’m doing just fine.

3.2. “Academia Is Academia”: Holding the Standard as Recognition

A second theme addressed how participants made sense of academia from their own position within it. Their accounts point to an ambivalent stance toward the standards to which they were held and the accommodations made available to them as students in the program.

Far from asking to be spared the standard, most participants valued being held to it. Shannon treated equal rigor as proof of equal worth:

This college’s reputation precedes it. The studies here are different from other colleges. We quickly understood that academia is academia. It proves that we are equal, that we do what everyone else does, that there are no concessions for us; that they do not lower the bar because it is [the special program].

Lily described being held to the same standard as something that helped her cope, precisely because it was not flexible: “In the seminar, there are standards we have to meet, like everyone else. There are no exemptions here, no special accommodations, and that helped me cope, at least in the way I felt.”

Alongside the insistence on high, uncompromising standards, some participants valued the way in which the academic program was adapted to their unique needs. Hanna described the program as singling out what mattered most:

The [special program’s] track does not resemble a regular track in any way. Where a regular student has 10 topics, for [the special program], they take two, the truly important ones … It is an exceptional program, and whoever thought of it is a genius.

In this sense, the adapted program was perceived as an opportunity for women like Hanna, given their academic histories, to enter academia in a way that would not otherwise have been possible:

Suddenly, there was this opening to get into teaching through a different path, and not [wait] 4 years now with a full week of study. It really is an opportunity. Many jumped at the chance. I think most of us, we’re a group of students who fell through the cracks in our childhood. For me personally, it is reparative. I have a learning disability. It’s really reparative, like, first of all, to see the child and really try to first give him a platform on which to express himself.

Hanna’s view of the accommodation, however, was not unambiguously positive: “On the other hand, I’m saying, there’s no filtering of students. Like, anyone can do what I’m doing. So, what? Is everyone just going to go be a teacher now?” Her comments reveal a deeper tension between access and standard, raising a question about the professional standing of the students who benefit from such arrangements. Lily expressed the same discomfort, but mirrored differently, by the pupils in her own classroom, whose resistance to accommodations she recognized as her own:

So, there are accommodations. You know, this really connects me to the pupils in my class, who have accommodations, and they don’t want the accommodations. And then I get annoyed, and I say, “Why not? You deserve accommodations, come, let me help you” … And I identify so strongly from that place of, they want to prove that they are like everyone else, and I think we’re a bit like that, as well.

In Lily’s account, the wish to prove oneself equal runs through the students themselves as much as through the pupils in her class. Being held to the standard was itself a form of recognition, a sign of being seen as equal rather than spared, the same recognition that her own pupils sought in refusing their accommodations.

3.3. “Someone Held Our Hand, Step by Step”: The Graduated Scaffold of the First Seminar

The heart of the participants’ accounts was the first research seminar and the way it was mediated. They described a clear architecture of support: the cohort was divided into two smaller groups, much of the writing took place in class while the lecturer moved among the students, a detailed accompanying booklet set out each phase in turn, the work was submitted in stages with formative feedback before any grading, and the lecturer remained reachable between sessions. Shannon recalled the collaborative, workshop atmosphere of the sessions:

Dividing us into two groups was excellent, because working all together would not have been a success; we were a large group. And the guidance, the learning, the questions, the practice itself during the lesson, when we tried and wrote and worked and consulted and asked, and if we could not find an article, you [the lecturer] came to our aid. It was simply excellent.

Jessica recalled how the phased structure broke down an overwhelming task into parts with which she could cope, until the whole came into view:

What helped my progress was that it was in stages. It lowered the pressure, and each time I focused on a different chapter, until in the end, I saw the whole puzzle complete and said, wow, is that me? I built a really meaningful intervention plan, both for the child and for myself.

Lisa pointed to the booklet and the lecturer’s accessibility as anchors to lean on:

The stages were wonderful, and there was an accompanying seminar booklet, so there was something to look at and lean on. And beyond that, the lecturer’s support, that we could turn to her and ask. She was very accessible; we could ask by text message or by email, there were several ways to reach her.

What gives this theme its force is that the participants reached, unprompted, for the very images used by the literature on mediation. They spoke of being held by the hand, of scaffolding, and of a lighthouse that kept them oriented. Susan described being held by the hand: “It was brilliant that we reached the first seminar step by step. As if someone held our hand and we did it.” Keren mentioned the scaffolding: “Scaffolding. They built us scaffolding,” and Rose spoke of a lighthouse that kept them oriented, and drew the contrast between being guided and being thrown into deep water:

It is not like being plunged into deep water when you can’t swim and are left adrift. You know where you are, you know what you need to do, and even if you are afraid, there is always a hand reaching out, pulling you, orienting you. You were a kind of lighthouse that pointed the beam, exactly, and showed me the way I needed to go.

The mediation was also directed toward the students’ own regulation of the work, not only toward the finished paper. Keren recalled returns for revision that she read as a wager on her capability rather than a judgment against her: “The “Tut, tut, tut” was really for the sake of elevating, because I saw that you truly wanted me to succeed. Saying, I do not want to grade this work; redo it and hand it in again.”

Susan recalled being taught to organize the competing demands of study, work, and family: “They taught us how to organize. To find time for family and for sport, as well as time for study. They actually used tables to show us how to manage our time efficiently. That was a lesson for life.”

Signs of appropriation run through the accounts, moments in which the work begins to become the students’ own, moving from what was co-constructed with the lecturer in the space between people into a practice they carry on their own. Rose described co-constructing the paper, part by part, rather than producing it alone: “We did not write a whole seminar alone. We worked part by part, did one part and sent it to her for checking, then another part for checking.” Samantha found herself writing, in effect, about her own learning:

From all your directing, I found myself doing a seminar that really speaks about my own issue. I felt I was writing about myself. I read, and I discovered things I knew but did not know what to call them. I learned so much from this seminar, about myself and professionally.

Sarah described the seminar as something that became part of her, a navigation card that she continued to consult: “I still keep the notebooks. I open them, leaf back, look at what I did, compare it to what I do today. It is a kind of small-big navigation card.”

In the participants’ accounts, this graduated structure carried a cumulative effect: each round of feedback and revision, once mastered, expanded what they felt able to tackle next. With every successful round, their sense of capability grew, and with it their willingness to attempt more ambitious academic tasks from a steadier footing, a graduated building of effort and capability that we termed an “effort ladder.” The participants indicated that this process did not remain within the seminar’s boundaries, but carried them forward into other academic pursuits. Each spoke to a different facet of that movement. Yasmine pointed out that the graduated process gave her courage to begin a master’s degree:

It gave us the tools, or the possibility, to continue. For example, Yara and I, now that we’ve continued to a master’s degree, we dared, because we had that experience there, with all the challenges, with everything, in the end we proved that yes, we can. And that reduced the fear a bit, and all the panic, about the whole seminar issue and the whole academic issue.

Shannon described calibrating the demand herself, course by course, until the standard she set became her own:

I was competitive with myself. Really, that’s something that hadn’t happened to me maybe in 30 years … not in terms of competing over who got more. No … It came from where I was, myself. And I really was, like, I’m in a challenge. Look, I set myself, really, there were courses where I said, no way, Shannon, you don’t get below 90, because you know you’re good at this. And there were courses where I said, between 70 and 80 is fine, I don’t know that much … because I really wanted to prove to myself, because I also saw, with all the fears and all the courage and all … to prove to myself that yes, I am capable, and I succeeded, and I’m here, and this is the time.

Yara located the same movement inside a single, recurring moment of “I can”:

I connected to what Lily said about the first year, that it was the academic writing, the referencing [APA], the grades you need to produce, the English, it was hard at the beginning … I often felt overwhelmed, but, every time I got that check mark, that “yes” of “it’s possible,” I can … it’s satisfying in the end, it’s hard, but it’s satisfying.

Finally, Sarah captured the effort ladder like a kind of internal compass, oriented permanently forward:

It’s a kind of added value beyond the seminar, okay? It wasn’t just a seminar, come on. There were a lot of other directions that we received, it’s really like a wheel-alignment for a car. A little more, a little more direction. You’re there, so you’re on the wave. It’s only forward. It can’t go backward, and it can’t get lost, and nothing. It’s like something embedded in you from within, and you know what you’re going to do.

3.4. Concentric Circles of Mediation and Support: The Human and Relational Envelope

The participants described a relational envelope that made their participation possible, expanding outward from the instructors to family, peers, and the workplace. At its center was a sense of being met with sensitivity rather than judgment. Lily located the value of the program in the absence of pressure and the presence of a listening ear: “First of all, to this day, I do not feel pressure from the college. I always know I have a listening ear. If something happens, I can talk. There is someone who will listen.” Yasmine recalled support at the point where a health crisis nearly ended her studies:

The turning point for me was the crisis I went through, the catheterization, when I said, that is it, I do not know if I can continue. And the support I received from the lecturers, from the college, told me, first, do not give up; you are already halfway through.

Yara contrasted the staff’s humanity with the frightening teacher of her childhood memory:

What contributed most to me was the humanity of the staff. I saw that in so many places, even when I was absent a lot. I never had that sense of the angry teacher from my childhood memory that always frightened me. That connection helped me believe in myself.

Keren offered a similar image, framing her relationship with the seminar instructor in familial terms: “There was counsel, trust, and a sense of capability. It was something maternal; I cannot even explain it. I could send a message at any hour.”

Beyond this institutional envelope, the family itself formed a further circle of support. Sarah described being freed from household demands so that there was room not only to study but to remember who she is:

Without that family support, when they free me from hosting or from shopping, it helps so much, because then you feel less pressure. They relieved me not only from the chores in order to do the work, but also gave me a moment to breathe, to remember who I am.

Lisa said: “My family supported me, and that was really important, because I had no time with the family at all. My mother sat with me, [saying to me] come on, a little more, it will pass.”

The outermost circles were the peer group and the workplace. Keren described a level of mutual responsibility among the students that turned the cohort itself into a source of mediation:

The support from the students themselves: there is no one I cannot ask. Everyone joins in to help. It is a level of real mutual responsibility, where each one truly wants the other to succeed. And the support of the workplace, where you have worked more than a decade, giving you time for your studies. Those are the two places where I received support, and I am grateful for that.

One of the most significant challenges facing adult students is the multiplicity of roles they must juggle, as students, parents, partners, and employees, often simultaneously. Therefore, it made sense that the resources of support described were distributed across all their circles: home, family, friends, and the academic institution itself.

3.5. “From an Embrace to a Release”: The Abrupt Fading of the Scaffold

The final theme focused on what happened when the support receded. Here, the participants’ evaluation turned, not against the support itself, but against the way it was withdrawn. Across the accounts, this withdrawal took the shape of a broader transition from the first to the second year, in which the close holding of the early stage gave way, often abruptly, to greater independence. Yara gave this general shift its central image:

We were very, very enveloped. They wanted to elevate us, to take all the potential and raise it up high, and propelled us to new heights. Enveloped, enveloped, enveloped. And in one moment, out of nowhere, they released the enveloping and released us, but from the heights to which they had brought us. For me, it was a kind of a fall. I had never been a student before; I knew nothing about the college. Like a mother and father, and when the mother and father left, I was a bit lost in space.

Difficult as this transition was, Yara came to perceive it, in retrospect, as the process through which she learned to stand on her own feet: “The process I went through was really about being both mother and father to myself. Like, that place, because the mother and father didn’t come back. Basically, they were there only in the first year.”

Shannon agreed that the difficulty was not the independence itself but the absence of any sign that it was coming, and she sought a remedy, warning us:

It is fine that they dropped us; we each coped in our own way, but it was also without warning. Go and start searching now, what is happening, what do we do, whom do we turn to. It is fine that they dropped us, but just warn us, tell us.

To that, Yara added: “Place a crash mat underneath.”

The longing for the lost structure persisted into the second seminar, even as the students acknowledged their accumulated experience thus far. Samantha missed the close support:

We are doing the second seminar now, and it is the same style, it should work the same way, but the close accompaniment is missing. Even with the experience and knowledge we have already gathered, the scaffolding and that lighthouse are genuinely missing.

Shannon described having to invent herself anew without the precise staging of the first seminar: “In the second seminar, we had to invent ourselves again and find ourselves, because there was not the precision of the first seminar, not those specific lessons. Again, we start to discover something new and to invent ourselves.”

Nonetheless, the same accounts also register what the scaffold had handed over. The students did cope, each in her own way. Sarah recalled: “That was excellent, it was simply excellent. It set you up for the second year, where it was no longer critical, because you already knew where you needed to go, what you needed to do, and how to study properly.”

The participants’ accounts reveal two intertwined movements. The first is fading that was not gradual: support was withdrawn in a single step, and several participants experienced the resulting gap as a fall, a feeling that resurfaced at the transition from the first to the second seminar. At the same time, these accounts reveal a second movement: several participants coped with the shift toward independence despite the absence of warning, and ultimately found in it a source of confidence. Some, like Yara, in retrospect, came to understand the fall itself as the process through which they learned to rely on themselves. Others described the close accompaniment of the first seminar as what had already equipped them, from the outset, with the tools and the confidence to face the second year independently.

The remedy the participants proposed, then, is not a request to soften the demand for independence, but a request that the fading be made as deliberate as the support itself had been: to be warned in advance and given a structured place to land. In this way, a scaffold experienced as sturdy could give way to self-reliance without first passing through a sense of falling. Several participants did achieve this, asking only that the shift be gradual and known in advance.

4. Discussion

This study followed a single research seminar as a case study to trace the arc from mediation to independence. It asked how mediation supported a group of experienced paraprofessionals as they wrote their first research seminar and how these students experienced the handover toward independent inquiry as support began to recede. Read together, the five themes tell a coherent story. The students arrived with long histories of academic difficulty; they asked not to be spared the academic standard but to be equipped to meet it; they were, in their telling, carried through the first seminar by a graduated scaffold and by a relational network that reached well beyond the lecturer. Despite this gradual structure, the students experienced the handover toward independence as arriving without warning, and their accounts of it are marked by ambivalence. The account that follows reads these findings against the sociocultural frame that organized the study and draws out three contributions: the distributed, concentric shape of the mediation, the alignment between how the seminar was taught and what it taught, and a participant-grounded metaphor we termed the effort ladder, through which a history of failure was slowly overwritten. It closes with the tensions left unresolved by the study and the implications for teacher education.

Read together, the findings suggest a conceptual model of the relationships among the study’s central concepts. Mediation is the overarching Vygotskian category: the participation of more capable others in what the learner cannot yet do alone. Scaffolding is its task-level realization, contingent support supplied within the zone of proximal development. Fading is the planned withdrawal of that support, and the transfer of responsibility is its intended outcome; learner independence, understood here as the capacity to carry the work of inquiry alone, is reached when what was carried between people has moved into the learner. In the case studied, the first elements were experienced as carefully designed, whereas the fading was experienced by some as abrupt, so that independence arrived, for them, as a demand before it was felt as a capacity.

One finding reshaped the study as it developed. The inquiry began with a support-oriented agenda: it set out to trace how mediation helped these students carry out a demanding task, and much of what the participants described confirmed that expectation. However, some of their accounts also redirected it. They referred to both the presence of the scaffold and to the manner of its removal, the movement they named as an embrace followed by a release. We propose reading this critique of the movement from dependence to independence through two distinct lenses. The first is pedagogical: the finding directs us to reconsider how the process of scaffold withdrawal and the transition to academic independence are managed, to make them more gradual and less abrupt. The second reading regards this critique as an expression of a difficulty that is internal, natural, and perhaps even expected in any movement from dependence to independence, particularly among this population of mature, first-generation-in-higher-education students. It reflects a tension carried by the students between their wish to meet the academic standard and to be recognized as having done so, and their apprehension at having the support withdrawn and having to face the academic tasks on their own.

4.1. The Architecture of Mediation: A Vertical Scaffold Within Concentric Circles

The students’ accounts describe mediation with two complementary shapes. The first is vertical. The graduated scaffold of the first seminar divided the cohort into two smaller groups, moved much of the writing into class while the lecturer circulated among the students, staged the work through a detailed accompanying booklet, returned drafts with formative feedback before any grade, and kept the lecturer reachable between sessions. The students did not write the seminar alone; they built it part by part, sending each piece to be checked and receiving another in return, and thus the paper was co-constructed rather than produced in isolation. In this sense, the joint, part-by-part construction was not a crutch but the very means by which the students were apprenticed into the conventions of disciplinary writing, a practice learned through participation rather than through transmission (Bruner, 1996; Lea & Street, 2006; Rogoff, 1990). The support was itself graduated across the seminar paper: the earlier sections were closely accompanied, whereas the findings and discussion sections, written later in the process, were carried more independently, as the responsibility for the work shifted further toward the student, placing the emphasis on doing and appraising, not on the product alone. Students read returns for revision not as a judgment against them but as a wager on their capability, and the explicit teaching of time and task management directed the mediation toward the students’ own regulation of the work, rather than focusing on finishing the paper. In these accounts, the activity is visibly migrating from the social into the individual plane, and moments such as “is that me?” and “I felt I was writing about myself” mark the appropriation through which the work begins to move from the space between people into the learner herself (van de Pol et al., 2010; Vygotsky, 1978; Wood et al., 1976; Zimmerman, 2002).

The second shape is horizontal and distributed. The students described a relational envelope that widened outward in concentric circles, from the humanity of the teaching staff, to family who relieved them from household demands, to a peer cohort marked by mutual responsibility, to a workplace that gave them time to study. The “more capable other” was distributed across a network rather than housed in a single figure. This gives a concrete relational shape to Vygotsky’s claim about the social plane and fits what the literature on first-generation students would predict, since the interdependent orientation possessed by many of these students is frequently overlooked by an academy organized around independent achievement (Bandura, 1997; Lave, 2009; Stephens et al., 2012; Vygotsky, 1978). For this population, the distributed character of the mediation is not incidental, but was the basis on which participation became possible at all. This is true, especially given that these students are also adult learners (Khiat, 2017) balancing multiple life commitments, a combination that calls for a more ecological model of support rather than one concentrated in a single relationship or institutional space (van Rhijn et al., 2023).

4.2. Walking the Talk: Teaching Self-Regulation Through Explicit, Situated Instruction

A further feature of the mediation is that the way the seminar was taught mirrored what it taught. As former special education teachers, the lecturers worked through explicit, staged instruction, the same pedagogy that these preservice teachers were being prepared to enact with their own pupils. As the subject of the seminar was itself self-regulation, the students were scaffolded into self-regulation while designing a self-regulation intervention for a pupil. The seminar did not describe good mediation from a distance; it enacted it, modeling the moves of inquiry and handing them over in stages (Bruner, 1996; Lave, 2009; Rogoff, 1990). This recursive alignment gave the students a lived template of the very practice they were learning to carry into their classrooms; a pedagogy that walks its talk.

4.3. The Effort Ladder: Overwriting a History of Failure

A distinction is in order before this contribution is presented. Empirically, the study documents how 13 experienced paraprofessionals perceived the mediation of their first research seminar and its withdrawal. Theoretically, it proposes two sensitizing concepts, the effort ladder and the concentric circles of mediation, constructed from those perceptions and offered as interpretive lenses for further research, not as validated constructs.

The study’s central conceptual contribution lies in distinguishing two things that scaffolding accounts often hold together. Scaffolding names what the mediator provides: contingent support, supplied from outside, that fades as competence grows and that carries the learner through the task at hand (van de Pol et al., 2010; Wood et al., 1976). The effort ladder names something that the learner builds within: not the completion of a given task but a growing, authentic sense of being able to carry such a task alone. It is a cumulative internal feeling, as each mastered task strengthens the sense of capability and expands the willingness to attempt the next from a steadier footing (Bandura, 1997; Zimmerman, 2002).

We use the term as a participant-grounded metaphor rather than as a measurement instrument: the image is a ladder climbed rung by rung, and no quantification is implied. The term entered our vocabulary as a conceptualization developed for our students in the course of teaching, and it is used here in that spirit: a working label for the felt, cumulative side of the climb, offered as a sensitizing concept. Ladder metaphors of gradual ascent are longstanding and widespread, and scaffolding itself belongs to the same family of construction metaphors through which learning has long been imaged: scaffolds erected and dismantled, foundations laid, knowledge built step by step, bridges crossed toward independence (Wood et al., 1976). The concept was constructed from codes describing the accumulation of small mastered tasks and the growing willingness to attempt the next one. It is related to, but not identical with, neighboring constructs: self-efficacy names beliefs about one’s capability in a domain (Bandura, 1997), and mastery experiences name the events that feed such beliefs; academic identity names who the learner takes herself to be; effort regulation names the management of invested effort. The effort ladder, as the participants described it, names a history of “I did it” slowly becoming “I can.” Read against the literature, this converges with evidence that a sense of competence rises through enactive attainment and reinforcement (Williams & Williams, 2010) and with Phan’s (2012) longitudinal finding that mastery experiences contribute more to academic outcomes than encouragement or situational classroom factors; in the participants’ accounts, likewise, the driving force was not external praise but an internalized, accumulating sense of “I can.”

The present study invites us to read the zone of proximal development not as a line to be crossed but as a rounded, relational space, the concentric circles within which the learner is at once held by others and rising on her own. For these preservice teachers, that space carries a particular weight.

These students began their studies with what one of them called “scars from the past,” an accumulated identity as the learner who did not succeed. Where the scaffold, as they described it, made the task possible, the effort ladder was, in their accounts, the making of a new, believable academic self; several participants connected this with their decision to continue into master’s degree studies. Naming the effort ladder as distinct from scaffolding foregrounds the affective and identity work that cognitive accounts of scaffolding can leave implicit.

Taken together, the study’s contribution can be stated against the three literatures in which it is situated. To research on adult learners and on first-generation students, it adds a retrospective account of how a demanding academic task can be experienced as recognition rather than as a barrier when the mediation around it is explicit, staged, and relational. To scaffolding theory, it adds two sensitizing concepts and, through the critique of the release, a learner’s-eye view of what contingent fading means in practice: not only a design principle for instructors but a felt passage whose management shapes whether independence arrives as a capacity or as a demand. And to the growing pipeline scholarship on paraprofessionals’ routes into teaching (Butler et al., 2025; Fogle et al., 2024; Shelton & Cruz, 2023), it adds the dimension that this scholarship has yet to address: the academic work inside the programs, and the pedagogy that carries experienced practitioners through it.

4.4. From Embrace to Release: The Fading of the Scaffold as the Decisive Phase

Scaffolding is defined not only by the support it offers but by its fading and by the transfer of responsibility, and both are meant to be gradual (van de Pol et al., 2010). Some of the students described a release that was not contingent on their development, and they experienced that movement as a fall from “the heights to which they had brought us.” Their accounts, though, were not of one voice. Alongside the language of falling ran a recognition of what the scaffold had already handed over: they did cope, each in her own way, and several read the seminar as the very experience that let them dare to continue. In their accounts, the handover was held as two things at once: a loss of the close accompaniment and a passage they had been prepared, in part, to make. Their own remedy, to be warned in advance, was a request for the fading to be made as deliberate as the support had been. Accounts of staged handover in higher education make the same point from the instructor’s side, treating the move toward independent practice as a designed phase rather than as what is left over once the earlier phases end (Stevens et al., 2025).

Seen through the lens of first-generation students, the shift was also a shift toward the academy’s prized norm of independent self-reliance, enacted without the relational base on which these students had drawn (Stephens et al., 2012).

Alternative readings of these accounts deserve consideration. The warmth that saturates the interviews could reflect cohort solidarity, the accessibility of particular instructors, retrospective gratitude, or differences among courses rather than the design of the mediation itself, and some of the appreciation may owe something to social desirability. We cannot rule these explanations out, and the design does not allow us to adjudicate among them. What the data do show is that the accounts were not uniformly appreciative: the same conversations produced the sharp critique of the release, and the participants’ insistence that they had received no special accommodations sat, unresolved, beside their detailed descriptions of an adapted program. We have deliberately kept this contradiction visible, reading it in the next section as part of the participants’ own unresolved negotiation between recognition and support rather than as noise to be reconciled.

4.5. Unresolved Tensions

The accounts hold tensions left unresolved by the study. On one hand, the students valued being held to the full academic standard. Far from asking to be spared the demand, they read this uncompromising standard as a mark of respect and of equal worth. On the other hand, they perceived themselves as needing accommodations to succeed. This need in itself was interpreted in two ways: as a tool that cannot be done without while simultaneously undermining the very professional recognition they seek. This challenge to self-worth is linked to their personal history of not seeing themselves as capable learners.

These unresolved tensions are the point of view through which we suggest reading our findings. From this perspective, one can read the theme “from embrace to release” not merely as a critique of the academic process they had been through, but also as a reflection of their inner struggle with the basic question: can I succeed on my own? This same tension resurfaces, in a different form, between the wish to be held to an unchanged bar and the wish for a route built around the realities of these students’ lives. The seminar held both at once, keeping the demand high while adjusting the path toward it, yet the balance is delicate and demands constant, deliberate attention.

4.6. Implications for Teacher Education

Two implications follow directly from the findings. The first concerns what to keep. The features valued by the students were the designed choices that kept the demanding task within reach: a graduated staging of the work, in-class writing alongside a reachable mediator, formative feedback offered before grading, explicit instruction drawn from the students’ lives, a distributed relational envelope of staff, family, peers, and workplace, and a standard held high rather than lowered. Programs serving nontraditional and first-generation students can treat these as a repertoire rather than as the signature of one exceptional course.

The second implication concerns what to redesign, and it follows from the students’ own request. If the fading is the decisive phase, it should be planned as carefully as the support that precedes it. A forewarned, staged handover between the first and the second seminar, together with an explicit naming of what is being handed over and when, would let mediation give way to self-regulated independence rather than to a sense of being dropped (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983; Zimmerman, 2002). On this account, designing the release is not a withdrawal of teaching but its completion. These implications are offered as design proposals grounded in the participants’ accounts; they require systematic testing before they can be treated as validated practices.

4.7. Limitations

As an interpretive qualitative inquiry, this study set out to understand one pathway in depth rather than to produce claims that hold uniformly across settings, and its scope is best read in that light. The account is grounded in a single program at one teacher education college, and its findings are offered as transferable rather than generalizable: a situated reading of one setting whose resonance readers will weigh against their own contexts. The focus-group conversations through which the accounts were gathered were chosen for what they do well, surfacing the shared, co-constructed meanings built by a cohort around a common experience. Individual interviews or observation across time would bring other facets of that experience into view, and the present reading makes no claim to exhaust it. Moreover, the study deliberately remains within the paraprofessional pathway rather than setting it against other routes into teaching, focusing on how these particular students, in this particular program, experienced the movement from mediation toward independence. What it offers is not a measure of an intervention but a close, trustworthy interpretation of one process, developed collaboratively and held accountable throughout to the participants’ own words. Several further limitations should be named plainly. The participants were 13 women from a single institution who selected themselves into the study, and their accounts were gathered retrospectively, in focus groups, at least a year after the seminar. The focus groups were the study’s single primary data source: no classroom observations were conducted, the students’ seminar papers were not analyzed, and no measure of writing quality, self-regulation, or subsequent outcomes was taken. One of the researchers had taught about half of the participants, and despite the safeguards described in Section 2, her involvement may have shaped both the conversations and their interpretation. Accordingly, statements about what the seminar accomplished should be read throughout as participants’ perceptions and researchers’ interpretations, not as an evaluation of the intervention’s effectiveness.

4.8. Directions for Future Research

Several questions remain open. The most direct follows the limitation just named. Future work could compare the trajectories of students who experienced the full scaffolded first seminar with those who did not, whether through a different entry route, a later point of entry, or a less staged version of the course, in order to trace how the presence or absence of that induction shapes the move toward independent inquiry. A longitudinal design could trace whether the effort ladder transfers durably beyond the seminar and throughout the degree. A design study could test whether deliberately staged and forewarned fading reduces the experience of the second seminar as a fall. The question of belonging raised by Hanna, of how a program can hold together open access and a professional standard, without either diluting the profession or reinstating the barriers it set out to lower, deserves further inquiry. Such work would benefit from individual interviews alongside focus groups, classroom observations, analysis of the students’ written work, and participants drawn from several institutions and from students receiving different levels of scaffolding.

5. Conclusions

This article followed one research seminar as a case study of the move from mediation to independence, among experienced paraprofessionals for whom that move carried the whole weight of an academic history they were working to revise. Participants generally described the seminar as supportive and valuable because its support was explicit, gradual, relational, and distributed across concentric circles, because it taught self-regulation by enacting it, and because it let each student build an effort ladder that slowly overwrote a record of failure with a record of “I can.” Its unfinished work lay in the release. A scaffold this carefully built deserves a fading built with equal care, designed to prepare the learner, deliberately and in advance, to carry the work alone.